The Greens new transport policy just arrived.
Green Party launches the transport plan to combat fossil fuel crisis
The Green Party’s plan for connecting aotearoa with fast, frequent and affordable public transport will:
- Immediately save people money by making bus and train fares free for children, teenagers, students, apprentices, Community Service Card holders, and Total Mobility Users, and capping bus and train fares at $2 for adults
- Build mass rapid bus and light rail in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch
Improve public transport in smaller cities and towns, as well as major metropolitan areas, by funding the shortfall councils need to deliver services, to give people options to escape the fuel crisis.- Deliver more frequent inter-regional bus services so people can travel in and
around smaller cities and towns affordably and frequently.- Connect the country with intercity, long-distance rail through new train services including an Auckland-Wellington overnight rail service, passenger rail between Christchurch and Dunedin with a potential extension to Invercargill, and improve, electrify and extend the Te Huia route to Tauranga.
- Enable councils to pedestrianise more inner-city areas to boost urban revitalisation, increase safe walking and biking spaces, and make urban areas beautiful places where people want to spend their time.
Policy announcement, passenger rail announcement, Full policy PDF here.
I am unlikely to benefit much from it because I live in the rural South Island, and I love it. It’s the quantum leap from ‘we should take climate seriously, let’s all have EVs’, to a systemic approach to making public transport the core of our climate transition transport policy.
EVs are appropriate and the more people who buy them the cheaper they will get and the faster New Zealand will drop our GHG transport miles. But we are too far into the climate crisis for a Jetsons style future where everyone has their own car they can drive whenever they want. Well designed public transport makes the transition faster, but it also brings other benefits in terms of lowered costs, less traffic congestion, more time to spend on other activities.
This is one of the most heartening things I have seen on climate this year. Typical of the Greens, there is easy integration of climate and socioeconomics, this is Just Transition in real terms.
One of the plans is to subsidise PT at the council level. This makes sense because it’s hard to make user pays PT work with our particular geography and populations spread. We need PT on climate grounds alone, and urgently.
Some on the right will wail and gnash about big government spending our hard earned tax dollars. Whatever. Public transport on this scale is a public good and government should be directly involved in leading and setting policy.
There will be a righty talking point about what about it being unfair on country folk. As someone who lives in a rural area poorly serviced with PT, this is a no brainer. You get the big centres with the most population set up first, you bring in and normalise subsidies there because of that, and you start to design a different set of public transport policies for areas that have no rail, smaller population, and further distances to travel. We all have to transition at some point.
I’m super excited about the return of the Southerner on the main trunk line (Dunedin/Christchurch at least). This was a major connection for many people over decades, not just Invercargill to Christchurch but all the small towns along the way.
It was fantastic seeing Aucklanders swooning last week as they go to try out their new City Rail Link. Congratulations to the Greens for their long work on PT, including campaigning on the CRL.
It’s bold policy, but it’s not particularly radical, which makes it easier to Labour to consider. Well done Green Party.
19% of cars sold in NZ in the July-Sept quarter were EV's. (BEV not hybrids). Epic.
Thank you President Trump.
Smart to see some concentration on policies that are price-focused and fast to implamenet, not more mega-project wish-lists that too often die.
Whoever is in government needs to put hard pressure on NZTA to move the MOTU card beyond the Christchurch trial and extend it across all cities – and indeed across the regional routes like Te Huia. That is where you will see proper modal competition.
Any government will also have to deal with the transfer of at-the-pump taxes to nationwide individual RUC accounts. It will come into place at the end of the next term and it will be a cultural shock.
The third big one any govenrment is going to have to deal with is congestion charging. Likely to be implemented into Auckland and possibly Queenstown (because constricted netowrk enables it). That has quite big democratic impact because it's a tax.