Tolling motorways to fund City Rail Link?

An article in the NZ Herald yesterday talked a bit further about the different options being looked at to fund Auckland’s transport projects over the next 10-20 years.

Aucklanders could pay between $1 and $3 to drive on the city’s motorways to pay for the inner city rail loop and a new harbour crossing.

Mayor Len Brown yesterday praised a “simple and straightforward” proposal for a regionwide toll on every on-ramp to the motorway of $3 in peak hours, $1 in the off-peak and $2 at other times.

It seems as though Len Brown’s caught onto a proposal that the NZ Council for Infrastructure Development have been pushing really hard over the past few months. You can read the presentation they’ve given to a lot of the different local boards from page eight of this document onwards.

The Herald article offered a bit more detail:

The “network charge” proposal, from the New Zealand Council for Infrastructure Development, would cap the charge at $6 a day.

NZCID chief executive Stephen Selwood said the charge would cover the repayments of $600 million a year to pay for the $2.4 billion rail loop and a new harbour crossing, costed at $5.1 billion for a pair of motorway tunnels or $3.9 billion for a new bridge…

…Mr Selwood said Mr Joyce clearly had political apprehensions about funding options for the rail loop, but he admired the courage of Mr Brown for raising the question with Aucklanders.

Mr Selwood said he had visited 12 of the 21 local boards and sensed 60:40 per cent support for a network charge. Some of the 40 per cent were not opposed but “just not quite there yet”.

There’s a useful description of how the system would work, taken from the NZCID presentation, below:

Before I get on to discussing what I think about this funding option, I think it’s worthwhile to first look at the number of projects that the NZCID think are “necessary” for Auckland over the next decade or two. Here are the PT projects (count the errors):

 And the roading projects that the NZCID consider necessary: Now personally I don’t think many of these roading projects will ever be necessary (like another harbour crossing, the tunnel under Hobson Bay and many of the most expensive bits of AMETI) and I think many of the public transport projects are unlikely to be necessary for quite a long time.

So really, the NZCID are trying to create a bit of a panic that doesn’t exist about all these supposedly necessary projects. But as they represent a bunch of companies that spend their time planning, designing and building infrastructure projects, this is not particularly surprising. Fundamentally I therefore question the extent to which we need to look at raising additional transport revenue because I don’t buy the argument we need so many new transport projects within the next 10 years or so. Furthermore, if we simply spent our existing transport revenue smarter we may not need to raise any additional revenue to build the projects that we actually really need.

But putting that issue aside, what do I think about the idea of tolling motorway onramps to help raise extra money? There’s one good element of the proposal: the differential pricing for peak time and off-peak travelling. I’m also not fundamentally opposed to the idea of tolling. But the idea does have a fatal flaw in my opinion – and that is by tolling the motorway network you are likely to push traffic onto local roads, causing congestion, stuffing up public transport routes and overwhelming roads that are located right next to where people live, work, go to school and so forth. It would be interesting to see NZCID’s response to this pretty massive flaw in their plan.

I also worry that talking too much about road tolling to help fund rail projects, when that probably isn’t necessary, will also undermine public support for the City Rail Link, which is pretty strong at the moment. I hope Len Brown keeps this in mind.

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