Auckland congestion charge: Business tells council to get cracking
Thursday, 3 December 2020
A major business group wants the Auckland Council to lead the early introduction of congestion charging on city roads.
The Employers and Manufacturers Association (EMA) said the council should convince the public about the proposed scheme, which was unveiled on Monday and included a charge of up to $3.50 for motorists to enter the city centre at peak times.
Government and council officials who spent four years exploring ways to reduce the number of trips or shift them off-peak had recommended the scheme start in 2025, even though technically it could be sooner.
“If you don’t lead the way, the way you did with the City Rail Link, we’ll still be talking in four, five or 10 years’ time,” the EMA’s head of advocacy and strategy, Alan McDonald, told the council’s planning committee on Thursday.
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Auckland mayor Phil Goff said the scheme had his “qualified support” after its release on Monday.
McDonald said the EMA and others had commissioned a report in 2017 that showed congestion then cost Auckland $1.2 billion a year and that the business view on congestion charging was way ahead of the council's.
“The timing of the introduction is the key thing, and that is a matter of political will,” he said.
The council has given the green light to officials to devise what the next stage of the project would look like, and to detail how the public would be consulted and how social impacts might be countered.
The officials produced a detailed proposal focused on reducing traffic and pollution as a basis for public discussion and political support.
They recommended a 2025 start for the first phase in Auckland’s CBD. This would follow the opening of the City Rail Link, which will make public transport a more attractive option.
Two further phases would extend first to central and northern Auckland, and from 2028 to the west and south.
Goff and councillors Cathy Casey and Efeso Collins questioned how the impacts on low-income workers would be dealt with.
The chairman of the planning committee, councillor Chris Darby, said any scheme needed to focus on reducing congestion and not on raising money.
“We need to give the public certainty that we won’t be like London and become a revenue-gathering scheme. In the original terms of reference, demand management was the clear purpose,” Darby said.
Darby said Aucklanders were already burdened by paying for multibillion-dollar transport infrastructure, and demand management was the way of breaking out of that spiral of spending.
“It will be an uncomfortable ride – we need to show some spine,” he said.
The officials’ report made clear that even after the completion of all agreed road and public transport projects over the coming decades, congestion would be worse than today if habits did not change.
Climate change lobbyist Paul Winton has also done research suggesting that all the transport projects currently planned would, on their own, have little impact on Auckland’s greenhouse gas emissions.
The Auckland Council is committed to halving emissions by 2030 and being net zero by 2050, with transport needing to make the biggest contribution to those goals.
Auckland Transport deputy chairman Wayne Donnelly said the council-controlled organisation's board had on Tuesday endorsed the report’s findings and approved further work on developing it.
Donnelly urged the introduction to coincide with the completion of major public transport investments.
“We have got massive investments coming on stream in four to five years. If we miss that opportunity, we could wait decades for another – to make a case to our community that this is a good thing to do,” he said.
Officials will report quarterly to the committee on the next stage of developing a congestion charging scheme.