A New Year

At the start of 2023 I wrote a list of the things I was looking forward to seeing in the new year. These included construction of Linwood improvements, Aranui and Gloucester St streets for People, completion of the South Express cycleway, rollout of safer speeds, Halswell Road bus lanes, Brougham Street improvements, and the Intensification Plan Change.

Looking back now, none of these things have actually happened.

Some of the things that did happen were:

• Completion of the Heathcote express cycleway
• Completion of the coastal pathway
• More development going up around the city, particularly around the Cathedral Square area.
• Matatiki Hornby Centre opening

My overall impression is that 2023 was largely a year of inaction in the transport world, overshadowed by CCC’s elections in late 2022 and national elections in late 2023. Both resulted in a change of leadership, but without a clear majority. This made leaders reliant on partnerships across the table between very different characters. Add to that CCC’s dramatic top-order batting collapse and 2023 was always going to be a challenging year.

As such, the highlights for me from 2023 are less about specific projects and more about the general patterns we’re starting to see emerging.

1. Despite the negative picture I’ve painted above, public transport patronage has been absolutely booming this year. In 2022 people made 10 million trips on the buses, in 2023 they made 13 million. 30% growth in a year is amazing. Partly this is covid bounce-back, and partly we’re starting to see broader societal shifts and external influences like rising fuel prices. But there’s also an element of Ecan doing some stellar work. They cop a lot of flak but seem to have really pulled things together this year. A few examples include fixing the driver shortage, electrifying the bus fleet quicker than most other cities in NZ, rolling out the new port-to-port and 27 routes, locking in frequency upgrades on route 7, and implementing $2 fares.

2. Cycling numbers are also booming, due again to a combination of broader societal shifts, more expensive fuel, and way better infrastructure being rolled out. We started the year with 29% more cycling than our 2017 baseline and ended it on 35%. Again, that’s impressive growth.

3. Emissions are falling. It’s finally starting to look like we might have turned the ship around and started heading in the right direction with greenhouse gas emissions. It’s still very slow to be fair, but even just turning the ship around is a massive achievement. Total city emissions for 2023 were 2.5 million tonnes of CO2 equivalents, down 10% from 2.8 million in 2019. Over the same period we had population growth of 9,000 people and GDP growth of 18%. Emissions are now falling while population and economic activity continue to grow. That decoupling is certainly worth celebrating.

4. The number of people being killed or seriously injured by cars continues to fall. In 2023 Christchurch had around 120 people killed or seriously injured on the streets, almost half the 200+ people the city was recording each year pre-earthquake. We’ve seen deaths and injuries reduce wherever we’ve slowed speeds through lowering speed limits (e.g. central city) and installing speed bumps and raised platforms (e.g. Lincoln Road). There are a lot of people walking around the city today who would be dead or carrying life-long injuries if council hadn’t made those changes. Again something worth celebrating.

So what am I looking forward to in 2024? I really don’t know what to expect, other than a rollercoaster. I’ve always considered myself a fairly optimistic guy, but even I’m finding it tough to see the silver lining at the moment. This new government seem laser-focussed on reversing all those metrics above and getting our road deaths up again, supercharging our greenhouse gas emissions, and generally making our city a crappier place to live. The best thing Christchurch can do right now is keep its head down and let Auckland and Wellington cop most of the flak.

Over time I think this will change. Climate change isn’t going anywhere and fuel prices won’t be dropping anytime soon. People aren’t going to suddenly stop wanting affordable ways of getting around and I predict we’ll continue to see increasing demand for public transport and bikes. This will put pressure on central government and it will get increasingly untenable for them to take such an extreme stance on transport. There’s already tension between transport minister Simeon Brown, climate change minister Simon Watts, and finance minister Nicola Willis, who are all saying completely contradictory things at the moment. It will be a big test of Christopher Luxon’s leadership to see if he can manage to pull those three into some sort of coherent position.

There are some important budgetary decisions coming up this year with each council deciding on their long-term-plans, Ecan doing their regional land transport plan and regional public transport plan, and the Ministry of Works Land Transport New Zealand Transit New Zealand Transport Agency Waka Kotahi Transport Agency publishing their National Land Transport Programme. That’s where a lot of my attention will be focussed this year.

A few other things will keep chugging away in the background:

• Continued roll out of cycleways
• Continued roll out of bus lanes (e.g. Halswell Road this year), bus stop improvements and bus service uplift
• Long-term planning for city growth including rapid transit
• Brougham Street upgrade
• Intensification plan change: The process is now completely up in the air but I hope that by the end of the year at least some form of upzoning will have gone through.
• Safe speeds. Again this is now all up in the air but again I think at least some of this work will be implemented by year end.
• Lots of minor safety improvements, like speed bumps and intersection upgrades. Again there’s political uncertainty but again the science is clear so hopefully we still see these go ahead.

So despite a fair bit of negativity there is also some good stuff happening. If Christchurch transport was a cricket innings, I feel like 2024 is that bit where we’ve got some runs on the board, but we just lost all our best stroke-makers in rapid succession and it’s now up to the scrappy lower-order batters to hunker down and try to avoid total collapse. To make it more difficult, the pitch is beginning to break up and the ball’s just started reverse swinging. The next few overs are going to be hard graft! Fortunately we’ve been in these situations before and we’re the best in the world at battling our way out of difficult situations to salvage ugly and unlikely victories.

Hopefully we can pull one of these out of the bag in 2024, but expect it to be less Kane Williamson, more Scotty Styris.