Happy new year everyone – I hope you managed to get some sort of break.
I’ve penned a few thoughts reflecting on 2024 from a transport planning perspective. It starts with my lowlights, but I’ve tried to keep these brief to avoid depressing everyone too much, before getting into my personal highlights!
Lowlights
- The government’s open hostility towards people trying to get around on foot, bike, public transport or EV. As many others have written, it’s damaging us and our kids irreparably and makes no sense at all whichever angle you look at it from: environmentally, socially, economically, or financially.
- Climate change manifesting itself more and more impactfully, whether it’s heatwaves in southeast asia, hurricanes in USA, or floods in Spain.
Highlights
- The biggest highlight for me is how far the public conversation has progressed on the need for changes to the way we price transport. National’s announcement that all their new motorways would be tolled was amazing and, even though they are already backtracking on some of this, it’s still a huge step forward from where we were. Seeing New York finally implement their congestion relief zone after 20 years of false starts feels like an important step forward as well, in the context of National currently passing legislation to allow similar types of congestion relief schemes in NZ cities.
As a reminder, pricing driving properly is the only real solution to NZ’s transport problems – everything else is just fiddling around the edges, so the significance of this can’t be overstated. - The backlash we’re seeing against the government’s high speed limits policy has been heartening. Whether it’s open letters from international road safety experts, submissions from local transport planners and engineers, or just regular people who want their children to be able to go to school without being killed.
On a non-transport note, the huge backlash we’ve seen against Act’s Treaty Principles Bill has also knocked back a lot of my growing cynicism about how horrible most New Zealanders are deep down – maybe we aren’t such a bad bunch after all! - Public transport numbers in Christchurch suddenly skyrocketing was probably the biggest surprise of 2024 for me (patronage last year was the highest we’ve seen in over a decade). I’m still not entirely sure why this happened – might do a post once on it once I’ve figured it out.
- In contrast, cycling numbers in Christchurch continuing to grow steadily was not a surprise at all, but always good to see (will try do a post at some stage).
- Seeing the significant liberalisation of planning rules in most NZ cities is, in my personal opinion, a hugely positive thing. The economists all say this move should take us a long way towards solving the housing crisis in NZ and the social ills that has been causing. We’ll find out in a few decades if they were right or not.
All up, there was bitter disappointment in core transport planning areas, but some really positive stuff happening in other areas, some of which was quite surprising to me.
Here’s hoping 2025 brings more of the good kind of surprises, less of the bad ones.
TALKING TRANSPORT 