Back To The Future For National’s Transport Policy
April 24th, 2008
With oil prices at record high levels and signals from oil producing countries prices will likely stay high (they have no incentive to cut prices with surging demand in China in particular) any sensible transport policy will be looking to maximise the use of energy efficient forms of transport. Already NZ’s high reliance on road transport has probably added an extra $2-3bn in domestic transport costs over the past three years fuelling inflation.
Policy Short-Sighted. Yet incredibly National’s Transport Spokesman, Maurice Williamson, signalled in Wellington last week his party intends to focus on building yet more road capacity nation-wide as the core plank in the party’s transport policy. It is hard to imagine a more short sighted and economically crippling strategy than this. The last thing the country needs to become even more dependent on road transport as it means we become even more dependent on increasingly expensive imported oil. The National Party has traditionally been at best apathetic towards rail, coastal shipping and public transport as much as anything because the people who work in these sectors tend to vote for the Labour Party. Private trucking companies on the other hand were and are viewed as bastions of private enterprise despite the fact of course the trucking industry can only survive with the help of the extra funding poured into the roading network from the pockets of private motorists.
Out-Of-Date Thinking. The harsh reality is the world is not what it was in the 1950s. Pretending NZ is mid-west America 1955 with abundant cheap oil driving road transport expansion supported by vast road building programmes is like sticking your head in the expensive Alberta oil sands hoping the reality of 2008 and the coming decades will go away. It won’t and we need to have a long term transport policy which reflects the need to boost the quality and quantity of the national rail and coastal shipping infrastructure as the main priority combined with better intermodal connections with road.
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