Auckland Transport (mostly) goneburger - Greater Auckland

Auckland Transport has long been a easy punching bag for the public, politicians and media, sometimes deservedly so, other times not. That could all be about to change following an announcement yesterday by the Browns – Wayne and Simeon.

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Just last week we were pondering the future of Auckland Transport, with Mayor Wayne Brown’s annual plan proposing to make some fairly significant changes to transport governance arrangements in Auckland. A big uncertainty in a lot of what he proposed came down to the fact that AT’s powers are mostly set out in legislation – meaning that central government will need to come to the party to make any changes.

Yesterday the government came through for Wayne Brown – and then some – by proposing what is certainly the biggest change to transport governance arrangements in Auckland since local government amalgamation in 2010. Here are the key details:

Return regional transport policy and planning to Auckland Council: Transport policy and planning functions will move from Auckland Transport back to Auckland Council, aligning with how other regional councils operate across New Zealand.Establish a new Auckland Regional Transport Committee: A statutory committee will be formed to develop a 30-year Integrated Transport Plan for Auckland, to be agreed upon by both Cabinet and Auckland Council. This will ensure long-term strategic alignment between local and central government.Designate Auckland Council as the Road Controlling Authority: Auckland Council will assume the role of Road Controlling Authority. Decision-making will be shared between the Governing Body and Local Boards.Empower Auckland Council to give it control over its transport council-controlled organisation: Auckland Council will retain a transport council-controlled organisation focused solely on delivering transport projects and services. The council will have six months once legislation is passed to determine its specific functions.

As with any change of this magnitude there’s a mixed bag in there.

The Good

The first, second and fourth bullet points are exactly what the Mayor has been wanting for a long time now. To align transport policy and planning with the rest of the country by bringing it back to the Council, to give Auckland Council the ability to decide which powers it delegates to AT, and to have a statutory 30-year Integrated Transport Plan.

Overall, these are all good moves – largely for the reasons spelled out a week ago. Having a statutory 30-year Integrated Transport Plan (ITP) is also a great and long overdue move and effectively gives the Auckland Transport Alignment Project (ATAP) some teeth. ATAP was originally initiated by the last National government and through several iterations of it we saw some more sensible transport planning emerge from central government. However, as it wasn’t a statutory document it was ignored by agencies like Waka Kotahi who never delivered the levels of funding the government had promised and carried on their own planning independent of what ATAP said.

So this undoes the mess that Steven Joyce made of transport planning and governance back when he changed the LTMA and got rid of 30-year Regional Land Transport Strategies and hopefully means a loss less random stuff like the NZ Upgrade Programme, the later years of light-rail, the Waitemata Harbour Connections debacle, and the Roads of National Significance.

The Bad

One big area of concern is the level of say the government will have over transport plans for the region. While having an ITP is good, a lot will depend on how much it’s based on evidence as opposed to reckons like the current Government Policy Statement has. Also key will the level of detail it goes to, for example will it give the government a veto over every individual cycleway proposal or just at a high level.

There’s also the issue of how often it can be refreshed as that could potentially lock Auckland’s transport future to the policies of this government and council.

The government will get more of a say in running of what remains of Auckland Transport as there will still be a board but the government will get to pick half of the board members.

The (potentially) Ugly

The one addition to Wayne’s proposal – making Auckland Council the Road Controlling Authority and potentially splitting decision-making powers between the Governing Body and Local Boards – has certainly come more out of left field and wasn’t really mentioned at all in the Mayor’s proposal. This change seems to have come from Simeon Brown’s weird belief that Auckland Transport was building safe streets and cycleways all over the city against public opinion – which is very odd given Auckland Transport has struggled to build many cycleways at all in recent years despite Auckland Council desperately pleading for them to do so. He said this in his press release about this particular change:

“Additionally, the Government will devolve specific transport functions to Local Boards, giving communities more say over transport issues such as parking policies, setting of speed limits, and approval of interventions on the roads such as cycleways and pedestrian crossings,” Simeon Brown says.

“This change ensures that transport policies have democratic legitimacy and democratic accountability —something that has been sorely lacking.”

The concern here is that some local boards are great on transport issues and others are less so and so the risk is we end up with a bit of a post code lottery on issues like whether it’s safe for your child to be able to walk to school.

The changes do suggest that it should be easier for supportive Local Boards to build more cycleways and pedestrian crossings though Simeon made it clear they’ll only be able to happen if communities fund them themselves, saying:

Well look, that’s one of the things road controlling authorities can do but I’ll tell you what, it’s not going to be funded by the taxpayer. We’ve made that very clear in the Government Policy Statement on Transport and that’s been given effect to in the National Land Transport Programme. I can tell you under this government there’ll be no co-funding from the government for those things. If the council and local boards want to spend money on those types of things which frustrate motorists, they’ll be held accountable by the people in their communities.

The Road Controlling Authority status is also potentially a lot of extra work for Councillors and Local Board members. It’ll be interesting to see how this is managed effectively, and how Local Boards will be provided with sound technical support and advice to inform their decision-making in line with statutory responsibilities. It’s perhaps too early to tell whether this means we will end up with a split of accountabilities a bit more like option AT3 in the Mayor’s proposal rather than AT2, or whether Auckland Council will decide that AT should retain a lot of their current roles and functions, with just the final legal decision-making sitting with the Council.

Overall the changes really do mean the end of Auckland Transport in its current form – to a much greater extent than the Mayor and Council were proposing last week.

I guess it is an indictment on the leadership of that organisation over recent years that few people will be sad about this. It is also quite strange that we are quite happy to see Auckland Transport disappear in their current form for the opposite reason to Simeon Brown – in that we think AT has spent most of its existence undermining Council strategy that has been forward thinking and progressive; whereas Simeon Brown thinks AT has been on an ideological rampage against the wishes of its elected members.

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