Kyoda. I'm Georgina Campbell in for Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a daily podcast presented by the New Zealand Herald. The government has announced a record thirty two point nine billion dollar investment in New Zealand's transport network over the next three years through the National Land Transport Program. The big winner is new roads and the
big loser is walking in cycling improvements. So what does this mean for congestion and emissions in our biggest cities and will a new national infrastructure pipeline prevent these roads being scuppered by future governments. Today on the Front Page we talk to Auckland University Senior lecturer in Urban Planning, Tim Welch to bring us up to speed. Tim, can you please run us through what the government has announced this week.
Sure. This is the National Land Transportation Program or in LTP,
and it's a program that's announced every three years. It can be six years by legislation, but traditionally our government does this every three years and it's really forms a budget for what we expect to spend over the next three years on anything from roads to public transport to walking and cycling, so anything that moves over land falls within this purview, and the government has allocated about thirty two point nine billion dollars over the next three years for this type of transportation.
So what is in that thirty two point nine billion dollars. Who are the winners and who are the losers?
Yeah, I mean, if we break it down, the biggest amount of money that we're spending is going to roads, and a lot of that is either what Simeon Brown is calling pothole prevention. We used to call it just road maintenance. A huge chunk of the funding goes there, and out of that also is nearly eight billion dollars for an old program that keeps kind of coming back to life every few decades, which is the Roads of National Significance, which is really a funding package to try
to bring more highways across the nation. There are some funds allocated to things that aren't roads, of course, there's six point eight billion dollars roughly going to public transportation, walking and cycling. But what this budget does not do, or this plan doesn't do, is bring us anything new really in anything, especially in public transport. Though really what this does is kind of fund existing programs and make sure that our existing public transport, whether it's rail or bus,
continues to operate from a walking and cycling perspective. It's only going to fund projects that are already in the pipeline, and specifically, which is really unusual for something like the NLTP, it states that there won't be any more cycling or walking projects. And this is really unusual because even national governments prior to this one have allocated funding for more walking and cycling and have boosted public transport to some degree as well.
Getting transport back to basics is one of the key reasons why Kiwi's voted for this government. They're sick of the potholes plaguing our roads. They'll fed up with the phantom projects that cost a fortune but never got off the ground. And they're tied of the speed bumps, planter boxes and cycleways that made going about their day to day lives all the more difficult.
So roads are clearly the big winner in your view. Do you think the government has got that balance right?
This isn't a balance that I mean we expected with this new government. They kind of made it clear that roads would be a priority, so it's not unexpected, but the level to which roads are funded and the expense of other modes is a bit of a surprise. It kind of goes contrary to what most other countries are doing. A lot of countries and cities are really focused on building up alternatives to driving, knowing that building one more road or one more highway isn't going to relieve congestion.
It's only going to increase demand for more driving over the years and lead to further congestion. So really the flow of budgeting and transportation across the globe has been to balance out other public transport, walking, cycling, with road infrastructure. This budget looks like something that we would have built in or we would have budgeted for in the nineteen sixties nineteen fifties.
Does that concern you the given climate change?
Yeah, I certainly. Anytime we're looking at more roads, and like I said, we're looking at more driving as a result, and that clearly leads to higher levels of emissions. It's this idea of induced demands. So when we add more road space, it makes a trip seem cheaper in terms of your time use, so it encourages more people to do it more often, and as a result, we have more driving, more congestion, and these effects happen rather quickly. It's not like a ten to twenty year time horizon.
When this happens, it happens within months to years of the construction finishing. And so certainly we'll have more cars on the road, more traffic, and more pollution, especially as the previously ended its focus on encouraging more electric vehicles, so we'll have more vehicles consuming fossil fuels, producing emissions and sitting in traffic for the foreseeable future of the next decade at least.
What did you make of Transport Minister Samine Brown's comments that he thinks Kiwi's are sick and tired of the amount of money going into things like psychle ways for example.
