Road tolls or fuel taxes? Neither says Minto for Mayor
Posted on July 15, 2013 by admin in John Minto, Press ReleasesThe “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.
Cimino Cole says:
Post Author July 29, 2013 at 3:36 pmFree and frequent buses are a necessary first step to addressing Auckland’s health, climate and transport crises.
World Cannot Afford to Solve One Problem at a Time is my grateful contribution to your mayoral campaign:
http://www.mahurangi.org.nz/Climate/One-Problem-at-a-Time.php
Pete Young says:
Post Author August 12, 2013 at 11:44 pmI’d like to see some revenue being gathered by undercover camera-cars out on the roads catching tail-gators and other aggressive drivers. I’m completely opposed to spying into people’s privacy, but I don’t regard catching aggressive, dangerous drivers out on the public road as any invasion of privacy. We’ve had zero-tolerance weekends with zero deaths on our roads, so that shows that eliminating the road toll is just a matter of political will. Fining all the aggro drivers until they stop tailgating and aggro overtaking would raise huge amounts of revenue. But, hey, this is nz, where it seems like most people’s only emotional release is aggro driving, so I might as well shut it now