“I reckon Mayor Brown’s being taken for a bit of a ride with this.”
Late last year, Mayor Wayne Brown and former Minister of Transport (and still Minister for Auckland) Simeon Brown announced the gutting of Auckland Transport. The minister called it “a great day for Auckland”.
Like Frankenstein but in reverse, AT will scoop out its own brains – the policy and planning functions – and hand them to council. By the time the Local Government (Auckland Council) (Transport Governance) Amendment Bill becomes law next year, AT will be a husk, without the ability to plan so much as a speed bump. It will be the council’s creature, overseeing public transport, but not the roads buses run on.
Few Aucklanders who drive, walk, pedal or chase trains, buses and ferries will mourn the dismemberment of AT, one of the last of the super city’s original seven ‘substantive’ council-controlled organisations (CCOs).
In a recent piece in Newsroom, Tim Murphy reviewed the fall of the once-mighty CCOs, the darling of supercity super-booster Rodney Hide. The former Act leader spent years saying stuff like this: “(CCOs) were controversial but have proved their worth in getting good people running critical organisations who would not otherwise be attracted to council work… They have enabled the council to focus on governance and strategic direction and not get bogged down in management.”
‘Management’, it turned out, really meant control. The CCOs were a failure – fifteen years after the big amalgamation in 2010, only 2.5 out of the original seven still exist, in Murphy’s reckoning. (The ‘half’ is the shrivelled AT.)
AT was an ideologically-driven fantasy which never made practical sense. To quote Mayor Brown: “Auckland Transport costs around one and a half billion dollars a year to run, while transport capital investment represents more than a third of the council’s 10-year budget. But under the existing law we don’t get to tell AT what to do. The bill finally makes it clear that AT should do what council tells it to do and hands power back to the people’s elected representatives.”
Like a dumb, flame-retardant robot, AT had proven resistant to the pleas of elderly who wanted their bus stops back, the residents complaining about parking spots effectively blocking their driveways, the fiery editorials, the corrosive mayoral disdain. In the words of New Zealand Herald columnist Simon Wilson, AT was “inefficient, resistant to council policy and unable to build strong relations with local communities”.
This does not mean that Auckland’s new transport system will work. Wilson is unconvinced, calling it “government over-reach”.
Under the new rules, the Auckland Regional Transport Committee (RTC) will oversee arterial roads and the city centre. The government gets to appoint three of its six voting members, and (along with the mayor), choose the chairperson. It is the minister, not the mayor, who signs-off on the RTC’s 30-year transport plan.
“This isn’t the council getting more power, it’s the government getting to sit alongside the council in its planning,” warns Wilson. “No other local authority in the country has the government in the room with them doing this. If that binds the government to the decisions of the committee, it will indeed mean more power for Auckland. But there’s no suggestion the committee will control the purse strings. That’s where the real power lies and it will mostly remain in Wellington.
“I reckon Mayor Brown’s being taken for a bit of a ride with this.”
Transport blogger Matt Lowrie, like Wilson, worries about the new split between buses and roads, looking to London’s public transport entity for a comparison. Like AT, Transport for London (TFL) controls city buses. Unlike AT, they also control the arterial roads (and thus, bus lanes). TFL controls the entire underground, overground, and crossrail rail services and infrastructure in London, whereas AT has to work with KiwiRail.
Simeon Brown seems to think that local boards, given free reign, will deliriously tear up their cycleways. (What is it with him and cycleways?) This was not the impression I got from listening to candidates at The Great Waiheke Radio Electorate Candidates Debate at Artworks Theatre on Monday. Several were cyclists, used to dodging cars on narrow Waiheke roads. One even said that he couldn’t wait to use the new rules to improve the safety of island roads for drivers, pedestrians and the cyclists who visit and live here. As AT routinely underspent its cycleway budget, the new system might even see more cycleways across Auckland, not less.
But will local boards receive the help they need to deal with the coming torrent of roading decisions? Decisions once dealt with by an army of faceless roundabout experts? Decisions which risk the special kind of loathing reserved for those who put a bus stop in the wrong place? While elected local boards have new powers under the act, they also carry the can for every pothole – just like the old Waiheke Road Board.
Transport is going to be big workload for our incoming local board. As Wilson says, “suddenly, there’s a whole lot more at stake.”
• Jenny Nicholls
Your local news providers are busy keeping you informed. Check out your weekly issues of Gulf News’ for our series of candidate Q&As, and candidate interviews on Waiheke Radio, waihekeradio.org.nz
