So much of the increasing congestion is driven not by the car but by the endless series of public transport projects that clog our roads. Photo / Dean Purcell
So much of the increasing congestion is driven not by the car but by the endless series of public transport projects that clog our roads. Photo / Dean Purcell
COMMENT:
The European Court of Auditors has done the work for us.
As Auckland battles through another Mad March, we already have the answers.
What the ideologues are trying to force upon us quite obviously doesn't work, isn't working, and as we can see from Europe, won't work.
Thereport into public transport by the auditors is called Sustainable Urban Mobility in the EU.
They looked at 8 cities in Germany, Spain, Poland and Italy, surveyed a further 88 cities and assessed 15 projects.
The money involved for public transport was 28 billion dollars over 6 years.
In a nutshell there has been no significant trend towards the use of public transport, no significant trend away from the private car, no significant trend towards bikes.
Further, there has been a lot of waste of public money, and in many cases it's still quicker to get to where you want to go by car.
It is a searing revelation of just what being blind to fact, not to mention the human condition, can do to your credibility and your argument.
The tragedy of all this, whether it is in Europe or Auckland, is it's all so fantastically obvious.
The threat was made last week that unless the use of public transport here increases at twice the rate it currently is then congestion is only going to get worse.
Luxembourg last week trumpeted the fact they were the first country in the world to make public transport free.
What tragically is lost in these increasingly mad and nonsensical announcements is the stark reality that we get it, but they don't.
We are still in our cars and will continue to be so because what they provide by way of alternatives simply doesn't work. We can't live our lives doing what they want or expect us to.
Most of us have complex, detailed lives, that involve being in different places at specifically designated times. Photo / Jason Oxenham
If you can step out of your front door, walk round the corner and catch an express service into the city centre, at which point you step off and walk round another corner to your office then a bus or a train might well work for you.
Most of us have complex, detailed lives, that involve being in different places at specifically designated times.
We have kids and sport and school and uni and work and meetings and we live in places that aren't well connected by bus or train.
It is vastly more efficient, faster and easier to run our lives from the car.
This is what the auditors of Europe have proved.
Even as it gets harder and more expensive we still don't leave our cars. Ask yourself why not?
What Luxembourg missed was the economic reality that giving a product or service away is an admission of failure.
The supply/demand equation is simple. If people want it, they will pay for it, they haven't and don't - hence there is no demand.
There is no victory in giving a failed product away, the same way there is no victory in Phil Goff announcing cheap or free transport for students.
The ultimate irony of course being so much of the increasing congestion is not driven by the car but driven by the endless series of public transport projects that clog our roads, block our intersections and shrink the actual space we have to move in.
Given our roads have never been that big to start with, adding a bike lane and a bus lane only means you're expecting the same number of cars to use less bitumen, while you're ideologically-driven spaces remain largely empty.
That's of course if the buses or trains are actually running and not on strike or broken, but that's for another column.
Also for another column is the sheer scandal of the CRL businesses now going bankrupt because of the delusion that if you take years to dig a big enough hole, people will thank you for it and use it.
Read the auditors report.
No one is out of cars.
No one is on the bus, and the money is too often wasted.
