Owen McShane: Bias against roads disqualifies ARC

COMMENT

For many years, local government's main job was building reservoirs, water mains, drains, sewage treatment plants, bridges and roads. The bigger the cities, the bigger the works. City engineers ruled with an iron fist in a concrete glove.

Large infrastructure projects benefit from economies of scale. Although times have changed, our big-project tradition means that our response to almost any infrastructure problem is to call for another round of amalgamation.

Unfortunately, democratic institutions show no economies of scale. Amalgamation just makes things worse.

The most cost-effective councils in New Zealand serve populations of 50,000 to 70,000. Below that, the rating base is too small. Above it, the councillors discover "sister cities".

Big councils are the enemy of democracy and they cost more to run.

The French understand this link between size and democracy. France has 36,851 communes, each with its own mayor, or one for every 1500 of France's 60 million people. New Zealand has 74 city and district councils, or one for every 55,000 of its four million people. Paris alone has 350 communes. In France, Auckland would have 40 councils, not seven.

On the other hand, 95 per cent of France's water and wastewater is managed by only five companies, operating through a commercial franchising system.

The French enjoy large-scale infrastructure companies and small-scale councils because they understand the difference between engineering and democracy.

If Aucklanders want to be even further disconnected from their politicians, let's have another round of amalgamation. Otherwise forget it - amalgamation will not solve our transport problems.

However, if we want an efficient transport network, we should set up an organisation dedicated to promoting efficient and effective regional transport and with no other commitments. Such a body need not own or run buses or trains, any more than it needs to own or run taxis or planes, or private cars and trucks for that matter.

Naturally, such a body would have to consult its customers and work through consent procedures. The people, the councils, and even the train brigade, would all have their say.

The Auckland Regional Council is not the right body for the job because it doesn't want to do it.

Since its inception the main task of the regional council has been administering its Resource Management Act obligations relating to discharges to the soil, the water and the air.

The result is a culture which is hostile to vehicle transport and indeed to urban growth in general.

The regional council's view is that rather than distribute and dilute our pollution, we should concentrate it all in the central city, behind a metropolitan urban limit. The reason we stopped building the motorway network designed in the 1960s was that the regional council has never wanted more private transport and has lobbied for more public transport and higher urban densities ever since.

The regional council never promotes mobility. It prefers "demand management", which is PC-speak for diminished mobility.

Organisations with conflicting goals do not perform well. The Reserve Bank was able to tame inflation only once that goal became its only task.

The regional council culture is focused on protecting the natural and physical environment. Fair enough; that's its job. Such an organisation should focus on developing exhaust emission standards and fuel standards, and otherwise deal with the side-effects of vehicle transport. But given that it views private cars and trucks as the work of Satan, it is not the organisation to promote mobility throughout the region. This bias towards nature colours everything the regional council does. Just visit its website.

The regional council planners' bias towards public transport has led them to promote ludicrously high population densities for inner Auckland.

Greater London wants to raise densities too. In 2000, the British Government directed London's councils to increase densities from the existing 23 dwellings a hectare to between 30 and 50 dwellings.

The regional council wants to increase the density of 19 of Auckland's suburbs from 15 to 20 dwellings a hectare to between 200 and 300 dwellings - a 10- or 20-fold increase.

These are six times London's targets. Do we really want Auckland to be 10 times more dense than London is now and six times more dense than London aims to be?

The regional council hopes this will promote public transport. Increasing densities 10-fold increases traffic congestion eight-fold. Aucklanders won't give up their cars. They will just give up on Auckland.

Also, the regional council's location at the top of the city centre means its staff and politicians work in an environment dominated by central-city commuter traffic. Most Aucklanders are not connected to the city centre. Commuter trips are only 25 per cent of daily trips in the region, and the central city generates only 11 per cent of them, or 3 per cent of the total. Yet this 3 per cent of region-wide trips dominates the regional council's thinking.

The Auckland Regional Council's area extends from Wellsford to Waiuku - which is huge. When staff visit these distant sites, the landowners have to pay for their travel time. Landowners in Wellsford or Kaiaua have to drive an hour or more to discuss their septic-tank consents in an office in the central city.

The regional council should decentralise its services into several local centres distributed throughout the region. Regional council meetings should also circulate so that local people get to see their rulers occasionally.

Then the regional council might come to realise that most Aucklanders will never see a passenger train, or even ride on a bus. For most of us, using public transport means taking a taxi or catching a plane.

Finally, the United States National Bureau of Economics Research found that during the 1980s and 1990s, higher local-government spending was associated with lower economic growth, unless that spending was on highways.

Highways generate growth. Not railway lines, not stations, not carriages, but roads; roads like the Romans used to build.

Modern transport runs on roads. Auckland doesn't have enough of them. The Auckland Regional Council won't deliver them.

* Owen McShane is the director of the Centre for Research Management Studies.