Rudman's city: Elections put pro-roaders back on their high horse

By BRIAN RUDMAN

As fireworks are to Guy Fawkes, what Auckland local election campaign would be complete without the pro-road lobby's triennial witch-hunt - the search for candidates displaying dangerous tendencies in favour of public transport?

From the Auckland Business Forum comes a questionnaire to each candidate demanding that he or she tick either Yes/No/Don't Know to, "Do you support completion of Auckland's motorway network."

With the survey comes the veiled threat that results will be publicised in the media "at regular intervals of the campaign".

Question 2 asks whether candidates would "call for the completion of Auckland's network by the year 2007/2010/Sometime Later/Never."

The businessmen claim by way of introduction that transport congestion is costing the Auckland economy about $1 billion a year.

They say that completing the motorway network and introducing the proposed new public transport system would both cost around $1 billion.

Candidates are then asked, "Which of these two $1 billion investments will reduce the congestion most?" and which of the two "has the highest priority for completion?"

Signed by Chamber of Commerce chief executive Michael Barnett - himself a candidate for the regional council - the forum makes no secret of where it stands.

It wants "to complete the region's transport corridor network within five years and make a start on sensible public transport options".

We all know what do-nothing words like "make a start" and "sensible" are a code for. Candidates have also received a questionnaire from the Employers and Manufacturers Association with the same questions tagged on the end, along with similar queries about the controversial eastern highway.

Makes you wonder, doesn't it? If this is what passes for informed debate and problem-solving in Auckland business circles, no wonder the economy continues to wallow.

If I was a candidate, I would fire a question or two back to Mr Barnett and his mates.

What I'd ask first was for them to justify the old litany about traffic congestion costing Auckland $1 billion a year.

How, for example, do they define the cost of congestion?

Presumably, they're using the traditional traffic planning formula that compares the cost of operating a vehicle in today's traffic with some ideal situation in which all delays are eliminated and you are king of the road.

As one British critic has observed, these "ideal conditions" are "patently absurd" because in big cities they apply only in the dead of night.

Delays resulting from other traffic are a fact of life in urban areas at peak times, just as they are in supermarket checkouts and theatre bars.

Does Mr Barnett think that it makes economic sense to build enough new roads to avoid all peak-hour delays, roads which will remain underused for much of the day?

Some transport economists further argue that increasing road capacity can be self-defeating.

It can encourage people off public transport into cars, encourage people to shift from off-peak to peak-hour driving, shift vehicles from unimproved to improved roads and, finally, encourage more travel than previously.

A Melbourne University planning lecturer and public transport activist, Paul Mees, highlights the pitfalls of the more roads approach in his recent book, A Very Public Solution - Transport in the Dispersed City (Melbourne University Press).

In 1988 in Melbourne the completion of the South-eastern Freeway linking two existing sections led to a sharp fall in patronage on the adjacent rail line.

By 1992 peak express trains had been reduced from seven to two and the new highway had become so congested it was locally dubbed the South-eastern Car Park.

With that example to go by we could end up, if Mr Barnett had his way, spending a $1 billion-plus on motorways and still have the $1 billion "congestion costs" the roads were supposed to remove.

Paul Mees and his colleague, Jago Dodson, presented a paper at a geographers' conference in Dunedin this year which outlined how transport planning in Auckland since 1950 "has been dominated by a stronger policy bias towards the private car than is found in Australian, Canadian and in most United States cities".

The result has been that Aucklanders take just 33 public transport trips a year, which is lower even than the 55 trips of the average Los Angeles resident.

In Toronto the figure is 350, Sydney 160 and Melbourne 101.

Mees says pro-automobile policies are so entrenched "both institutionally and intellectually" that "total automobile dominance" is now the "normal" policy option and "balanced transport" - as in a mix of public transport and motorways - is seen as the "radical alternative".

It's a carcentric stance "supplanted even in most United States cities".

The pro-roaders have had 50 years to do their best - or worst - for Auckland transport. The results are all around us.

Why anyone should be pushing for more of the same defies reason.