Last night the Campaign for Better Transport ran a meeting of transport spokespeople from five different parties, asking them two key questions:
- How they think the government’s $3 billion a year contribution to transport should generally be split across the different modes.
- What their party will do specifically for transport matters in Auckland over the next three years.
There was a pretty good response from the political parties, although it was a shame that Steven Joyce didn’t turn up and we ended up with David Bennett instead. For some strange reason Steven Joyce doesn’t seem to be the Campaign for Better Transport’s biggest fan. The speakers were:
- David Bennett, MP (National)
- Shane Jones, MP (Labour)
- Gareth Hughes, MP (Greens)
- Don Brash (ACT)
- Colin Craig (Converatives)
Don Brash spoke first, and pretty much devoted his entire time to arguing for road pricing. This wasn’t necessarily too much of a surprise, given ACT’s ideological bent and I must say I was reasonably impressed by his knowledge on the topic – referring to examples in Sweden, Singapore and the typical London case. He made the point that if we ran airports and air-travel like we run land-based travel, we’d have huge queues for peak times planes and nobody on planes at others times – strangely similar to what we have for land transport. There wasn’t too much about whether road pricing should be used as a revenue generation mechanism or a demand management mechanism (I’m guessing largely the latter), and also not much said about whether it should lead investment in alternatives or whether it would follow that investment – I’m guessing the former. While he didn’t say much about what plans the ACT party might have for transport in Auckland in terms of new projects, I guess the feeling is that if we price roads properly we might not need new projects.
Gareth Hughes from the Greens was unsurprisingly very comprehensive in his answers on both the questions raised. He pointed out that the Green Party has been pushing for better public transport and a more sustainable approach to transport for a very long time, although he welcomed Labour’s shift over the past few years. He was scathing of National’s spending on the various Roads of National Significance, not just the usual whipping boy of the holiday highway but also other projects with dodgy cost-benefit ratios like Transmission Gully. While the Green Party launches their transport policy this coming Monday, Gareth gave us a few insights that the Greens want to push for a 60% government contribution to the City Rail Link, they would make walking and cycling a much greater priority (pushing for 100% NZTA funding over the next few years) as well as making significant baseline increases to the PT operating funding budget. All up, he certainly seemed to have the most detailed grasp of transport matters out of all the candidates.
Colin Craig rambled on a bit about all sorts of things, noting that he was standing in the Rodney electorate so felt compelled to support the Puhoi-Wellsford road even if it wasn’t quite clear whether he personally thought it was a good idea or not. He talked quite a bit about utilising New Zealand’s ability to innovate and suggested that we should look a bit outside the square for transport solutions. My overall impression was that his knowledge of transport policy was fairly basic, but I guess that’s not particularly surprising as he’s the leader of that party rather than their transport spokesperson (if they indeed have one). In general he came across as a fairly friendly character.
Shane Jones outlined key aspects of the Labour Party’s transport policy, which obviously include shifting $1.2 billion from the Puhoi-Wellsford funding pool and putting it into paying for approximately half the City Rail Link. Interestingly, he noted that this had caused him some grief amongst his Northland supporters and seemed to have been quite a challenging decision for the Labour Party to make (clearly some residue from the roads-centric days gone past). He also talked about Labour wanting to make better use of coastal shipping and the ports, as well as using rail freight to a much greater extent. For some reason he still can’t help himself from calling PT “public sector transport”.
Finally, David Bennett probably felt a little bit like a sacrificial lamb being required to talk at such a meeting and he certainly came across as being quite nervous for much of it. He talked a lot about all the roads the government has been building over the past few years and all the roads they want to build over the next few years – while making some relatively brief mentions about improvements to public transport at the same time. Probably the most interesting argument he made was in response to Labour’s funding decision for the City Rail Link, where he pointed out the potential for some misalignment between the timing of Puhoi to Wellsford and the timing of the City Rail Link – saying that much of the big funding requirement for the motorway would not be for many more years whereas Auckland Council want to advance the CRL almost immediately. Personally I don’t think this is much of an issue as Puhoi-Wellsford was proposed for completion by 2022 while the CRL has always been seriously proposed for completion by 2021.
