Rudman's city: Take the elite road or travel the free way

By BRIAN RUDMAN

The better-off already have their fee-charging private schools and hospitals. Soon they could have a choice of elite toll roads as well. And it's with the blessing, would you believe, of our egalitarian Labour-Alliance leaders.

It's the Government's user-pays way of coping with the perpetual clamour for more highways.

The only proviso is that there must be an alternative free route available for those who can't, or don't want to, pay extra - among whom, one presumes, will be many Labour voters.

Rodney District Council's planned 7km private toll road from State Highway I across the Weiti River to Stanmore Bay is the hint of things to come. Rodney wants a private developer to fund, build and manage the $47 million project, recouping the costs with toll income. After 30 years the council will gain ownership, and the tolls will end.

Last week the council was before Parliament's local government and environment committee seeking a law change to make it possible. There's every indication it will get the nod, if only because tolling is increasingly being seen by the Government as the fast-track part-solution for Auckland's congestion problems.

Prime candidates for this user-pays solution are the long-stalled $145 million development of the Northern Motorway between Orewa and Puhoi, the extension of State Highway 20 across Prime Minister Helen Clark's electorate between Mt Roskill and the Northwestern Motorway, and the controversial eastern highway from the port, through or under Hobson Bay east to Manukau City.

In the case of the State Highway 20 extension, tolls could be a way of paying for a more environmentally friendly solution than a basic surface road. In other words, Government funding would be found on the basis of a notional surface road being constructed. But if Aucklanders wanted it to go underground, beneath parks and Oakley Creek, then the extra costs associated with that would have to be found through road tolls.

And before we Aucklanders start feeling all persecuted again, tolling is also being considered as the way to fast-track the long-delayed Transmission Gully alternative exit out of Wellington.

Personally, I'm a bit ideologically uneasy about the concept. Why should we be taxed twice to travel on a public road?

However, I do recall a drive in from Jakarta airport one oppressively hot afternoon along a toll road. Adjacent to it was the clogged public highway, clouds of fumes hazing the view. There's no doubt we on the pay-way enjoyed, at least from time to time, a rather faster and more pleasant run, and I felt not a twinge of guilt.

The same, no doubt, will be true for travellers on the Auckland toll roads. And to look on the positive side, the shift by some to the toll routes should free up the old highways for the non-payers, at least to begin with.

However unsavoury tolls might seem, what other solutions are there? The obvious one is to stop force-feeding the voracious and never satisfied King Road and concentrate on public transport solutions instead.

However, in this land of the two and three-car household, such an approach will get no one re-elected.

A huge rise in petrol tax is similarly unlikely to be electorally popular.

But the reality is that roads cost vast sums to build and maintain. This year, for example, the Government's national road funder, Transfund, has $1.05 billion to spend on roads, $368 million of that as subsidies on local roads and $614 million on state highways. Once GST has been deducted, the grand total is just over $830 million. Of that, the largest portion - $516 million - goes on maintaining existing roads, while just $315 million is available for new roads.

How much is a road? Well, the proposed four-lane Eastern Highway has a figure of $150 million on it, and that's cheap.

An underground State Highway 20 extension could easily gobble up two or more years of Transfund's annual road building budget.

Government advisers have indicated blowouts of hundreds of millions of dollars in the roading budget over the next 10 years if current congestion-busting roading plans are completed without new sources of funding.

What might they be? Well, hiking the existing excise duty on petrol is an obvious one, and we can expect an announcement adding another 3.5c per litre to the existing 35c per litre petrol tax any day now.

About a third of what we pay for petrol is siphoned off into the Government's coffers - about half of that tax going to road building, the other half into the general coffers.

Diverting the more than $400 million of petrol tax that goes into general funds rather than into roading would be a good way of paying for new roads. But I don't see the Government warming to the idea - not when there's a pledge not to raise personal taxes for anyone earning less than $60,000, which is what would have to happen if that $400 million was added to the roads budget.

The Government also plans to increase the road-user charges paid by users of light diesel vehicles, who at present pay much less duty than petrol users.

Another funding option is for Government-owned road-builder Transit New Zealand to borrow. Of course, if you leave the building to private enterprise, borrowing is no longer a Government problem, and this option is also being looked at.

Associated with the tolling option is the concept of private-public partnerships such as that adopted by Rodney District. Their scheme is what's called a Build Own Operate Transfer (BOOT) project, where the private operator does it all. The only council involvement is setting the toll rate.

I continue to feel uneasy about this two-class system of roads. Then again, I don't have to face traffic jams night and day.

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