A fairly lengthy and detailed documentary on the Roads of National Significance projects was aired on Radio NZ this morning. You can listen to the 27 minute long documentary here.
Quite a few comments in this previous thread relate to the documentary – and raise some important points I think:
- Most of the non-political commentators (NZCID, AA, Road Transport Forum etc.) are organisations which support the projects. This is unfortunate because to the listener it comes across as though the only reason you’d oppose the RoNS package is for political reasons.
- Unfortunately there’s also relatively little ‘probing’ of the economic claims made by many of the projects’ supporters. Or international comparisons.
- The argument made by the Smart Transport network (that we shouldn’t put all the RoNS together into a package and then say it makes sense) was deliberately misrepresented in NZTA’s answer that every corridor needs to be looked at as a whole, without any follow up even though they are two completely different things.
On the other hand, it is good to hear some detailed media happening about the RoNS projects. After all the RoNS package as a whole is one of the biggest investments ever made by a New Zealand government, we need to discuss it more.
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These ‘non-political commentators’ are not as non-partisan as we think. In fact, the chief spokesman for the NZCID is Stephen Sellwood, a former National Party candidate from maybe 2008. And the president of the Road Transport Forum is one-time ACT MP Ken Shirley.
Yes, I had thought of mentioning the same thing. The NZCID’s ongoing unshakeable support for highly questionable road projects completely undermines it’s credibility as an organisation: It’s nothing but a lobby group for large infrastructure companies. I feel like the AA, while also putting out a biased perspective, at least openly acknowledges where it’s opinions apparently originate from: The views of motorists. Shame that the AA does not realise that the world is changing and so are it’s members: Most of whom support the CRL more so than Puhoi-to-Wellsford.
And before someone suggests that everyone – including this blog – has “biases”, I’d just like to say that I couldn’t agree more. The key difference is that we when we express our opinions they are prefaced with “I think the RoNs …”. That’s quite different from saying “The RoNs will …”. The intellectual dishonesty of those organisations that support the RoNs needs some good ol’ civil sunlight …
The odd thing is that NZCID’s members have masses to gain from something like the City Rail Link project. After constructing the New Lynn trench, the Victoria Park Tunnel and the Waterview Connection tunnel, Fletcher’s (one of NZCID’s most important members I would assume) are surely likely to be at the forefront of getting the CRL construction contract.
I actually think that NZCID is becoming a personal mouthpiece of Stephen Selwood, who is probably saying quite a few things many of his members wouldn’t agree with.
There are many valid reasons to oppose the RoNS. The ‘economic contribution to the country’ argument used to promote this kind of roading largesse used by its proponents is not accurate. But it is being sold to the public as though it is sound and sensible. See the Bloomberg article for analysis of a similar situation in Europe/Greece. Putting so much money for such dubious economic benefit also sucks money from other potential worthwhile productive public investment…
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-17/greece-s-highways-are-smoother-than-its-finances.html
Yeah, that trade off thing is called “Opportunity Cost”
And whats lacking here so far is any real discussion of round the whole RoNS thing.
As in, if we didn’t build the RoNS what should we do with the money instead, and is that alternative use going to deliver a better result/outcome?
And also – if we don’t build the RoNS what are the alternatives to the transport issues they seek to solve.
Hi Greg,
i too travelled in Greece, 2 years ago, and was amazed a the highways, magnificent they were too! Just google Greece and highways and you can actually see for yourself, although I can’t believe you missed them the first time.
Having driven on the roads in Northern Greece not too long ago, I can tell you that those roads were little better than we have back here.
Agreed that some of the main roads in Greece are well paved, especially those that lead to/from the borders of other EU countries.
But maybe Greece has a more fundamental issue than what the Bloomberg story suggests – like a fair and well spread tax base, and lack of corruption?
When I was there the taxi driver we used was a cop doing full shifts moonlighting as a Taxi Driver, he drove like a maniac too (worse than other Greeks did), in part as he knew his cop mates wouldn’t stop or ticket him. Feel pretty sure that he wasn’t paying taxes on his second job (or probably turning up for this first job either).
Thats the kind of corruption that must be rooted out in Greece before it can become a good EU citizen.
The net economic contribution of the RoNs to New Zealand is negative. Nuff said …
The key word there is “net”. The government often says there will be an economic benefit from the projects and that’s true, but the real questions remain unanswered. They include:
1) How do the benefits compare to spending that money on different transport projects?
2) How do the benefits compare to spending that money on something that isn’t transport at all (flash new tertiary campus in Whangarei for example)?
3) How do the benefits compare to the cost of the project?
4) How can we achieve the benefits (or at least a big chunk of them) of the projects for a fraction of their cost?
Spending $12 billion to dig holes and fill them up again would create an economic benefit (lots of employment and great if you own shares in a shovel company). However, that wouldn’t create a net benefit.
While reading a great article on the end of urban highway building a particular quote caught my eye about the whole BCR concept:
“In practice, many urban highways were justified with some form of cost-benefit analysis. However, most experts in cost-benefit analysis point out that the tool was never meant to evaluate whether or not to build urban highways but rather to prioritize between competing inter-urban highway projects.”
