Fellow transport blogger Darren Davis recently posted his Christmas wishlist over here, outlining a few transport projects he’d love to see happen.
This got me thinking about my own transport project Christmas wishlist. With a national election between now and then, I like to think that anything could happen in the transport policy space. Five things I would love to see by Christmas are:
- Government to start funding the basics again: low cost walking, cycling and public transport. For the last three years National have been siphoning money away from these in order to pay for their Roads of National Significance programme. I’d love to see this reversed.
Better still would be a fundamental change to the way we fund transport in NZ to stop this happening again in future. The Auckland mayor has suggested previously that central government need to get out of the way and just let locals make their own decisions on how they operate their transport networks, rather than trying to micro-manage everyone. I think I largely agree.
Specifically in Christchurch I’d love to see a little more money for bus services, especially on routes where the demand already exists and passengers are being turned away as buses are too full. We could also make these buses much faster and more reliable with some relatively low cost changes to our road networks – painted bus lanes, queue jumps, signal priority, and better bus stops. Some more money to fund the already planned cycleways would make sense too – these are relatively small dollar amounts with very high returns on investment. - Government to allow local communities to set speed limits. We know from previous consultation that a lot of Christchurch residents want 30km/h speed limits on their neighbourhood streets – there is no reason for central government to deny them this. From a personal perspective I would love our residential neighbourhood to be 30km/h – it would be the difference between me having to chaperone my kids to school versus them being able to safely get themselves there.
- Government to allow long-term planning again. A lot of the country’s long-term planning was put on hold in order to prioritise the urgent delivery of the Roads of National Significance programme. I’d love to see this reversed. One such project that should be back on the government’s books is corridor protection for eventual mass rapid transit along Christchurch’s busiest and most densely populated corridors. Doing these kind of route protection plans now will save us all sorts of headaches in 20-30 years time.
- Government to get back to basics with inter-regional travel. They’ve always been happy to spend large sums of taxpayer money subsidising regional air travel and state highways, but for some reason are hesitant to spend much smaller amounts running buses and trains that, to a degree, would achieve the same thing. I think there’s probably much better value for money in some of these low-cost services. I haven’t spent a lot of my time thinking about inter-regional travel, but Darren Davis has and he lists out a few of his ideas here.
In my mind, none of these four things should be controversial. They’re all inexpensive in the context of national transport budgets (multiple billions of dollars). And they would would all save us much more than they’d cost.
I didn’t really mean it when I started writing this but, looking back now, there’s a real “fiscal prudence” theme coming through here. The strange thing is that previous versions of the National party have built their whole image on being the “fiscally prudent” party. This government have damaged that reputation with their transport policies, spending up ludicrous sums of money that they don’t have on fantastical roading projects, while defunding the low-cost basics that everyday kiwis actually need.
There’s a massive opportunity for either (a) the right-bloc to get back on track with their “fiscal prudence” image, or (b) the left-bloc to swoop in and steal their crown.
Hopefully one of these two things happens: anything but more of the same.