This really reflects something we often call a windshield bias, and so what it really is telling him us is that when you typically conduct all your travel driving and looking through a windshield, you tend to see everything from the perspective of a driver. And the another old saying is you know, if you as someone who has a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So the perspective is that you know if you see if you're driving and you see people on a bike. You can't really relate to
them very well. There's no empathy for that, and everything's kind of framed in the idea that nobody else wants this infrastructure because it's just slowing everyone else down. The reality is that walking and cycling are hugely important to our cities. Without that infrastructure, our cities would be at
a complete standstill. In Auckland alone are very limited cycle ways and shared paths carry over three million cycle trips a year, and if those were all converted to cars, this is our roads just wouldn't move at all.
And it's quite a political statement. Simeon Brown wouldn't be saying that unless he thought people would like to hear that. So how do you change that perspective or encourage more people into active modes of transport or is driving just what people want?
It's a really difficult position. And so whenever something like walking in cycling or public transport is put into the frame of a culture war, it makes it really difficult to make progress on these really important modes. And it's easy for politicians to say that people don't want it and to build roads because cutting ribbons is on roads or announcing that new roads will be built, or that you'll spend less time in your car is always something that gets headlines and it provides a few votes, But
the reality is that we need these other modes. They're just part of functioning as a city. And it's unfortunate that it's kind of become part of political fodder that we would cut cycle ways and walking cycling and even limit our funding on public transport, when in reality they do a lot of the heavy lifting to keep our cities moving and they're really a critical component. So the
rhetoric is really unfortunate. It'd be good to go back to a time when public transport and walking cycling investments didn't make the news. They just were quietly funded and were an important part of our total transportation package.
You have written about how all these billions of dollars that the government has gone to spend in the next three years won't actually just buy and kind of measure up new highways. Can you elaborate on that.
Yeah, we were allocating seven billion dollars to these roads of national significance and another billion dollars in contingency funding to try to speed up that planning process. But that eight billion dollars really is just going to lay the initial groundwork for building these roads, so there's a lot of work that had to go into it, including securing routes and right away purchasing property, doing planning, writing business cases.
So most of this money is really just going to go to those stages, and a lot of that will go into the pockets of consulting firms that do this on a regular basis. And what people won't see drivers or cyclists or people on public transport, will be any
progress towards relieving congestion. And many of the projects aren't even slated to begin construction until well after this plan ends in t and twenty seven, some of them not even until twenty twenty nine at the earliest, so we won't see a significant movement here in building roads, but we will see a significant spend towards planning these roads.
So we're spending a lot of money that could be used for other things with immediate impact going towards the idea of roads that likely won't even be built in the long run anyway.
Labour's transport spokesperson, tonguing You to Kenny, is unimpressed the.
Increased levels of driver's license fees at are coming in the driver's text that will kick in from the start of next year. The planned increases to fuel excise from twenty twenty seven. This is a government that is simply hypocritical and lumping additional costs onto road users.
Julie and Genter from the Greens says local roads account for most trips and the balance of the funding is all wrong.
New Zealand does have a bit of a track record of infrastructure projects being scuppered by future governments. For example, this government has axed Auckland light rail and let's get Wellington moving. Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop says workers underway to develop this thirty year national Infrastructure pipeline in the hope that political consensus can be built on an enduring list
of priorities. Does that mean that these new state highways that the government has promised, you know as sort of future proof, and that they can't just be scuppered by you know, maybe a more leaf leaning future government.
Well, it's an interesting idea, but there's nothing really that locks us into these roads to be built, you know the future. You know, National actually National Infrastructure Agency is supposed to make it easier to start to build facilities like roads and attract private investment. But really there's no evidence that a future government wouldn't be able to change that,
and it's just not the way funding works. We could find somebody that will privately fund an entire road and then build it, but that's that's typically not the case. There's usually a high amount of public funding that goes into that. And anytime there's public funding, there's the opportunity for the government to change its plans. And we've seen with things like Let's get Moving, Wellington Moving and the
Auckland light Rail, that spending can occur. We can start to plan and we can start to build a little bit, and political winds do change and projects still come to an end. So there's nothing about these new projects or Bishop's agency that would safeguard these road projects from never being canceled.
