AT is to be gutted

A big announcement was made yesterday about the future of Auckland Transport. The Government announced reform of AT, effectively conceding that the behemouth National created in 2010 was the wrong structure.

The Royal Commission on Auckland Governance report which preceded the super city recommended that there be four local councils with control over local roads and a new CCO for transport with responsibilities for regional transport, including public transport, as well as for strategic planning and for regional arterial roads as well as oversight over local roads.

But the Government decided on the recommendation of then Minister Steven Joyce that the whole transport system should be handed over to AT. Business interests preferred this option but the Auckland Regional Council and various local authorities preferred that an elected body had decision making power.

Joyce sided with business interests’ preference.

Complaints about AT have been present over many years. It was too big, too corporate like and democratic input into decision making was poor.

It achieved some good. The City Rail Link is nearing completion. The completion of double tracking and improvements to the rail system have been handled satisfactorily and who knows, if it had been left with greater control over Light Rail things might have been different.

But it also was indifferent to local desires and expectations and had a heavily overengineered approach to issues which could have been dealt with more cheaply and subtly.

AT’s basic problem is that it was underfunded.

Yesterday in the stand up Simeon Brown made mention of the Auckland Transport Alignment Project which National established in 2016. He did not mention that ATAP was only meant to address congestion, that it had a rather large unfunded hole in it, initially estimated at $4 billion that ballooned by a further $1.9 billion in 2017, or that a fifth of the projects were not funded.  If you want to make sure that a transport entity does not live up to expectations then underfunding it is a sure fire way of doing so.

Labour introduced the power for Auckland to impose a Regional Fuel tax which it did. This tax combined with NZTA subsidies meant that the gap was filled. And despite rhetoric to the contrary only $0.9 billion of the total of $28 Billion was going to be spent on walking and cycling.

National’s removal of the Regional Fuel Tax and its refocus on roads has meant that the city’s plans had to be completely rewritten.

My main criticism of AT has been that the Council has decided some time ago via the Transport Emissions Reduction Pathway to cut transport emissions by 64% by 2030 by meeting agressive targets for walking and cycling and public transport but even now appears to have given up. But again it does not have the funding to achieve this even if it had the will to do so.

There are a couple of twists to the announcement. As pointed out by Greater Auckland the city could be looking at a hotch potch development of walkways and cycleways depending on the flavour of the individual local board. And building cycleways or other transport infrastructure that cross local board boundaries could become very tricky.

And the new Auckland Regional Transport Committee will have half of its members appointed by the Minister. I don’t know if this level of control from Wellington is appropriate and given the Minister’s world view this fills me with concern.

For instance Greater Wellington’s Transport Committee is made up of six Councillors and 6 mana whenua appointees.

The announcement is something of a boon to current Mayor Wayne Brown whose recently released Mayoral Annual Plan proposal focussed heavily on Council controlled organisation reform. With election year around the corner this gives him another chance to claim he has achieved something.

Overall there is some good and some bad in what has been announced. The biggest problem is that the Auckland region will not be resourced properly to commit to the ATAP goals of making the city more sustainable. At a time when the need to be sustainable has never been clearer.