Guest Post: User Pays or Carbon Tax?
This is a Guest Post by regular commenter Patrick Reynolds.
In 2007 the Transport Minister Labour’s Annette King formalised NZ’s excise tax on petrol as a hypothecated tax for the National Land Transport Fund. This means that the tax is only to be used for funding transport.…
8 Comments A curious Herald editorial
I should be jumping for joy today over an editorial in the NZ Herald today that’s highly critical of Steven Joyce. But I’m just not quite sure about what it’s really trying to achieve by telling Joyce to “butt out” of the congestion charging issue.…
Time-of-use road pricing – Taking the next step, voluntarily!
Recent posts (here, here, and here) have touched on the issue of time-of-use road pricing. In this post I will briefly examine its merits, before suggesting a strategy for how it might be implemented in a way that overcomes it’s main disadvantages. …
Funding the big transport projects
An article in today’s NZ Herald notes an important discussion at an Auckland Council meeting yesterday over their 10 year funding plan – and in particular what was said about funding options for transport projects in Auckland – including the City Rail Link.…
Making congestion charging politically feasible
Transport economists and planners have long argued that the only way to really solve traffic congestion is through some form of road pricing, or as it is commonly known – congestion charging. The theory behind it is simple: congestion is the result of there being excess demand for road space in comparison to the level of ‘supply’ that exists.…
Congestion Pricing
Since I wrote a post about congestion pricing/charging a week or so ago, a post has emerged on the excellent Human Transit blog, and Streetfilms have also put together a video on the issue: As I noted in my previous post, I’m somewhat agnostic about congestion pricing.…
Congestion charging back on the cards?
One aspect of the government’s papers on the Auckland Spatial Plan that has been picked up by the NZ Herald today is the suggestion that some sort of congestion charging mechanism be looked at again as a way of funding Auckland’s future transport requirements:
A paper released by Local Government Minister Rodney Hide before Auckland’s first spatial plan due out in 11 days suggests raising revenue by charging motorists to drive around the Super City at peak times.…
Is congestion pricing feasible for Auckland?
Every time you fill up your car with petrol a fairly significant amount of that cost is petrol tax – although by international standards we actually tax our petrol quite lightly. Petrol tax is something of a road-user charge, as it’s spent on transport activities to make life better for you as a road-user (at the moment it can’t be spent on rail infrastructure even though such projects create significant road-user benefits, but that’s a whole different argument).…
How should we fund transport?
The excellent Captain Transit blog has a very interesting post on the fundamental question that all those interested in transport need to have a good think about – what is the best way to fund improvements, maintenance and upgrades to transport infrastructure.…
Embracing Congestion
In a few posts recently I have hinted at the need for us to fundamentally re-evaluate the way we approach transport policy and planning. Just quickly I will briefly summarise a few posts I have made previously on the issue: From reading David Owen’s excellent book “Green Metropolis“, I noted the ecological disadvantages of reducing congestion, because making driving easier just encourages people to drive more – and as a result both pump out CO2 emissions and other pollution from their vehicles as well as generally living in unsustainable low-density sprawl.…
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