Unfortunately I couldn’t stay for the question and answer section, so it would be interesting for those who did stay to add in if anything interesting was raised.
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“For some strange reason Steven Joyce doesn’t seem to be the Campaign for Better Transport’s biggest fan.”
Maybe it’s the name. Better Transport, Phooey, what kind of transport minister would want that?
““For some strange reason Steven Joyce doesn’t seem to be the Campaign for Better Transport’s biggest fan.”
Maybe it’s the name. Better Transport, Phooey, what kind of transport minister would want that?”
I would say it is because one of CBT’s leading people routinely publicly insults the minister. I wouldn’t blame the minister for shunning an organization that does that. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
It’s more likely complete arrogance and disrespect to the voting public, than having his little ego bruised a little.
It is his unwillingless to listen to anyone who is outspoken on his unwillingless to listen.
It is because he is doing what he is requested to do as paid to do so by his corporate donors, completely ignoring the other people that pay him, the New Zealand people.
He dismisses all dissenting voices as “left-wing blogs” even if they’re not particularly left-wing. The blogs and dissenting voices such as the CBT add up to having more expert knowledge than him, and instead of listening, he doesn’t and does what he wants, even though it consistently is found to be bad policy, a waste of money and will lock NZ into further mandatory motoring, urban sprawl, foreign fuel dependency, long commutes, and huge levels of debt.
Being a list MP high up on the National list we don’t get to vote him out. He is appointed, not elected.
He must be the complete antithesis of a good transport minister and the #1 reason to change the government.
If telling him he is no good at his job, and he does everything wrong, is to to be taken as an insult, instead of constructive criticism, then again, he is the wrong man for the job.
Well expect them to do, we’re hardly going to crowd around going “we love you”! Any attacks at Steven Joyce and the National Party are fully justified.
The funding crunch issue also depends on how fast you pushed through cbd rail and some other projects. Interesting to know if you could slow waterview down a bit without increasing overallprice too much
I don’t think there’s too much conflict between Waterview and the CRL for funding as the CRL’s construction won’t ramp up until around the time Waterview is being finished. Slowing Waterview would probably create more of a funding squeeze.
“He made the point that if we ran airports and air-travel like we run land-based travel, we’d have huge queues for peak times planes and nobody on planes at others times”
Erm, we do. The only difference is that people use land transport on a daily basis, and we are diurnal creatures, so the peak occur across the course of the day (specifically in the morning not long after people wake up and start to go about their business, and about eight hours later when people head home again). If we look at domestic business travel (Auckland to Wellington, Melbourne to Sydney) then indeed there are busy daily peaks will lulls in between and at night. But international travel on the other hand is undertaken much less than daily, so the peaks occur across the course of a yearly cycle. We do have huge queues for peak time planes (Christmas, school holidays) and other times with almost nobody on them.
One thing the libertarian types and the road pricing advocates seem to gloss over is the fact that there is usually a very good reason why us humans want to travel at the same times of day, which usually boils down to the fact that we are animals that sleep at night and are active during daylight hours.
I get the feeling that Brash and the like are very supportive of road pricing for the sector society that can afford to pay to travel on newly uncongested roads at peak times, without any real regard for the other half that have to be priced off the roads at peak times and forced to travel at times they don’t want to in order for the scheme to work.
The airport comment was more in relation to how airlines charge different fares for different routes and at different times of the day so the popular flights attract a premium while other flights are cheaper to encourage people to use them. Basically land transport works in the opposite way with us building masses of peak capacity in our systems so that everyone can travel when they want.