I was reminded of the quote by your excellent points made above Mr Anderson.
I’ve linked to it before, but John Adams’s ‘…and how much for your grandmother?’ articles does a good job of pointing out some of the absurdities of cost-benefit analysis in almost any context. Here’s the article: http://john-adams.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/and-how-much-for-your-grandmother-4.pdf
In the transport context, a big issue is that we can put a monetary value on benefits like reduced driving times (which almost never eventuate) but a lot of the non-construction opportunity costs are much harder to put a value on. Like that couple in the doco. Ask them how much that road is costing them and they’ll give you a very high number, which would blow the thing out of the water if you included it – so, um… you don’t! Instead, you ask them how much they would pay to stop it, which is not the same thing at all – or more likely, you don’t even include that aspect, you simply price the land.
I don’t know. I thought the programme was very poor in terms of analysis. Lots of unchallenged talking from the head of New Zealand Transport Authority with a supporting chorus of interest group (infrastructure lobby, truck lobby), little on why these roads may be a silly idea or the sort of alternatives that could be built, Julie Anne Genter on for what 1 minute? But then I think that the roads of national significance are wasteful and that there are better ways to use that public money. So maybe I aren’t objective about the radio programme.
This article, snarfed from a Facebook post from Smart Transport, could be prescient:
http://ow.ly/d4jSy
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“All those fast and smooth roads should help Greece export goods. But even in 2008, before the crisis, Greece didn’t export that much: 24 percent of GDP, compared with Bulgaria’s nearly 60 percent. The remainder of Greek’s EU money could have been spent developing other infrastructure, such as its judicial system or its universities. Instead, what the free cash mainly did was to release other Greek government money for misspending on the public sector, jobs-for-votes merry-go-round that collapsed under pressure from the global financial crisis. Greece’s best university still ranks only a little better than 300th in the world.
Now Thessaloniki, a Greek city with a glamorous Byzantine history is a depressed scene of shuttered stores and unemployed youth. The main export growth in the area lately has been of companies, especially international ones, which over the past two years have chosen to relocate operations to cheaper Bulgaria.
Greek exports as a whole rose by a miraculous 37 percent last year. But that was almost entirely due to rising oil prices, which increased the value (not the volume) of Greek oil product exports. Exports of manufactured goods, agricultural products and commodities that might create jobs and growth were all flat or down. Greek businessmen are breathing a sigh of relief after the recent elections produced a rational government and, at the very least, a stay of execution.”
Someone from NZTA (or maybe the Council for Infrastructure Development?) claimed that if you plan to build a house and then decide to cut costs by not building the kitchen then you don’t have a house. This was supposed to be an analogy with the RoNS ‘package’ – leave one of them out and you don’t have a what? This is a patently flawed line of argument and went completely unchallenged. How can projects at opposite ends of the North Island be as intimately linked as house and its kitchen, so much so that if you don’t build all of them then none of them have any value? I assume that most intelligent listeners can spot how daft this is, but it’s disappointing that they get to make claims like that without being questioned.
What an outrageous analogy. Mooo haa haaa – more grist to the RoNs mill.
Dangerfield (wilfully?) misinterpreted the whole point that Silvia Zuur was making – equating “we shouldn’t consider all the RoNS as a single package” with “we shouldn’t consider all parts of one RoNS as a single package”. As I noted above, very annoying that wasn’t jumped on by the interviewer.
PS – who is Silvia Zuur anyway? Great to have some gender balance in the transport debate and she sounds really well informed!
I think this is Silvia Zuur. http://www.uwcad.it/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=414%3Asilvia-zuur&catid=62%3Ainternational-affairs&Itemid=128
Have to read some of those books, they sound interesting. With respect to the gender imbalance in the transport sector, yes it does exist and it is a problem. Refer to this comment here from Michele:
“As a fellow female transport planner I can attest to the fact that in nz the boys don’t expect young professional women in transport and it was suggested as an issue to me by older males in the sector! I was gob smacked but at least some male professionals understand how some of their fellow professionals treat/ view women in the sector.” (http://greaterakl.wpengine.com/2012/08/18/brownlee-is-a-roads-scholar/#comment-44932)
If you have a government without a rational policy, do you not have a government?
Ms. Zuur I think (from a Backbenchers appearance I base this guess) is the daughter of the principal at the little private school in Raumati that would go under the Kapiti Freeway depending on the location of its southern start near QE Park. Her mum, the principal, I think, stood unsuccessfully as a candidate in the KCDC local elections last time. The location of the school is interesting as if somebody decided on the location in the likely alignment of the road and was playing a long chess game to oppose the freeway..As it is, I think, the school stays but I think the prospect of ever having a Raumati train station on the Kapiti Line is permanently buggered. There is quite a local call for a Raumati station instead of having to backtrack to Paraparaumu.
