Former Auckland Mayor - and now former UK High Commissioner - Phil Goff, photographed in 2023 with the current deputy mayor, Desley Simpson.
This is a transcript of Simon Wilson’s weekly newsletter Love this City – exploring the ideas and events, the reality and the potential of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. To sign up, click here, select Love this City and save your preferences.
This summer at the Good Planet farm in Riverhead, volunteers from Fair Food in west Auckland turned up to pick strawberries. The charity came away with 480kg, a gift from Good Planet, which they distributed to schools, community hubs, social services, food banks, transitional housing, young mums groups and family violence shelters.
Fair Food stops food going to landfills. They take surplus food from supermarkets and producers and invite people to donate surplus food from their own gardens. How are your lemons, grapefruit and oranges just now? Got a bag or two to give to a good home?
They call themselves “the charity behind the charities” and they operate through a network of 49 “food rescue hubs”: churches, community centres and other groups, mainly in the west but also in other parts of the city. Their own hub is on Rosebank Rd in Avondale.
“If you’ve got citrus to spare, now is the perfect time to share it,” says Fair Food’s Michelle Blau. “If you can’t get to a food rescue hub, then at least pop it in your nearest pātaka kai or go meet your neighbours.”
Pātaka kai are small-scale public food pantries, looked after by an outfit called Love Food, Hate Waste, which in turn is run by 52 councils around the country, including Auckland Council.
One in four children face food insecurity in this country and it turns out school lunches aren’t exactly solving the problem.
And yet, says Fair Food, in Aotearoa New Zealand we throw away more than 150,000 tonnes of food every year, much of it still edible. Globally, a third of all food gets wasted and the emissions from that waste create as much greenhouse gas as road transport emissions.
Perhaps you have a garden with fruit trees or vegetables. Perhaps your neighbour does. “If you spot fruit trees in your neighbourhood that aren’t being picked,” says Blau, “offer to lend a hand. It’s a great way to connect with neighbours and stop good food from going to waste.”
Feijoa season is coming on. Google Fair Food for details.
So said the headline on a press release this week from Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown. Well, Mr Mayor, you did ask ...
Congestion is not about building more roads because that encourages more driving. It’s about reducing the use of the roads. Creating desirable alternatives to jumping in the car every time you want to go somewhere.
Sydney, with three times the population of Auckland, has less congestion than we do because it has diligently applied itself to the creation of functional public transport. Buses run frequently, all over the city. So do the trains. They closed the main street, George St, to traffic and installed surface light rail instead. It’s incredible how busy it is and how well it works.
They are on track, pun intended, to install 52km of metro lines: high-speed, driverless light rail, much of it underground. The downtown section has just opened and it’s incredible how busy that is too, and how well it works.
If Mayor Brown wants to make a difference to congestion, he should champion public transport, and cheaply built cycleways while he’s about it. He should take the lead, explaining as often as he has to, to the public, to the Government, to the roads lobby, to his sceptical councillors, why these things are important.
Why doesn’t he do that?
Brown put out his call for good ideas to tackle congestion in part because the Government has just introduced the Land Transport Management (Time of Use Charging) Amendment Bill. This bill will establish a legal structure for “time of use” or congestion charging to be introduced by local roading authorities, under the direction of the NZ Transport Agency.
Brown has also released a white paper prepared by consultancies EY and ARUP, which suggests the cost of congestion in Auckland could reach $2.6 billion by next year.
The Mayor’s own plan for time-of-use charging involves a toll on motorway pinch points at their busiest times.
The upside of that: the cost is borne by the drivers creating the problem. The downside is that it could make drivers abandon the motorway and clog up other city streets instead. That defeats the purpose of the charge and, for that matter, of motorways.
The option generally preferred in 2021, when a select committee last looked at this, was a cordon around the city centre. The new bill now goes to a new select committee and there is much to debate.
“One of my key policies as Mayor is to Get Auckland Moving,” said Brown [his capitals, not mine], “and right now Aucklanders are not moving at peak time on our motorways and city centre. If anything, it resembles a carpark, and that’s not good enough.”
Exactly. And it leads to this ...
This week, the council heard from Auckland Transport about what’s called “farebox recovery”. That’s the percentage of the cost of running the services covered by fares.
Around the world, in the wake of Covid disruption and inflation, farebox recovery has plummeted. Auckland has held up: it’s 31% right now. That compares with big Australian cities, which mostly range from 13% to 18%.
Last year Auckland also had the 7th-lowest fares (adjusted for cost of living) in Australasia over short distances. But we also had lower patronage levels than those Aussie cities.
For many planners, the holy grail of public transport is to get all three numbers right: relatively good farebox recovery, low fares and high patronage.
