What will the new government mean for transport in Christchurch?

I’ve read National’s pre-election 100-day plan, the coalition agreements with NZ First and Act, and the post-election 100-day plan and tried to infer what they might mean in the transport world here in Christchurch.

Climate Change

Before we get into that, just a brief statement on climate change. Getting the transition to zero-carbon right has been the biggest challenge in transport over the last decade, and will continue to be for the next few. The new government are still committed to the emission reduction targets set out in our Paris agreement (50% reduction by 2030). Act have said previously they’d chuck it out if they could, but I think it helps that it was John Key’s National Government that signed us up to the Paris agreement, and also that it is now included as a condition of our free trade agreements which all the partners support. Christopher Luxon has insisted many times that he’s not a climate change denier (e.g. here).

“Look I mean you can’t be living in the twenty first century and deny that human induced climate change is real. It is real. There is no room for climate deniers or climate minimalists in the twenty first century”

The trouble is all three parties have said almost zilch on how they plan on reducing the country’s emissions. The coalition agreement with ACT literally never mentions climate change. The NZ First agreement mentions it a solitary time, and that is in the context of trying to downplay it’s significance. It reads to me like this government just hasn’t thought about climate change in any depth. 

National’s pre-election 100 day plan

National’s 100 day plan (here) talks about transport projects in Auckland and Wellington but never once mentions Christchurch. They do talk about transport more generally though, some of the key points being:

• Force Auckland Council to remove their fuel tax
• Slightly reduce petrol/diesel excise
• Remove clean car rebate (ute tax)
• Build a bunch of motorways (Roads of National Significance).
  One of these is close-ish to Christchurch: the Woodend bypass. However this is contingent on a robust business case being produced, which I’d expect to take most of the next 3 years, if they can even to do it at all: it won’t be easy making a case for this investment.
• Raise speed limits
• Cancel Let’s get Wellington Moving
• Cancel Auckland Light Rail
• Progress other (unspecified) public transport projects around the country

I don’t think I need to tell you that every one of these policies bar the last one will increase the country’s transport emissions.

Act Coalition Agreement

The coalition agreement with Act says they’ll do everything in National’s 100 day plan plus a few extra bulletpoints on taxes/pricing/incentives:

• Institute long-term city and regional infrastructure deals, allowing PPPs, tolling and value capture rating to fund infrastructure
• Introduce financial incentives for councils to enable more housing, including considering sharing a portion of GST collected on new residential builds with councils.
• Work to replace fuel excise taxes with electronic road user charging for all vehicles, starting with electric vehicles.
• Work with Auckland Council to implement time of use road charging to reduce congestion and improve travel time reliability.

I find these four bulletpoints intensely interesting. Pricing is the one area I think this government could make more progress on than the previous government did. For a long time we’ve known that a lot of our transport and landuse problems are caused by our unwillingness to price transport properly. Bringing in a greater user-pays element to our transport pricing could bear massive positive benefits for the country, but the previous left-leaning government never felt that they had the mandate to do this – a right-leaning government is far more likely to pull the trigger on user-pays roads. And trying to fund growth infrastructure better is long overdue as well, and could potentially help a lot with fixing the broken housing market.

Act also add a caveat onto the end of National’s speed limit increases:

• Reverse speed limit reductions where it is safe to do so

To me this may be significant because pretty much nowhere will engineers be willing to put their neck out and say that it is “safe” to raise the speed limit. In theory this caveat should count out pretty much any speed limit rise, although I suspect government might just ignore it.

NZ First

The NZ First coalition agreement is longer and wafflier. Again it never mentions Christchurch, and says relatively little about transport. The only real thing it adds is one more motorway to National’s list (in Northland), and it also says:

• Reduce expenditure on cycleways
  (which I think everyone expected National to do anyway)

So what will Christchurch see over the next 3 years?

On it’s own all the above sounds pretty bad right? Except that the government keeps on insisting it is still committed to reducing emissions in line with the Paris agreement and our free trade deal conditions.

Although they don’t explicitly say this, their position as a right-leaning coalition suggests to me they’ll rely more heavily on the Emissions Trading Scheme. This means allowing carbon prices and fuel prices to increase more substantially than what Labour was willing to, which then forces people to burn less of it.

This works, but the concern has always been that it makes life harder for people, especially the poorest. That made it difficult for Labour to support, but I think it will easier for this government. National, Act and NZ First have always been pretty transparent that that they’re not here to represent the poor.

As fuel gets more and more expensive we’ll see people looking for alternatives. And with no clean car rebate and road user charges being introduced, fewer people will be able to afford EV’s. This means greater demand for walking, cycling, and public transport. We were already seeing increased demand under the last government (buses and bikes); we’ll see it even more under this one.

Despite ominous signs for the country as a whole, my sense is that this government has very little idea what it wants to do in Christchurch over the next three years. Some of my friends are quite worried that this government will do a lot of damage over the next three years, and I think that fear is justified for those up north. But the more I read these agreements, the more I think that Christchurch will dodge the worst of it. We have a long and proud history of flying under Wellington’s radar, and I think a reasonably likely scenario is that we don’t actually see massive changes down here. I’m expecting we’ll see tweaks rather than mass cancellations on most of our programmes:

• Continue with most of the cycleways. The programme may be slowed down but to be honest that was looking likely anyway.
• Continue with planned public transport improvements (PT Futures). Despite cancelling the high profile schemes up north, National keep insisting they still want to fund lower cost public transport improvements. When Labour announced funding for the PT Futures programme earlier this year, Simeon Brown came out and confirmed he also supported this programme.
• Continue with most of the upzoning currently underway. The medium density residential stuff is up in the air but the rest of the upzoning should be pretty safe.
• Continue with most of the safer speeds. A lot of our communities are screaming out for these e.g. around schools, shops, and quiet residential streets. It may be scaled back in a handful of locations.
• Continue with planning work for the rapid transit scheme (National promised this in their separate transport policy, and the documents above don’t say any different).

If this is how things were to play out, I wouldn’t necessarily be completely demoralised. Lots of small wins can add up to something much bigger. This article (https://newsroom.co.nz/2023/11/27/crime-wave-in-otautahi/) from an Aucklander visiting Christchurch said that he reckoned Christchurch had:

“very progressive transport options. The teal bus fleet, the Neuron e-scooters, the tram ringing its ding-ding-ding bell – Christchurch, the city that shares its spaces, makes the city a joy to get around.”

So we’ll hopefully be allowed to keep going with all that stuff. But the thing I’ll be watching with the most interest over the next three years is changes to pricing in transport and tax incentives for councils to achieve urban growth.