Spare me the fallacies of March Madness
The month is fast running out and I haven’t seen “March Madness”. Every day I’ve driven the 15km to work in the city and home again, and never found the traffic to be anything but entirely normal. That is to say, it moves along at 20-40km/h and it takes me about 40 minutes to make the trip in the morning, a bit less in the evening.
I can see why March Madness might be expected to happen when universities open for the year and students join the traffic but I’m damned if I’ve ever noticed any difference. The only madness around me every March is a rash of published articles condemning car travel.
The writers promote two fallacies. One, that congestion is getting worse. The other, that public transport in Auckland is not good enough. Car drivers, feeling stoical and guilty, subscribe to both fallacies, as do mayors, councils and their transport planners.
But the truth is, despite 40,000 more cars on Auckland roads last year, the Automobile Association reports congestion eased over the year, thanks to the Waterview motorway connection. And Auckland’s upgraded buses and trains are said to be getting more reliable.
Promoters of public transport lose no opportunity to tell me I’ve been wrong to doubt the worth of projects such as the Northern Busway and the Central Rail Link. They say the muchimproved buses and trains are bursting with patronage and I’m glad to hear it. I’m just waiting to hear those forms of transport are paying their way.
It’s not that I resent money being taken from road taxes to subsidise public transport, my concern is for the country’s economy. Transport infrastructure is a significant national investment and it is vital to get it right, not just for its cost but for its impact on all other activities in the economy. Most of those activities involve travel.
Cars and trucks are economic. Their taxes pay for their roads. Don’t tell me about air pollution costs and other “externalities” measured by guesswork. Successful economies work on measurable spending and earnings. When investments respond to those measures, companies remain solvent, shops don’t close, jobs are plentiful.
Impose uneconomic investments on the country and everyone can suffer. When I look at the Central Rail Link construction I still shudder. It never satisfied the objective economic tests used by the NZ Transport Agency, which allocates road tax revenues nationwide.
The Transport Agency was taken by surprise in 2013 when John Key suddenly gave the go-ahead for the first phase to neutralise the issue in the mayoral election that year.
But even now, I understand, nobody really knows what the full project might finally cost or how it is going to be financed.
A regional petrol tax is going to pay for part of it, and I don’t hear car commuters objecting. We are happy to see more people on public transport and, contrary to what you have been reading, we don’t mind sharing the road.
When exclusive bus lanes were introduced some years ago, public transport columnists predicted we would hate them and try to defy them. We accepted them immediately. We don’t invade bus
We have a good system of continual road investment if we can keep it at arm’s length from politics.
lanes, we don’t even invade those T3 lanes that haven’t worked. Mike Hosking says he does, but whenever I’m in traffic alongside an empty T3 lane I don’t see cars coming past with fewer than three people in them, I rarely see a car in the lane at all.
Bike lanes have been the main subject of March Madness this month, although shopkeepers, not motorists, are making the complaints. They want car parking outside their doors, not an empty bike lane.
In the city I cross Nelson St twice a day. A complete lane has been barricaded off for cycling and on weekdays it is rare to see a cyclist on it. Occasionally, I walk across the Hopetoun St bridge and look down on the elaborate elevated cycle path the Transport Agency has built through spaghetti junction. Again, never anybody on it.
We have a good system of continual road investment if we can keep it at arm’s length from politics. Around the northwestern edge of Auckland these days lovely new motorways await the city’s planned spread. Go south through Waikato and you find yourself on a new expressway. Same around Tauranga.
But when you leave Auckland’s motorways you come under the care of Auckland Transport, which has come under more political control.
The greatest fallacy in our transport debate is the idea an urban roading system has a finite capacity. It doesn’t, technology will provide ever more ways to accommodate personal vehicles if we have transport planners prepared to work with most people’s demonstrated preferences, rather than trying to change them. Their mistakes can cripple an economy.