But for others, the goal is simply to get high patronage. After all, it fits with the goal of reducing road congestion.
In this, Brisbane has embarked on a bold experiment: all public transport fares, whatever the distance and whatever the mode, are just 50 cents. Six months in, patronage is up 20%.
That’s a great result: it’s better than the reduction in traffic we get during school holidays.
But as Auckland councillor Chris Darby warned the council, while fares should be low, making them extremely low may not be the most important enticement to greater use of public transport.
The key is frequency: if the buses and trains keep coming every few minutes, you can rely on the service. Also important: efficient travel (bus lanes to avoid congestion), cleanliness and personal safety.
The fares survey also showed AT’s longer-distance fares last year were very high. That’s one of the reasons AT has adopted a $50 per week fare cap, as proposed by Mayor Brown.
It makes a difference. People travelling into the city centre every weekday from Pakuranga, Māngere Bridge, Kelston, Te Atatu, Albany and all points further out get a day or more a week of “free” travel.
On inner-harbour ferries like Devonport, they get three “free” trips a week.
The University of Auckland has just announced its 2025 list of “distinguished alumni”.
Among them, the property developer Peter Cooper, who set the benchmark for downtown urban development with the Britomart precinct; Amelia Linzey, who has climbed to the top of engineering in this part of the world as CEO of Beca; the long-serving and recently retired executive producer of Tagata Pasifika, Stephen Stehlin; and Helen Robinson, the City Missioner.
Robinson is an extraordinary champion of the homeless, the traumatised and the vulnerable in this city, and a guiding light at the mission’s world-leading HomeGround mothership on Hobson St.
Humility? “We are held only by the generosity of others,” she says.
And she told me once, “I’m always checking myself. We say the mission is full of hope and that has to be true — but is it true?”
I’m not sure many of us hold ourselves to account quite as rigorously as that.
Parking at St Heliers is back in the news. Currently, most parking in the village is P30, with some loading bays and P10 spaces for very short stops. The streets closest to the shops without a P restriction tend to be used for all-day parking by people working in the village.
Auckland Transport has discovered that most shoppers stay for longer than 30 minutes, and also believes the all-day parking means there aren’t enough spots for shoppers. So it’s proposing to keep the loading zones and P10 parks, but make the rest of the village P120.
AT says people who want all-day parking are advised to park a bit further away or to use the very good bus service (unlimited travel with that $50 pw cap). The agency also advises it will keep an eye on what impact this has on residential streets.
Public consultation is open until the end of March and, despite some claims on social media, this is not a plot to introduce parking meters.
Transport Minister Chris Bishop said it and he’s right. While the trouble with the tracks won’t be fully fixed for many more months, it’s easy to forget just how far our rail network has come in the last 20 years – under National and Labour governments and several different councils.
The magnificent Britomart Station opened in 2003. Since then the network has been electrified and double-tracked, with new trains and new and improved stations on all three lines. Services run frequently and there is a world-class cashless ticketing system, integrated with bus and ferry services and useable not only by HOP card, but by credit and debit cards too. That latter feature, introduced late last year, has already been used more than a million times.
When the City Rail Link opens next year, rail capacity on the whole network will double, making train travel an appealing option for many more Aucklanders.
“I’ve been down to the new CRL stations,” Bishop said last month. “Aucklanders are going to be blown away. My prediction is that people will say what they always do once a big new project eventually finishes: ‘Why didn’t we do this decades ago?’”
Another sign of the changing times: since Covid, AT has reported, growth in public transport has been higher on the weekends than on weekdays.
Former Auckland mayor Phil Goff was sacked from his job as High Commissioner in London on Thursday. Just like to say there are absolutely no credible rumours he will run again for Mayor of Auckland. Absolutely none. But imagine it ...
Pasifika: A celebration of the people and cultures of 11 Pacific Island nations. Western Springs, March 8-9.
Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki Auckland Arts Festival: The city’s annual arts festival opened on Thursday and runs for two weeks, with cabaret in the spiegeltent and theatre, music, dance, visual arts and family fun all over the city. March 6-23.
Festival highlights this weekend
Belle – A Performance of Air: a multimedia show with “spectacular strength and skill” in aerial acrobatics, dance, live music and what they’re calling “bespoke circus apparatus” and a “gorgeous soundscape”. Created by Malia Johnston, famous for her work in the World of Wearable Arts and the opening of the 2023 Fifa Women’s World Cup, with collaborators Rowan Pierce and Eden Mulholland. Transforming the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre like never before. March 6-9.
Siva Afi Festival: Samoan fire knife dancing! With the Wāhine Toa Afi comp on Friday and Masters of the Flame Aotearoa on Saturday. Māngere Arts Centre, March 7-8.
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Simon Watts emphasised the need for councils to deliver the basics well.