KEY POINTS:
Transit New Zealand has backed off from a proposal to have tolls on the western ring route - raising the prospect of a regional fuel tax to pay for it.
The agency's board, which travelled to Auckland yesterday to consider findings from public consultations, took less than an hour to kill off its proposal to toll the 48km route between Manukau and Albany.
Capital projects general manager Colin Crampton told the board just 20 per cent of more than 21,500 Aucklanders who returned questionnaires last year supported the scheme, which Transit said then was needed to plug an $800 million funding gap for the route to be completed by 2015.
Concerns included the fairness of charging Aucklanders to use roads on one side of the region, and not the other, and the cost of collecting tolls.
Although 19 per cent said they could "live with" with the scheme, and more than 38 per cent backed tolls in principle, Mr Crampton said public support was only about half of that for proposals to charge motorists to use the $365 million motorway extension being built north of Orewa and a duplicate Tauranga Harbour crossing.
The second Tauranga bridge is now being built toll-free, as a condition of the political agreement between Labour and New Zealand First, leaving the Northern Motorway extension as Transit's only toll road scheme.
Mr Crampton said the 2015 deadline might still be achievable, given the Government's consideration of other funding sources for Auckland transport, notably a regional fuel tax.
The five-member board voted unanimously to drop tolls and support investigation into such funding sources "to achieve the planning target for the opening of the western ring route by 2015".
A spokesman for Finance Minister Michael Cullen confirmed last night that a regional fuel tax was under investigation.
Although one of three options open to the board would have been to keep refining a tolling scheme as a contingency against a failure to raise enough money from other sources, its acting chairman, Bryan Jackson, said it appeared "pretty obvious" there would be still be insufficient public support.
Board member and Labour Party president Mike Williams said that as an Aucklander he believed the consultation findings had "got it dead right" in capturing the public mood. But he was surprised only 56 per cent considered completing the ring route as soon as possible to be important.
Transit has promoted completing the route as a way to relieve pressure on the narrow State Highway 1 corridor through central Auckland, but Mr Williams said a levelling off of motorway congestion might have diluted public support.
He said Transit had to make it clear that the ring route must be opened by 2015, given that trucks were still being strangled by congestion day after day.
Christchurch board member Ernesto Henriod wondered how representative those who completed the questionnaires were of the 480,000 Aucklanders sent mailouts, and asked whether there had been any community activism.
But Mr Williams, a former market research supremo, described the return rate of almost 5 per cent as "a significant response" and senior Auckland Transit official Clive Fuhr said there was little evidence of activism.
Mr Fuhr added, however, that the Government's announcement of a record surplus a few days before consultations began in October featured strongly in people's minds.
Council for Infrastructure Development chief Stephen Selwood said he was late for the meeting because of a jammed Southern Motorway.
He questioned the ability of a regional fuel tax to fund the western route since it was being eyed as a funding source for many projects including rail electrification.
"It has been spent ten times over," he said.
But the Automobile Association and the Auckland Business Forum expressed confidence the route would be completed in time, given what they said would be economic benefits from it of more than $800 million a year.
Waitakere Mayor Bob Harvey welcomed Transit's stance. The earlier scheme was flawed in including a motorway toll-lane in each direction which would have passed through his city "with no way for our vital traffic to get on to or off it".
