My opinions of the draft Government Policy Statement for transport funding were articulated in this recent post. Papers from Auckland Transport’s May board meeting outline the issues of concern to them in the document. Helpfully, Auckland Transport provide some useful tables that more clearly highlight areas of funding that are proposed to increase and decrease over the next 10 years.
Auckland Transport have put together a comparison between the expected spend in the current (2009-2012) GPS and the proposed draft one (2012-2015). Keep in mind that the current GPS itself reallocated a lot of money away from local roads and public transport, into building more state highways:
Setting aside the small areas like transport planning and sector training and research, the biggest reductions in funding are felt in public transport infrastructure, new and improved local roads and road safety.
Public transport infrastructure and new local roads are a major area of transport expenditure for Auckland Transport. Constraints on their funding seem likely to significantly impact upon the likelihood of large Auckland based transport projects (aside from state highways) to proceed any time soon.
The next table highlights how the changes will directly impact on Auckland (as opposed to the country as a whole):
As you can see, the big reductions in PT infrastructure and local roads come through most clearly. It is likely that these funding cuts will be devastating in terms of efforts to advance projects like AMETI and the Dominion Road upgrade.
Auckland Transport makes the following observations on the funding allocations:
In my previous analysis of the GPS I probably hadn’t quite known the extent to which the PT services increase is very much simply to cover metro rail costs. As I had suspected, the government’s promise to pay for Auckland’s electric trains in lieu of cancelling the regional fuel tax has not occurred – and we will end up having to pay for the trains after all: out of both increased rates and the reallocation of PT services funding that would otherwise be able to be spent on things like improving service frequencies on both the bus and train networks.
Given that the GPS absolutely guts Auckland Transport’s ability to achieve many of its long-term transport projects: particularly important PT and local roading upgrades like AMETI and Dominion Road, the proposed feedback that Auckland Transport will be sending off is, in my opinion, overly mild:
It is the third from bottom paragraph that I think is of most relevance here. By cutting back public transport infrastructure funding the government is making it extremely difficult for Auckland to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of its public transport system. Cutting back the ability to introduce bus priority measures seems short-sighted in the extreme, as it will make the public transport system more reliant on subsidies than ever: as the buses will be slower, less reliable and therefore less popular than would otherwise be the case.
Let’s hope Auckland Council’s submission not only highlights the same flaws pointed out by Auckland Transport, but perhaps has a bit more strength in the suggestions it makes on the GPS engagement document. One would think that the government will ignore Auckland Council at its peril.
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The third paragraph from the top is also interesting – because it suggests that AT is tied into fixed-fee maintenance contracts of some form, with any shortfall in central govt funding being picked up by ratepayers. This will drain AT’s funds and reduce their ability to fund public transport infrastructure off their own bat. As I understand it one of the aims of going into these long-term contracts was to extract better value for money from consultants and contractors, but the agreements should have been conditional on central govt funding.
Also, it’s somewhat ironic to see changes in excess of +-20% in activity class allocations, because the GPS process was intended to bring more certainty to funding. Large changes in funding allocations will mean that regional/local authorities cannot plan effectively, which will in turn undermine the ability for the private sector to gear up in advance of projects. End result? Tax-payers will end up paying more to get these transport projects done … ie. Joyce’s frivolous flights of road-building fancy seem like a sure-fire recipe for cost escalation.
AT should write something to that effect in their response to the discussion document …
What I also didn’t pick up (not a major concern for me) was just how badly this would impact on local road funding. The other councils (which are smaller and have even less ability to fund themselves than Auckland) must be livid about this.