His main point was actually that there are so many subsidies in land transport, both private and PT, that how can we accurately judge the benefits of investments, road pricing is just an tool to enable private travel to be charged correctly. I also don’t think he was completely opposed to providing a subsidy to encourage desirable activities but that for that to happen we need to fully understand the impacts of that decision.
It’s the same with air travel too, there is masses of peak capacity in airports, terminals, air traffic control etc that is only fully utilised a few percent of the time.
Airline pricing isn’t quite the same thing, their goal isn’t to move people to other times or routes (a full plane is ideal or them) but simply to maximize profit on travel times that are popular. I.e where they can drastically increase the price over the holidays and they will still have a full plane. Their goal us to set the price at the most they can without turning people away.
With road pricing it’s a bit different, the goal is to have the infrastructure at less than full capacity which requires pricing it higher than most people are willing to pay. Put that in the context of people already having strong disincentive signals to avoid peak travel (travel time and reliability, frustration, fuel use etc), yet still travelling… And we realize for pricing to have an appreciable effect on congestion it has to be priced out of the reach of the majority of people. pricing for revenue gathering is one thing, pricing out congestion is another.
There is masses of peak capacity, but those who choose to travel at peak times pay more to pay for that peak capacity that only they use.
“Airline pricing isn’t quite the same thing, their goal isn’t to move people to other times or routes (a full plane is ideal or them”
I disagree, airlines have massive fixed costs, the planes, and the airport/runway. The trend over the last couple of decades has been to squeeze as many flights as possible out of those fixed assets, and to do so by charging lower fares at the more inconvenient times. If you get to a london airport at 4:30 it is quite shocking how packed it is, and all those people of got up at about 3am to get there for a 20quid flight.
8 full planes loads is more ideal for them than 6 plane loads.
The peak flights aren’t impossibly priced, but there is enough of a price difference to encourage people to change their behaviour.
Brash’s approach appears to treat transport in general more as a private good with little public good component. You want it you pay for it. Whereas Gareth was clear about the public good aspects of transport provision. There are plenty of people who don’t have the luxury of being able to choose where they live and where they work.
“I get the feeling that Brash and the like are very supportive of road pricing for the sector society that can afford to pay to travel on newly uncongested roads at peak times, without any real regard for the other half that have to be priced off the roads at peak times and forced to travel at times they don’t want to in order for the scheme to work…”
So on this basis presumably you are against removing minimum parking requirements? It is the same argument – if you reduce parking availability only the wealthy will be able to park.
Are there other parts of the economy you want socialised? Perhaps the supermarkets should hand us out our allocated vegetables each day, funded by taxes?
Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear but my main issue is that Brash and co seem to use road pricing alone as a sole solution. I.e. everyone basically still has to drive if they want to travel (i.e work, study, buy food, enjoy their lives), but driving at convenient times is priced to prevent congestion, which necessitates pricing it out of the reach of the majority of people. If they paired this with alternatives to driving, such as public transport, improved communications, changes to land use planning so that people don’t have to travel as much etc then I wouldn’t be so concerned. But all they promote is pricing the proles off the road to make it congestion free.
You are welcome to teeter around on an ideological high horse if you like, but I’m more concerned about practicalities such as what would happen to our economy if workers found it too expensive to drive to work or shops at the times they are open, yet had no other way to get there.
As for minimum parking requirements you’re barking up the wrong tree, nothing about having minimum requirements makes parking more accessible to the less weathly, and nothing about removing them would make parking accessible to the wealthy alone.
If we remove minimum parking requirements then an organisation can develop as much or little of their land for parking as they see fit for their users, not an arbitrary amount tied to a council formula for the near maximum conceivable use at any one time. The vast majority of car parking subject to minimum standards is unpriced, the offices, commercial spaces, shops malls etc. Removing the minimum standards isn’t going to magically make them priced, especially if the organisation decides they have too much parking.
Street side parking, parking lots and parking buildings quite obviously aren’t subject to minimum parking requirements, yet are usually already priced. Removing minimum requirements will have zero impact upon these already priced parks.
