Dom Post on Auckland
The Dom Post Editorial today:
The mayoral war of words that greeted the report of the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance and the Government’s swift response to it, has merely proved the commissioners’ implied message that their cities comprise a sprawling metropolis, the councils of which prefer to work in silos, believe one community is superior to the others and that, given the opportunity, mayors would rather engage in verbal battle than unite to secure a structure that would benefit most of those they purport to represent.
Indeed the Mayors have proven the case for change.
To their credit, Auckland City’s John Banks and Waitakere’s Bob Harvey seem to have glimpsed what the commission was trying to achieve when its three members delivered their report late last month. North Shore Mayor Andrew Williams and his Manukau counterpart, Len Brown, seem unable, however, to see beyond the prospect that their mayoral chains will have to be stowed for good after the next local body election, possibly now two years away.
I would agree that Harvey has been constructive.
The kerfuffle with which the four mayors responded to the Government’s post-commission plans simply underlines why much of the rest of New Zealand regards their politics as toxic and why reorganisation of local government north of the Bombay Hills is urgent.
You won’t get integrated public transport and a proper roading strategy until you have one Council.
Mr Banks is itching to be mayor of an Auckland “supercity” and has tried, unsuccessfully, to remain above the fray. But he is at odds with the leftist minority on his council and certainly with his North Shore counterpart, who has an idiosyncratic approach to local governance.
Heh that is a euphemism.
April 22nd, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Bob Harvey constructive? Not according to Whaleoil this morning.
http://www.whaleoil.co.nz/content/mad-mayor-goes-wild-waitakere
Harvey wrote a letter to the Herald describing the Auckland Regional Council as “dorking democracy”.
Mind you, Harvey is the most long serving politician in the region, so that counts as some “elder statesman” gravitas on local government I guess.
April 22nd, 2009 at 1:57 pm
John Banks for Mayor.
Go Banksie!!
April 22nd, 2009 at 2:02 pm
“You won’t get integrated public transport and a proper roading strategy until you have one Council.”
I see no evidence for that statement. There have been numerous specialist umbrella bodies devoted to Auckland’s roading and transport management and there is no rational reason to believe that a bunch of newly-elected super city prima donnas will do anything but further muddy the waters.
Give us an objective test so that we can judge in two year’s time whether this change has succeeded or failed.
April 22nd, 2009 at 4:47 pm
I hope Bob Harvey gets it. He’s much more fun than Banks, and it would annoy his wife, Lady Barbara, enormously. That’s always a good thing.
April 22nd, 2009 at 5:14 pm
I agree with DPF on transport issues. Having one regional transport agency in charge of almost everything (except the railway lines and the motorways) is going to be a significant improvement for transport.
Although, in saying that, we’d almost have integrated ticketing being rolled out now if the government hadn’t squashed it a month or so back. I shall go back to bashing my head against a brick wall whilst I wait for integrated ticketing.
April 22nd, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Saying Mayors squabbling proves the case for change is like saying we need a Bainarama-like dictator because Nats and Labour can’t agree on things and argue in public. The two do not follow.
I always thought political debate was a “good thing”?
April 22nd, 2009 at 8:43 pm
“Having one regional transport agency in charge of almost everything (except the railway lines and the motorways) is going to be a significant improvement for transport.”
That is hilarious in itself, and quite wrong to suggest the mega council will mean one transport authority, or any substantive change, it wont because it means neither of those things.
1) There is NOT going to be one regional transport agency, there will be three. The NZTA will still look after state highways, and Ontrack the rail network. Clearly the government doesn’t trust a single Auckland local authority to look after nationally owned strategic corridors competently! I don’t blame it, neither would I. Much like the UK government didn’t trust Transport for London to look after motorways in London.
2) There is currently one entity responsible for public transport and for putting together a single bid for local roads in Auckland – ARTA. I should know since I helped set the damned thing up. ARTA contracts all public transport, and was meant to ensure local road funding bids to NZTA were integrated. However ARTA has little interest in roads, because the ARC is so focused on public transport. The new mega council will face the same pressure. It is far more interesting playing with trains rather than minor projects on the disparate Auckland local road network.
So there will be little substantive change. The new ARTA will blame central government for not giving it money for pet public transport projects, it wont pursue more new local road projects (desperately needed) because it points the blame for congestion on the state highway network (which works better than most local arterials), and it wont dare suggest road pricing to replace rates funding for roads because of the politics around it.
