If only my light rail dreams came true
In an alternative universe, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland didn’t rip up dense tram networks in the 1950s in a bizarre attempt to model car-centric, traffic-jammed Los Angeles. We would have built on it with Mayor Robbie’s 1960s dream, developing a rapid transit network, including passenger rail with three-minute wait times.
Freedom to get around easily would have been a right to all with a transit card — not requiring a 16th birthday, multiple tests, a licence, ongoing fees and purchase of or access to an 1800kg hunk of metal.
The perceived requirement for a car to get around our city and our country wasn’t an inevitability. It was a conscious political choice.
Those same conscious political choices are being made today.
Nobody was forced on to the trams on our roads from 1902 to 1956. People took them because they were accessible, affordable and convenient. They were built as such.
Yet I find when we talk about public transport these days, certain people, for some reason, feel under personal attack. It’s similar to how when we talk about International Women’s Day, some people ask when it’s International Men’s Day (November 19). Or how, when we talk about renters, it’s conflated with an attack on landlords. Or how, when we talk about increasing density in our cities, some behave like we’re sending bulldozers to their colonial villas.
The private vehicle came to the mass market in the 1900s promising affordable convenience for everyone. But that affordability is questionable now when fuel hits $3 a litre and convenience is another entirely when Auckland alone is estimated to waste $2 billion in productivity a year sitting in traffic jams.
UK car insurance service Confused.com recently found that of all the countries across the world, New Zealand has the highest proportion of cars per capita: 0.7 cars for each person in the country. Our cars are also the fourth oldest (and therefore least efficient), just behind the Czech Republic, Romania and Argentina.
These are the legacies of political
decisions that made it really difficult to get around without your own private vehicle that’s individually and volatilely expensive to run. That volatility has been profoundly felt these past few weeks as petrol prices exploded, fuelled by demand shocks and the war in Ukraine.
In response, the Government decided to cut already ring-fenced fuel taxes 13 months after declaring a climate emergency. It came in the midst of public anger about inflationary pressure, where support could have been far more effectively channelled through raising incomes and universalising basic services, like dentistry or childcare.
Parking that (pun intended), tacked at the end of the announcement was an incredible moment for climate campaigners. Half-price public transport!
The cost of cutting fuel taxes by 25 cents for three months was projected at $350 million. For the public transport component, it was $25-$40m. Extrapolating from the most expensive end, we’re talking $320m — or $30m cheaper — for free public transport, for all, for a year.
Building on the grassroots Free
Fares campaign for free public transport for Community Service Card holders, full and part-time students and under-25s, the Greens launched our petition for free public transport for all.
Some say they can’t take their tools on the bus, others lament that there’s no route to the supermarket or kids’ swimming lessons. I get it. These systems have consistently been under-resourced and are therefore intentionally — best case, by neglect — inaccessible to all. It’s a similar story with cycling and walking infrastructure.
No one is forcing anyone to use public transport. But more people using public transport is awesome for all of us, regardless of whether you personally use it; we’re talking less congestion on roads, less carbon emissions, cleaner air, greater demand and more services you might just like to use…
Boston in the US recently trialled a free-fare route. It reported a 38 per cent increase in ridership, increased speed in boarding and minimal impact on services.
Some will raise equity for rural New Zealanders. Firstly, rural New Zealanders deserve greater connectivity through high-quality, inter-city public transport. Secondly, Statistics NZ reports 87 per cent of our population is urban, meaning a colossal opportunity to reduce transport emissions — the otherwise fastest-growing emissions profile in the country — which is of critical importance to all of us.
In an alternative universe, we kept the foundations of and built a worldclass, clean, convenient and efficient public transport network, as in Melbourne, Tokyo, London and many other cities.
We must demand today’s decisions build tomorrow’s real transport freedom.