Green Party Transport spokeswoman Julian Gender has also drawn attention to another problem that these roads could run into, and that's a graph in this recent National Land Transport Plan which shows n zta's revenue mainly from fuel taxes and road user charges, basically that it will fall slate short of its estimated expenditure. So does the government have a massive hole in its transport plane.
Yeah, by current calculations, by twenty thirty, we're looking about a six billion dollars shortfall because of this massive spind up for these additional roads. And the issue really is that we have we rely on funding for our transportation system from fuel tax is one of the primary sources of revenue, but the amount that we are receiving in that revenue has been falling over the years because people have more efficient vehicles, so they're using less fuel for
every trip they take. There's the introduction, of course of electric vehicles, which have reduced demand, and the fact that we haven't increased the fuel tax in several years and four years since twenty twenty. At the same time we've seen a huge ramp up of inflation. So you know what we pay now about seventy cents per liter from twenty twenty on, should have been raised to about eighty six eighty seven cents now if we wanted to keep
up with the level of revenue. So we've lost about thirteen and a half cents in value for every leader of fuel that we sell, and that has a huge impact on what we can spend and what we plan to take on in the future, and as a result, we're seeing these huge deficits coming into the future. And the only way that we're going to be able to plug that hole is by increasing our road user charges or significantly increasing fuel tax, both of which are pretty politically unfriendly.
Transport Texas by stealth coming road tolls, vehicle licensing, road user charges are all set to increase over the next three years.
The first thing we did was we stopped the petrol tech increases which the last government had been planning. We said, no, that's not right when New Zealanders have been struggling through a cost of living crisis, and we've postponed those out to twenty twenty seven. So that's a really significant backdrop.
But what we've also.
Heard from New Zealanders loud and clear is they want proper highways, they want proper public transport projects, and they recognize that in some cases paying a small toll will mean that happens a lot quicker.
And I guess the government could help plug that with Crown funding, but the budgets are looking pretty tight for the next few years, right there's not a lot of room to move.
Well. Unfortunately, well there is a huge budget crunch. That's essentially what the plan is telling us now is that we are going to plug this hole with crown funding. Some of it will be Crown grants, so money. The government gives about three billion there and then another three billion in Crown loans. So just if we go back even five six years ago, our transport plans didn't require much,
if any, Crown funding. It was all supposed to be essentially self funded through the fuel tax and through road user charges and a few other sources of revenue. But now if we look at the budget coming forward again, it was like almost six billion dollars in Crown funding. So we're actually relying more and more on rates pain than we were in the past ever in the past. So not people just driving, but people who are pain rates are now subsidizing our roads to a massive degree.
And finally, tim how do you think the government will measure the success of its plan.
It's a good question. We don't have a lot of information on that yet. The idea, the objective of these plans for the last couple iterations has been reducing congestion. Unfortun only none of the investments really are aimed at doing that and the idea is there, but the reality of things I conduce demand, which we've known about for seventy years or more, really mute any kind of impact
we'd have on congestion from these roads. So it's really hard to say what the measure of success would be other than having a plan, you know, something on paper that says these roads will be built. That's about all we can expect at this point and maintaining the status
quo for walking and cycling in public transport. But you know, for looking at this from a business angle, it's hard to see any KPIs that would really come out of this investment that would that would be a surefire way to say it's a success or not.
Thanks so much for joining us, Tim, that's set for this episode of The Front Page. You can read more about today's stories and extincts of news coverage at inzipherld dot co dot inzet. The Front Page is produced by Ethan Sills. Dan Goodwin is the sound engineer. I'm Georgina Campbell. Subscribe to the Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever it you get your podcasts, and tune in tomorrow for another look behind the headlines.