Auckland Transport Funding Consultation

"This report requests Strategy and Finance Committee approval to release for consultation the attached discussion document “Getting Auckland Moving and Paying for Auckland's Future Transport...."

This text comes from the Executive Summary of a report titled: " Alternative Transport Funding" which is on the agenda of Auckland Council's Strategy and Finance Committee meeting which is scheduled for tomorrow - 15th February.

Which is interesting, given that the discussion document has been all over the Herald, and responded to by letters to the editor for the last few days. The committee report indicates that the signatory is Mayor Len Brown, but the "Getting Auckland Moving and Paying for Auckland's Future Transport" report itself does not have a signatory. The mayor's office is seizing the initiative here - makes me think of Jaime Lerner and Curitiba.

The discussion report itself is a straightforward and reasonably cursory document. I welcome it, because it finally indicates a recognition that visions are all very good, but ultimately useless unless implemented. (This perception was fundamental to my criticisms of Auckland Unleashed in particular, and to a lesser extent, the Auckland Plan itself.)

I also think that the criteria suggested for comparing the different funding options is helpful (fairness, administrative efficiency [cost of collection], transparency, neutrality [no unexpected consequences], capacity [to raise the money needed]), though I believe that the factors "ability to pay" and "who should pay" should also be built into the consultation, rather than being presumed.

I note, for example that already the response letters refer to "those who benefit" and which take a narrow "user pays" critique, rather than the more justifiable broad view that the discussion document hints at, but does not explicitly incorporate. Unless ideas around who benefits, that illustrate how options are more or less related to those benefits (some broad - like value uplift, some narrow - like congestion), then the opportunity to use the consultation to educate the public and shift the debate forward might be lost. Some sort of "exacerbator pays" criteria would begin to address this. Some sort of reference to targetting the charges - though fairness might be said to include the idea of targetting. Targetting is a more positive test, neutrality is, well, neutral.

It may also be appropriate to indicate which of the criteria deserve more weight in any assessment. For example, if the ability to raise revenue is the priority (and I believe it is), then options which efficiently and cost-effectively raise revenue should get top-billing. And in my experience of Auckland transport the two options that immediately jump to the top of the list are: regional fuel taxes and commuter car-parking levies.