ACT - the transport supercharger for North West Auckland.
For drivers heading to the northwest on State Highway 16 you may have noticed changes to lane marking at the Te Atatu and Lincoln Road interchanges. And since the changes made by Waka Kotahi, queues of traffic could block those off ramps at pretty much any time of day.
If you live in Te Atatu like I do, traffic congestion and delays are now much worse than before the lane changes. This not a design fault, this is the design intent.
The Labour Government and their climate-obsessed consultants took traffic lanes and turned them into bus stops on the motorway off ramps and adjacent local roads.
As a result of trying to fit five traffic lanes into two, rather than the previous three, traffic now comes to a halt in all directions for hours every day. Even the rare buses on those routes are stuck in the same traffic jams. It is infuriating for people needing to go places.
The consultants hired to design this ongoing disaster don’t care about people needing to get places by car. On their website they state “Car-dependent transport systems are bad for us all. We get communities spread thinly across the landscape, where people are forced to use a car to get around, and valuable city space is lost to carparking.
They give us a binary choice of either roads and cars, or salvation by bus and bike.
“To invest in roads, we sacrifice investment in public transport and walking and cycling infrastructure, which makes these options less convenient, safe, and comfortable.”
New Zealand’s transport system is going to continue to suffer as long as it is dictated by anti-progress climate policies. The climate obsessed politicians who claim that roads are the problem, are themselves the problem. People who chose to live in the North and West of Auckland need reliable road transport, whether they are riding public transport or rely on cars.
The real problem with roads is that good ones cost a lot of money. That is why ACT is the only Party proposing a genuine shake-up of how roading infrastructure is funded in New Zealand, ensuring Auckland, and the rest of New Zealand gets access to safe, modern and efficient roads.
For the people of the North and West stuck in gridlocked traffic, in a car or in a bus, ACT is going to supercharge your road.
ACT is proposing to introduce a world-class toll roading system. It will use private sector financing and expertise to get new roads built faster and to maintain existing roads more quickly and effectively. Countries like Ireland have successfully made extensive use of tolling.
In March 2018 then Transport Minister Phil Twyford said “Solving Auckland’s traffic gridlock is also important for the rest of New Zealand with congestion in the city between 2015 and 2017 estimated to have cost the economy $1.3 billion a year in lost productivity”.
Under a world-class toll roading system, New Zealanders will have a choice: make use of new toll roads much sooner or wait for tax-funded roads to be delivered later or never.
The delayed Kumeu-Huapai Bypass could be delivered this decade. The promised North West express busway is another road that could be delivered using toll revenues. The choice is in your hands this October. If you want to supercharge your road, give your party vote to ACT this election.
