NLTP 2024 released – destroying pipeline of shovel ready local projects

Transport Minister Simeon Brown and Waka Kotahi yesterday released the latest National Land Transport Plan (NLTP) for 2024-27. The NLTP sets out what transport projects will be funded for the next three years, including both central and local government projects.

As expected, given the government’s extremely ideological transport policy, it’s terrible, not just because of what it does fund – focusing much of the country’s transport investment into a handful of roads that carry less traffic than the average Auckland arterial – but also because of what it doesn’t fund: destroying a pipeline of shovel-ready local projects, right at a time when the government claims to care about having an infrastructure pipeline.

Like every NLTP before it, this one is being announced as a “new record” for levels of funding, with a whopping $32 billion to be spent on transport over the next three years.

Here’s a quick look at how much was announced in each previous NLTP along with their equivalent record claims.

The biggest winner from all of this funding is the state highway network, which gets $7.01 billion over the coming three years for new and improved state highways (mostly the new Roads of National Significance) –  close to triple what it was for the previous three years – plus another $4.4 billion for maintenance and operations of those highways.

Those RoNS projects are also going to create a huge funding issue in coming years, given the $6 billion gap per year between revenue and expenditure forecast:

For his part, the Transport Minister continues with the tired old claim that this is just about spending road taxes on more roads:

“People pay their road user charges and their fuel excise duty, and their expectation is that that funding goes back into building and maintaining that road network,” he said.

The reality is the various road taxes now barely even cover the maintenance and operations costs for roads. Combined, they equate to $13.7 billion in funding, which is less than 42% of total transport spending and only just higher than the combined direct crown funding sources.

In other words, the government plans to fund its roads-heavy programme by matching road taxes dollar-for-dollar with non-road taxes – the latter diverted from other potential beneficial uses (schools, hospitals, social services, other transport infrastructure, etc) while also actively cutting funding to schools, hospitals, social services, and other transport infrastructure, etc.

At the other end of the funding spectrum, investment for walking and cycling has been slashed in half. It seems most of what remains will be for just finishing projects that are already underway, like completing the Ngauranga to Petone project – which, lest we forget, is largely a seawall to protect the motorway and rail line that just happens to have a cycleway on top. (Ed: the Minister is also wrong in his claims about public support for investment in walking and cycling infrastructure, as Waka Kotahi’s regular research confirms. E.g. 61% of New Zealanders support investing in cycle lanes to provide transport choice ,and 69% of urban New Zealanders support people getting around by bike in their community.)

This halving of active modes investment, along with other funding decisions made by the Minister, means a lot of important, long-awaited and high BCR local projects will now be on hold.

And as it’s going to be some time before the big new roading projects are ready, in the next few years we’re likely to lose a lot of people and talent to other industries or to overseas – there are suggestions this sector-specific brain drain has already happened to a significant extent.

Meanwhile, in order to deliver on these promised big roading projects, that money will instead need to be spent on huge numbers of consultants writing business cases – which is exactly the kind of thing that the Minister accused the previous government of doing too much of.

A series of regional maps brings to light how grim this is in terms of local planning. For example, in Auckland it appears that there are basically no new local projects at all. Just a bunch of further business cases on major projects that are years away from being good-to-go. Presumably the map below only shows the “new” projects, so therefore excludes CRL and Eastern Busway – but it demonstrates how little progress will be possible in the next three years in our largest city:

There’s also a very weird mention of (stage 2 of) a “Point Chevalier ferry charging and infrastructure” – this is certainly the first we’ve heard of that?

Other things that caught the eye in the NLTP document were some troubling words around climate change that reveal Waka Kotahi is skirting with outright climate denial:

Also extremely eye-catching is this language around how little Waka Kotahi cared about local priorities when developing the NLTP.:

We have reviewed the regional priorities in each RLTP when making final prioritisation decisions within activity classes to consider opportunities to adjusting the NLTP to better align with regional priorities. While RLTPs must also be consistent with the GPS, Regional Transport Committees use a variety of prioritisation approaches meaning regional priorities can differ from those determined by NZTA.

Those priorities were carefully considered, but ultimately, we are required to form our own assessment of the investment required to give effect to the GPS. Reviewing the top priorities for each region for all new proposed activities where the region gave a priority ranking from one to nine, against our ranking assigned for the region, applying the IPM. As part of this review, we sought to determine whether each region had been appropriately categorised using the NZTA’s taxonomy as set out in the July Board paper or not. It was apparent many chose to apply their own approach to priority ranking which led to much of the divergence we observed.

Applying a further adjustment to what we had previously considered as probable and possible activities in the NLTP to promote activities identified as a regional priority over activities that have a similar IPM priority but are not identified as a regional priority. Where this occurred, we applied an exception to our IPM assessment to include such an activity

We’re still waiting on some of the more detailed figures from the NLTP, but there is some information about how much will be spent in each region, which allows for a quick per capita comparison for the regions.

As you can see, the lower North Island is doing much better than other places. Wellington is especially notable as over the last fifteen years or so it is always at or near the top in this metric. Note, The West Coast is typically high on a per capita basis, due to its large roading network and small population.

More detail, at a project by project level, is likely to come out in the day next or so. So expect further posts once this is available.

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