And yes socialised vegetable distribution might be quite a good idea, considering we have a socialised healthcare and welfare system it would probably have a net saving on expenditure while improving the health of our people. (FYI only rabid ideologues think ‘socialism’ and ‘tax’ are a dirty word, it doesn’t offend my faith to consider such possibilities might be an option to look into)
If abolishing minimum parking requirements doesn’t reduce the supply of parking, then minimum parking requirements must have no real effect. I don’t believe that’s the case.
Yes it will reduce parking if there is an oversupply, it won’t if there isn’t. What it won’t do is create a scarcity of parking. Note that removing minimum parking requirements doesn’t involve setting a maximum parking requirement, it involves not have any requirement and letting developers respond to the market demand for parking.
But that is irrelevant seeing as most parking isn’t priced, especially where there is an oversupply. No longer having an oversupply of free parking has the same impact on rich and poor alike, i.e. very little. Even a reduction of supply in free parking is equally restricting to rich and poor alike. Price isn’t a factor if a price isn’t charged, so wealth isn’t a factor either!
Where price is a factor is in commercial parking lots and buildings, and they aren’t subject to minimum parking requirements anyway. Removing the minimum wont change a thing there. Already in the CBD of Auckland there are no minimum parking requirements, buisinesses are free to supply as much or as little parking as they desire.
If unpriced parking becomes scarce, how do you expect it to be rationed?
Swan, it would be rationed on time, just as it is now. Shopping malls tow or ticket your car if you stay longer than allowed. That’s a non-priced form of demand management, and it works well. Why would it stop working if minimum parking requirements were abolished?
Matt, Remember ‘now’ we live in a minimum parking standards world. Agreed time is one way to ration parking but it is still on the cheap/ low-price end of the spectrum, and obviously doesnt result in parkers paying for the cost of parking directly (they are still being subsidised).
Changing minimum parking requirements will obviously not change the equilibrium on parking overnight (or nearly as fast as road pricing might), perhaps it would take a decade or two for the full effects to be realised.
But, as an example, say I am a developer looking to build a retail/commercial/education/healthcare/residential development. Why would I build free parking at a significant cost (mainly in land) if I wasnt going ot make a return on it? Every other major part of the development will be priced. Tenants will be paying per square metre, so why not car park users?
“Why would I build free parking at a significant cost (mainly in land) if I wasnt going ot make a return on it? ”
Because if you were a developer you would probably need to include that parking in your development to sell or lease the properties. Currently you would have a hard time making a return on a property parcel that didn’t include an appropriate amount of parking, except perhaps downtown where you might get away without any. By the way it isn’t free, it is costed and included included in the price of the property, like all other parks of the development.
So yes parking is priced, by the people leasing it. Most offices or shops have a set amount of spaces included on the title, mall shops pay for it in their management dues, some stand alone places pay for it in terms of the initial land cost. You can see this in apartments, those without car parks are about $50k cheaper. People don’t pay to enter a shop or pay to use the shops parking, rather the shop owners pay for the facilities through their lease and the consumer pays them though the mark up on thier purchases. That doesn’t make any of it free though!
What minimum parking requirements are is the council legislating a minimum amount of carparking a developer has to provide (IIRC usually set at 80% of the maximum conceivable occupancy, in most cases vastly in excess of what gets used on any normal day), whether the developer needs it or not. Removing that minimum allows the developer to set the level of parking according to the market demands in the particular sector. Removing minimum parking requirements won’t create a scarcity, people will still have and be able to build as much parking as they like, and developers will in most cases still need to provide plenty of parking to sell or lease a property. If there is no demand for parking then they need not provide any. But if there is no demand then there won’t be scarcity.