In the programme, Clint Owens asked not a single question about how roads fit into New Zealand’s transport infrastructure.
We repeatedly heard that $10b is a huge investment into roads but we didn’t see how this fits into the amount New Zealand spends to move things and people around the country.
Could some of those billions be better spent on rail infrastructure for freight or passengers? If I listened only to this programme, I would have no idea because the question wasn’t asked.
Or any mention that importing cars and oil are the two biggest drains on our current account deficit. I wonder what the macro-economic impact of reducing the billions upon billions we spend on those imports each year would be.
Yes, the macro-economic impacts of our import-based transport system must be enormous. Not that I’m necessarily into the whole “import substitution business” (because after all less imports mean other countries have less money to buy our exports), but there’s no doubt that we’re importing a shed load of oil and cars from countries that don’t buy a hell of a lot from us.
I agree with many of the comments here that the documentary seemed to give a lot of free air-time to the usual Govt RoNS talking points. It’s a shame, because the journalist is one of the best in the country, particularly when it comes to transport, and he is often breaking new stories. Not sure why the documentary ended up with so little critical analysis. Also, where is this new two dollars of benefit for each one invested coming from? I noticed that Stephen Sellwood and Ken Shirley said that last week, but in this piece the journo seemed to say that NZTA is now saying this about the RoNS.
As I understand it, Arthur Grimes was one of the policy architects of the RoNS, and it’s very unfortunate that he was the economist who got interviewed for this piece. He said he was sure the benefits of the motorways would be greater than indicated by the BCRs?! If anything, I think the benefits would be lower because the CBA framework in NZ tends to underestimate the costs and overstate the benefits of motorway projects. My reading of Grimes’s work suggests he has no understanding of transport market distortions and their impact on both mode choice and land use in NZ, and the economic analyses he’s done in this area are seriously flawed as a result.
Very interesting that Spain and Greece received huge amounts of EU development money for transport, and that Greece mainly spent it on motorways, from 2000-2006. I’m going to see what else we can find out about that. Seems like a relevant lesson for NZ.
Thanks for dropping by Julie – agree with many of your thoughts. One of the main wider economic benefits assessed in transport projects is agglomeration benefits, the benefit you get from clustering activities together. Given that motorways tend to make dispersal easier, you would think that they might have negative agglomeration benefits.
Is that possible to measure?
Brilliant point. The holiday highway encourages sprawl up the north-eastern coast, which mainly benefits those with land interests or lazy constructors of low-density subdivisions. We all pay the costs.
Silvia Zuur did some great work on the campaign to oppose the Wellington Northern Corridor in Kapiti. It is, indeed, great to have her involved in transport politics. Maybe you could ask her for a guest blog post? I think it might be the first ever written by a woman on this blog 🙂 And great work Julie!
Sorry – just to clarify. The guest blog post could be to explain who she is and what the Smart Transport Network is. Just an idea…
Just a further comment – I have sometimes wondered if the under-representation of women in the transport sector has contributed to the fact that public transport options in NZ seem particularly poorly designed for moving young children around. After all, most primary care givers for children in this country (and in most countries, actually) are still women and if they are under-represented in transport planning/advocacy it makes sense to me that transport options might not be as well designed to meet their needs as other groups. We know that this happens for ethnic minorities in health care/the justice system/education so why would transport be an exception.
I would be interested in seeing a blog post from a young mother about the challenges of using public transport in NZ. I am also interested in whether there has been any research done on this topic in NZ – for example, what do mothers of young children actually want from transport? Are they less likely to use PT than other groups or is that just my entirely subjective impression? How do our current transport options fail to meet their needs? Has there been any research done overseas on these topics? Have any other countries been successful in designing PT/walking/cycling options that do meet young mothers’ needs?
I imagine from the perspective of increasing transport mode share, it matters quite a lot whether mothers use public transport/walk/cycle with their children because people model their behaviour (to a large extent) on what their parents do.
Getting transport to work properly for disabled people benefits parents with kids as well. Judging by the lethargic progress on the former, I wouldn’t be optimistic anyone has invested in understanding the latter.
Generation Zero show how the messaging needs to be done by everyone, about the CRL as well as intergenerational fairness:
“Generation Zero spokesperson Paul Young said that the motivation for the Bill is so that the Government can pay for its $12 billion ‘Roads of National Significance’ programme, which is currently putting a squeeze on all other areas of transport funding.
“We don’t want to be saddled with debt to pay for costly highways that we don’t believe will benefit us in the long run,” said Mr Young. “We want a smart transport system that gives people real choice and doesn’t depend on more and more oil to run, because the future needs to be low carbon.”
“That means we want the Government to invest in the likes of Auckland’s City Rail Link, which will double the capacity of Auckland’s train network, and give Kiwirail a fair go against the huge highway spend propping up the trucking industry.”
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO1208/S00235/young-generation-wants-say-on-roading-projects.htm
Gen Zero has an anti-RONS Avaaz petition here:
http://www.avaaz.org/en/petition/Stop_New_Zealand_going_down_the_wrong_road/