Mike Hosking: Welcome to the Park n Ride circus

COMMENT:

My mate drives past his local Park n Ride each morning and smiles if not laughs to himself.

As he tells it, the Park n Ride has been recently expanded given it's a good example of most of the infrastructural things we do in this country.

It's not built for purpose or with any long-term vision. It's too small.

Sad thing is the new bit isn't open, it's coned off, and it's coned off because it hasn't been signed off.

Funny thing is the same people who built it are the ones who sign it off.

So you can see why we are where we are, when one department literally can't coordinate with another.

But the scandal of Park n Ride, is the same as the scandal with the cycle lanes, which I will return to momentarily.

That scandal is the ideological criminality that's driving us out of cars.

There was a survey a week back, the largest survey yet of public transport users, and the biggest response was two fold; 1, they want more services, and 2, they were only on public transport because there was no parking - and in that is the crime.

The reason there are no parks is because councils have deliberately killed parking, they have cornered the market in yellow paint and gone about the place putting lines on the sides of roads, then they have amped up charges and put in bus lanes and cycle ways, and every time they do that they smile because they know, having profoundly failed to convince us that public transport is good news, they have had to set about forcing us out of the car by literally making it impossible to enter the city with one.

Hence we get the response we are only here because we'd go broke in a carpark otherwise.

But the real scandal is the other part of the answer; more services. And here once again is where they are inept.

If they had had their act together, if the public transport service had in any way shape or form been remotely modern or up to scratch, we would have transitioned to buses far more easily than we are.

The trick to public transport is accessibility, and they don't have any.

Which brings us back to our Park n Ride fiasco, at its very core, public transport is about efficiency, what is efficient about turning up to a park n ride to only have to go round and round and round and end up in a paddock down the road because there is no space.

What then is the efficiency of having to turn up an hour early to wait for your bus, so you can get a park, you are adding to your commute time, you are spending longer driving and parking and waiting - before you even get on your transport to work - than if you'd stayed in the car in the first place, it's insanity.

Auckland Transport, the geniuses who cocked all this up to start with, when they had it brought to their attention by the AA, who say quite rightly this is a joke, instead of accepting it as such, replied with, "no" we don't need more parks, what we need are more buses, buses to get you TO the buses.

So you hop on your bus - presumably you haven't driven to the bus so that would have to be in your street, so you hop on your bus that takes you to the park n ride - which isn't a park n ride anymore because you don't park, so its a ride n ride, then you wait to get on another bus to town.

When that doesn't work, will it be a ride n ride n ride? Just how many buses will we eventually have to board to get to work?

This isn't of course just a joke, it's a circus, it's a circus designed by ideologues frequented by the angry and frustrated, and it's a massive fail.