Friday flashback: remember the oil crisis and carless days?

Friday, 20 September 2019

We've had something of a mini oil crisis this month.

But that hardly registers next to the global crises of the 1970s, which culminated in a strange and ineffective stress attack in New Zealand that we called 'carless days'.

For those who weren't around in the heady days of Prime Minister Robert Muldoon and the Holden Kingswood, let's recap.

The first big global oil crisis came in 1973-4, when the Organisation of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) instituted an oil embargo against countries it perceived as supporting Israel.

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The second happened in 1978-9 in the aftermath of the Iranian revolution. It caused another global panic over the supply and price of oil.

The NZ Government's response was to introduce carless days on July 30, 1979 in an effort to reduce NZ's national petrol consumption.

Vehicle owners had to pick a day of the week that they could do without their wheels. It applied to any vehicle weighing less than 1995kg (4400lb in the old money). So many luxury SUVs circa-2019 would have escaped the ban…

As a further measure, the open-road speed limit was reduced to 80kmh.

Every car had to carry a special sticker on the windscreen indicating the day of the week it was supposed to be parked up.

There were different coloured stickers for each day, to make offenders easier to spot.

The first person to be charged with breaking the carless day law was Gordon Marks of Christchurch. In October 1979 he was at a party and decided to have a sleep before heading home. He woke at 3.45am and drove his car, forgetting that he was technically on his carless day.

He was fined $50 out of a possible $400.

The carless day programme was not a huge success. There were many exemptions (about 15 per cent of vehicles when the scheme was launched, according to a Wellington Evening Post article of the time) including taxis, government vehicles, the armed forces and farm transport.

To apply for an exemption, car owners had to answer yes/no to four questions:

'(I) Is public transport (other than taxis) to and from your place of work readily available, in relation to your starting and finishing times, on your carless day?

(2) Is another family vehicle available?

(3) Could you travel to and from work with a fellow employee, friend, or neighbour on your carless day

(4) Does your employer provide you with transport?

Those who can answered no to all four questions were entitled to an exemption sticker. If the answer to one or more questions was yes, an application could still be made to the Ministry of Energy.

A contemporary 'Politics in Action' piece by journalist Miles Wallace that's been much-circulated over the past four decades prompts Minister of Energy Bill Birch to stop playing around with carless days, highlighting the fact that exemptions have risen to 25 per cent of vehicles and port take-off figures show that NZ is only using four per cent less petrol than the previous year: 'And this is the worst point of carless days - it often wastes petrol.

'People drive for miles to get an exemption form. Or they take taxis which run a double distance. Or they get a friend to drive them…'

Birch always maintained that it was a temporary solution to try and smooth out oil supply to consumers and avoid the more extreme approach of rationing.

The scheme was suspended on 13 May 1980, less than a year after it started, with a warning that it could be reinstituted at any time.

It was not the end of oil supply and price concerns by any stretch, but carless days never came back. The 80kmh speed limit did stick around, however.