Canterbury’s missing transport billions
Wednesday, 4 September 2024
Despite “record” transport funding, Canterbury has been left billions of dollars short by successive governments, Charlie Mitchell finds.
ANALYSIS: If you kept track of every kilometre travelled by all of New Zealand’s vehicles for a decade, how much distance do you think they’d cover?
It’s an obscure question, but there is an answer: Around 493 billion kilometres, equivalent to over 100 trips to Neptune and back.
We have this metric — vehicle kilometres travelled (VKT) — because it underpins how national transport funding is allocated.
The government releases its National Land Transport Programme (NLTP) every few years. It outlines all the transport projects the NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi (NZTA) expects to fund over the next three years, primarily with money from the National Land Transport Fund (NLTF).
This fund mainly comes from fuel taxes and road user charges. Put simply: The more you drive, the more you pay into the fund.
This money is redistributed around the country for road maintenance, public transport, new state highways, and walking and cycle infrastructure. (Because the fund is failing to keep up with planned spending, it is now being topped up with general government spending. The Government has signalled an overhaul of this funding system).
Unsurprisingly, politicians of all stripes delight in announcing the planned projects every few years. This week’s announcement of the next three years of projects was no exception.
“Christchurch is the economic powerhouse of the South Island, and transport is a critical enabler for economic growth and productivity,” Transport Minister Simeon Brown said in a press release this week.
Brown said that Canterbury would receive $1.8b in transport funding for the 2024-27 period, with significant projects including the long-promised Woodend Bypass. He correctly noted this was a record, and slightly more than the previous high of $1.7b in 2018 (if we don’t include inflation).
What Brown neglected to mention, however, is that this was the lowest per capita funding of all 13 regions. Canterbury, the region with the second largest population, the second largest GDP, and the longest roading network, is expected to receive proportionally less than what it puts in.
Let me explain why.
It partly goes back to the VKT. Of the 493 billion kilometres travelled in the 2010s, 67 billion were in Canterbury. That’s around 14% of the national total.
For comparison, the Wellington region — centring on a densely populated city with adequate public transport — made up 8% of the national total. They simply drive less, for understandable reasons.
The figures won’t be exact, but these percentages will roughly correlate to each region’s contribution to the NLTF.
One might expect this is accounted for when that money is redistributed. If Cantabrians are putting in 14% of the funding, the region might expect around 14% of the pot. But data suggests the opposite is true: Not only does Canterbury get less than what its population contributes, it also gets significantly less than the national average.
This is not new. The figures for the 2021-24 projected spending, released under the previous government, were similar: Canterbury ranked second to last of the regions, around half the national per capita average. The approach is bipartisan.
The discrepancy becomes particularly notable when compared to the Wellington region, the closest in population size. Since 2018, forecast investments through the NLTP were valued at $8.3b, compared to Canterbury’s $4.7b.
It makes little sense on paper. Canterbury has more people and more roads. In that same period, it overtook Wellington as the second largest regional GDP, had triple the population growth, and consented more than double the number of new dwellings. Wellington already has mass rapid transit (MRT), while Christchurch is the largest city in Australasia without it. There is a clear case for investment.
And yet, funding for the two regions is almost exactly the opposite of what one might expect. Wellington does 8% of the driving, but gets around 14% of the funding; Canterbury does 14% of the driving, but gets around 8% of the funding. It is as if an administrative error has mixed up the two regions.
While tempting to suspect a conspiracy — politicians and public service workers are often stuck in Wellington traffic, after all, hence the appeal of a proposed mega-tunnel conveniently connecting the airport to the area around Parliament — there are other explanations for the discrepancy.
Wellington has difficult topography, and Canterbury had some of its roads replaced after the earthquakes — noting that repairs are not the same as upgrades.
There’s another reason, too.
Around 40% of the forecast $3.3b spending in Wellington is for public transport — almost as much as Canterbury’s total transport funding. A regional summary released this week notes that “strong uptake” of Wellington’s public transport means it is “at capacity” and requires “ongoing investment”. It is getting more funding because it is successful.
Similar is true in Auckland: 45% of forecast spending is for public transport. Canterbury’s is less than 20%, which appears to include upgrades to Halswell Road, where new bus lanes are just one component of the project.
What does this all mean? If Canterbury had received transport investment in line with its approximate contribution to the NLTF — or even its share of the population — it would have received more than $3b extra since 2018. That is close to the estimated $4b cost of a light rail system proposed in a business case last year, for example.
Local politicians have made this argument, to no avail. Last year, the Canterbury Mayoral Forum said Canterbury’s transport funding should be doubled. It clearly fell on deaf ears.
With a shake-up of transport funding on the cards in the future, change is possible. Until then, Cantabrians can rest satisfied that they are indeed funding public transport improvements, including mass rapid transit. They’re just doing it for other cities, on another island.