All it does is stop (in some cases) regulating in an oversupply a glut of parking that goes unused 360 days a year, stop regulating in an excessive expenditure to waste land that could more productively used otherwise. If a mall or whoever think they need heaps of parking they will still be able to build it, nor would anyone be required to remove any parks. However others with too much parking might be able to use it for something more productive. Plus over time it is likely that we’ll shift toward non-car transport to particular centres and not having minimums mean businesses will be able to expand their floor area or customer base without being saddled with the requirement to provide x many new car parks for each 100m2 of shop or office space.
Ok you are of the opinion that minimum parking requirements and subsidized parking don’t have much real effect other than produce empty asphalt. I suggest you read Donald Shoup.
Forget not that the right wing have absolutely no problem with the SOCIALISM of our roading infrastructure, its construction, maintanence and use.
On a good day road users MIGHT contribute %60 of their fuel excise and RUC’s towards these roads. I wander where that other 40 comes from?
I don’t know who you consider to be right wing, but most of this thread is about the ACT party leader (classical liberal, described by NZ media as right wing), banging on about road pricing.
He’s indicated no desire to price in true costs, though. He only wants to price for usage – and only as far as is required to make it too expensive for anyone other than the very wealthy to drive in normal peak times – which still leaves society to bear the costs of all the other externalities. So, yes, even the head of NZ’s most “economic liberal” “mainstream” (very, very loosely mainstream, but still much more so than the LibertariNZ) party is still very much a socialist when it comes to road infrastructure.
If only the “very wealthy” can afford to drive, sounds like we won’t be needing or getting any more roads (or the negative externalities associated with them) then huh? I mean if a price that only allows the “very wealthy” to drive is still not paying for the externalties, then presumably the only option is to actually ban roads altogether. Is that what you are suggesting?
Don Brash described Len Brown’s Albany to airport rail vision as “dopey” in the Q and A. Part from that there weren’t too many surprises.
I’m sure I remember John Banks talking about an Albany to Airport line at the CBT’s AGM last year. What party is Banks in again?
Not to mention him lauding the benefits of a city rail tunnel in public, then quietly acknowledging he’d never expect it to actually happen.
I already wrote a blog post on this two days ago, feel free to read and join the discussion!
It does come from a libertarian urban planning student perspective, but adds some useful info.
One thing Colin Craig said was that while there is the a large chunk of funding coming from the government they will always be disagreements over what projects we should be building and that we need to sort that out by having only one transport agency doing things. The way he said it indicated that would support the bulk funding of AT to do this for all of Auckland but he also mentioned concerns he has with them being a CCO and not directly under political control but he never actually confirmed who should be doing things for Auckland.
I thought Gareth was clearly the most informed on issues while Shane Jones tried to be to clever for his own good and was a bit scattery.
When he ran for mayor, didn’t Colin Craig promote ULTra pods as the solution to Auckland’s transport woes?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ULTra_(rapid_transit)
http://www.ultraglobalprt.com/
Are they the same as the Sky Cabs thing Hugh Chapman is pushing?
http://www.skycabs.co.nz/
Hugh came along to a Meet the Candidates evening in Freemans Bay last week, his mate, NZ First candidate Alan Davies spent half of his allotted 8 minutes waxing lyrical about them…
Cue much laughter at the back of the room and “Monorail, Monorail” singing
One thing PRT advocates always seem to ignore is that even the designers of these things don’t think they can replace regular public transport, and expect them to be used as local circulators feeding to or from rail and bus. People like Mr Craig who suggest we drop all plans and build these pod systems across Auckland are proposing an application the system designers would never expect to work. For example, from the ULTra website:
“where can it be used?
From business campuses to city centers, the Ultra pod system avoids obstructive development in built-up areas through highly flexible construction options that offer almost limitless application possibilities and make it ideal for retrofitting into urban environments.
The system *complements existing forms of public transport* by providing an on-demand and direct service over a *localized area*. “
@ Josh. That depends how pessimistic you are about when the CBD rail link starts construction, doesn’t it?
Even if we set aside the funding issue the project will be lucky to start construction by 2014. Remember it has no consents and no final detailed design yet.