What do cyclists, pedestrians and South Islanders have in common? Being largely ignored in the government’s new National Land Transport Plan, of course.
The three-year $32.9 billion programme, announced earlier this week by Transport Minister Simeon Brown, is less of a "land transport" plan and more of a "cars and trucks" scheme. There’s certainly not much there for anything other than vehicles with four or more wheels which run on state highways.
Unsurprisingly, there is very little in it for the South Island, in terms of either new or unexpected funding for projects.
These are two activities which not only keep New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions lower than they otherwise would be but also improve the nation’s health and fitness.
In fact, it could be said the minister has absolutely no truck with such frivolity and if anything appears to have a level of paranoia about cycling infrastructure in particular.
Launching the transport plan, Mr Brown made it crystal clear there was less money being disbursed for cycleways — "I think New Zealanders are sick and tired of the amount of money going into cycleways", he added.
That somewhat hostile attitude was encapsulated brilliantly in an Emmerson cartoon in The New Zealand Herald, showing a somewhat flummoxed Mr Brown accidentally driving his car down a cycleway and muttering: "And that’s another thing we have to fix, these lanes are far too narrow."
We’re not sure where such antipathy to cycling and cyclists comes from. It may just be that, in the high-pace, ultra-productive, go-go-go world the government wants New Zealand to be, anyone taking time to smell the roses is considered a stumbling block to such progress. There’s no funding for speed bumps either.
It wasn’t just Minister Brown who was in the spotlight on transport issues this week. His Auckland mayor namesake, Wayne Brown, was busy making stupid and ignorant comments about the Dunedin hospital rebuild.
According to the feckless Mayor Brown, Dunedin folk would rather have a new Ford Ranger than a new hospital. Perhaps the biggest surprise here is that he even knows there is a place called Dunedin?
Such a good example of Auckland-centric thinking brings us back to the government’s "cars and trucks plan", which is, let’s face it, largely focused on our largest city and the upper half of the North Island.
It’s true of course that a successful Auckland means a successful New Zealand. But Mr Brown’s blueprint strongly reflects the impression that this government really does not want to bother with the South Island, that what lies beyond Wellington and Cook Strait is a step too far.
This seems to apply to the ferries too. Never break up by text is the sage advice. However, this is just what government officials did late last year to their South Korean counterparts over the scrapping of the plans for two new Interislander ferries.
An Official Information Act request from RNZ disclosed that our Korean ambassador Dawn Bennet texted high-level official Seo Min-jung twice about the government’s project-scuppering decision, the second time less than half an hour before Finance Minister Nicola Willis publicly announced no further funding would be made available.
Since then, there have been several incidents involving the ferries which have broken the link between islands and jeopardised the effective operation of what is actually State Highway 1 across Cook Strait.
Dunedin city councillor Jim O’Malley picked up on the government’s apparent transport bias towards the North Island, saying successive administrations had underfunded South Island roads but that this latest announcement seemed even more egregious.
Billions of dollars of pothole-repair funding would help in the South, but there were other urgent safety improvements needed around southern cities, he said.
With funding also cut for rail, it’s hard to get past the feeling this government is awestruck by the trucks which thrash their way across our highways.
The bigger the rig, the better, as far as they are concerned. Cyclists and pedestrians can go whistle Dixie.
It’s such a short-sighted approach.