Roads have never been competently managed by local government in Auckland, there is no reason to believe that will change. The clearest evidence is the debacle over the Waterview section of SH20. The only reason this is being debated is because previous Auckland councils removed the land designation for the motorway beyond the Mt Roskill section currently being built – they gave it up in 1974 so the potential routes got built on. How stupid was that in planning? Retaining a protected route from Manukau to Mt Roskill at a dead end. Another example is the cheap and nasty south east Arterial that links Penrose to the Pakuranga motorway bridge, substandard with traffic lights on an otherwise motorway type road – an Auckland City Council special built in the 1980s.
Far better to take all but residential cul-de-sacs and access streets into a new SOE type Auckland Roads company that has as its objective access and mobility, which seeks to maintain and develop the network.
April 22nd, 2009 at 9:51 pm
Libertyscott. I’m sure you realise that each council has a transport department at the moment. You have Transport Committees on a lot of the councils and as a result a heck of a lot of agencies involved. If your bus runs late it’s the operators and/or ARTA who you contact, if the bus shelter is missing/vandalised it’s the city council who need to fix it up. If a transport project is proposed it’s ARTA who organise it, but in the end it is the city council that has to stump up with half the funds (with NZTA sometimes covering the rest).
Sure, there will be KiwiRail, NZTA and the new Regional Transport Agency managing transport across the whole region. But three is still way better than….. oh god I don’t even want to try to count how many we have now. KiwiRail, Ontrack, ARTA, one for each district/city council, one for the ARC (separate but kind of linked to ARTA). What’s that… 11?
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:35 am
There is no correlation between the size of councils and their effective management of transport.
Auckland currently has one Regional Council and seven City and District Councils. These have been subject to at least eight jurisdictional reorganizations since 1963 when the Auckland Regional Authority was first established and yet the problems remain.
Metropolitan Paris, (pop 12 million) has seven regional governments and more than 1,300 municipal governments. Tokyo, the world’s largest metropolitan area, has more than 225 municipalities that stretch through the parts of four provinces. The Milan area has more than 150 cities. San Francisco Bay has 101 city governments. Super Cities are not necessary for success.
I have just returned from Seatlle which has a major motorway expansion programme underway and it runs through six cities and one of those cities was formed to deal with its impact. It is progressing rapidly and will soon be complete. This is a local highway and must be approved by each city. They started planning seven years ago and it is nearly complete.
There is a parallel highway running through downtown Seattle which is the responsibility of the State and the FEds and the governors office is in charge. They started planning nine years ago and work has not even begun. The reason it that the central decision making is driven by politics and earmarking and is caught up in all the pro transit stuff and “no more roads” campaigns.
The local highway (a bigger project) has a different means of operation. The planning manager is local and has a staff of 24 to plan all these highways for the state of Washington. 24 not 2,400!
Their management diagram put the public at the top of the tree and the transport spending must serve the public – not pressure groups.
They also agreed in advance that the consensus would be driven by the data.
The models showed that rail would do nothing to solve the congestion problem –it would take most of its passengers from buses not from cars. Rail would cost over $85 for each additional passenger mile.
The expanded road programme which would solve congestion and serve for a further twenty years cost just over $10 per additional passenger mile.
The data won the day.
April 23rd, 2009 at 10:24 am
And an academic confirmation:
Local government amalgamation policy: – A highway maintenance evaluation
April 24th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
Nothing will change until we have a change of philosophy, the superficial structure of the bureaucracy will not matter as long as we continue to bitumenize our urban areas. It is not that we need more roads but smarter roads. I lose count of the number of roads that lead to dead ends instead of going accross the gully to get you to where you need to go. We create bottle necks by running eight roads into a roundabout simultaneously and wonder why no one can get through. We actively kill off cycling and walking by creating dangerous intersections with slip roads, cycle paths that go no where, clash with pedestrians and dangerous roundabouts. We place our train stations in dark, isolated locations miles from shops, houses or their community. The solution to everything is to waste more money on more bitumen building unaffordable projects that will never pay their way. If roads were fully privatized how may roading projects would survive without taxpayer bailout? The names may change but the failures of the past will be repeated without a change of philosophy.