Road tolls or fuel taxes? Neither says Minto for Mayor

The “consensus building group” report which today gave Aucklanders the choice between road tolls or rates increases and extra fuel taxes to pay for new roading projects is wrong headed.

They are both bad options to deal with traffic gridlock and Auckland should reject them both.

Building more roads will NOT reduce traffic congestion. Nowhere in the world has any city been able to tarseal its way out of gridlock.

Mana is proposing an end traffic chaos in Auckland within 12 months at less than half the cost of Len Brown’s proposals. We will do this using free and frequent public transport to all parts of the city’s urban area.

Our proposal will release $1.25 billion per year in extra productivity wasted currently in traffic congestion as well as stimulating the economy with the money saved by people using free public transport.

Len Brown’s proposals on the other hand will condemn Aucklanders to traffic gridlock for the next 30 years while forcing us to pay $400 million per year extra for the privilege.

Other cities in the world are going down this path of free public transport – Chengdu in China and Tallinn in Estonia are a couple of examples amongst dozens of other cities with different versions of free public transport.

An international conference on free public transport is being held in Tallinn next month – Len Brown should go.

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