Transport Minister Simeon Brown announced that the government has agreed to policy settings that will allow time of use schemes to be proposed.
Video / NZ Herald
Opinion by Simon Wilson
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues. He joined the Herald in 2018.
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.
OPINION
Congestion charges, aka time-of-use charges, aka more road tolls, aka another tax, are coming to a busyroad near you. Probably. Possibly. And almost certainly not until about 2028, although the technology exists to do it from as early as next year.
Again, though, the Stockholm experience is instructive: strong public opposition before the trial turned into 53% public support after it.
Minister Brown acknowledged the lack of public support last week, but he also said little to suggest he would mitigate the harm congestion charging can cause.
He began his announcement by talking about concrete trucks. Currently, he said, a truck might be able to make two deliveries in Auckland a day. With a congestion charge, those two trips could become three or even more.
Good news for every freight carrier, service deliverer and tradie stuck in traffic. Time is money. The peak road-freight body Ia Ara Aotearoa Transporting NZ said it “fully supports” the proposal, although with breathtaking arrogance the interim chief executive Dom Kalasih did also call for truckies to be exempted.
In Stockholm, like London, Singapore and elsewhere, it works with a cordon around the city centre. Cross the cordon and you pay a fee. This approach was recommended here in The Congestion Question, a report drawn up in 2021 by a multi-agency taskforce led by the Ministry of Transport and accepted by a parliamentary select committee at the time.
Mayor Brown has a different idea for Auckland. He wants a toll on the busiest sections of motorway at the busiest times. A kind of “hotspot” approach.
The beauty of the cordon is that you can’t avoid it. The cameras will see you whichever road you cross the cordon on, so there’s a built-in incentive to find another method of travel.
Conversely, hotspot pricing encourages drivers to go around: to stay off the motorways and clog up local roads. That undermines one of the main reasons we even have urban motorways.
Minister Brown says the Government has not decided what option it might prefer.
All we know for now is this. Introducing the legislation, putting it through a parliamentary process (with a full second round of select committee hearings), designing and building the centralised back-office system, inviting councils to work with the NZ Transport Agency to design their own application of the system, getting it approved by the Government and then building it will take until ... about 2028.
This is not the Government’s usual “getting things done” approach. Is it too cynical to note that 2025 is a council election year and 2026 is a general election year? Or even wonder if they intend to do it at all?
The City Rail Link is expected to open in 2026: if Auckland is to have a congestion charging scheme, that should be the target date.
But to get there, the minister has that mountain of public opposition to climb. Why will it be so hard?
Let me count the ways. It’s another tax. It’s a regressive tax. It’s not the key to solving congestion. And one of the most common arguments for it is economic gibberish.
Let’s start with that. These charges will be a cost of doing business that companies will pass on to their customers. For the general public, they will raise the cost of living.
When I asked Minister Brown about this last week, he reiterated that “time is money” and said every driver wins if they spend less time stuck in traffic.
Alan McDonald from the Employers and Manufacturers Association (EMA) has said much the same. “Recent traffic monitoring data has found that Aucklanders are losing 22 million hours per year out of their lives while they sit in traffic,” he declared. “That equates to a $1.3 billion annual hit to GPD.”
Gibberish. You can’t link private travel to productivity because very few people drive to work on company time. However long your commute takes, it’s your own time you’re wasting.
Everyone resents it, and fair enough. But the economic value – the “annual hit to the GDP” – is zero.
Employers and Manufacturers Association head of advocacy and strategy Alan McDonald. Photo / File
Why are congestion charges regressive? Because the more you have to count every penny, the more they will hurt. Wealthy drivers won’t find them a burden and will enjoy the emptier roads. They also tend to live closer to the centre so they already have better public transport and cycleways.
What happened to being laser-focused on reducing the cost of living for ordinary hard-working Kiwis?
There’s a bigger issue in all this. We already know from our experience in Auckland with the Northern Busway that rapid transit is the key to managing congestion. Fast buses, trains, light rail.
Rapid transit also meets other goals, like lowering emissions and increasing road safety. In fact, its value is so obvious, we should do everything we can to make the most of it.
What would that mean?
First, expand the rapid transit network throughout the city as quickly as possible, with buses and trains that are cheap, fast, frequent and reliable, with 2026 as the target date.
Where there is no dedicated busway, give buses a lane on the motorways, including the harbour bridge.
Join up the bus lanes on other major arterials. Supercharge Mayor Brown’s programme of using smart technology with dynamic lanes and bus priority at traffic lights.
Support the rapid buses and extra trains with a big network of feeder services: cheap and easy ways to get from home to the station. That’s more buses, minibuses and cycleways, better street lighting for people walking, and park-and-rides too.
A congestion charge could form a valuable part of this strategy, pushing more people towards public transport. But the PT must be good.
Stockholm, it’s worth noting, already had good public transport and cycling infrastructure and when they introduced congestion charging they built a whole lot more.
At the same time, make a plan to reduce school traffic. That requires, among other things, safe ways for kids to walk and ride a bike.
And while all these relatively quick solutions are put in place, build more dedicated rapid-transit lines. Include surface light rail along with rapid buses in the analysis and debate, as well as a commuter rail service to Huapai, cable cars, more ferries and other technologies.
We have such an opportunity here. Our roads are appallingly congested, we are failing to reduce carbon emissions and our road safety record is among the worst in the developed world.
The opportunity is for a rethink about how and why we use the roads, so we can build ourselves a more functional, friendlier city.
Instead, the Government proposes a new tax. And it’s cutting important transport funding. And the council has added its own cuts.
The CRL and Eastern Busway will be finished, but that’s almost it. Budgets for local buses, cycleways and many other services, including some feeder routes, are slashed. There’s a promise of a new Northwest Busway, but no money for it.
A great many people will not be able to avoid a congestion tax. That’s the opposite of a laser focus on bringing down the cost of living.
And if it’s introduced in the form Mayor Brown favours, it will transfer motorway congestion on to the city’s other, already badly congested, streets.
In effect, it will mean telling ordinary, hard-working motorists on, say, the Southern Motorway, to use Great South Rd instead.
