As heartening as it may be to see bipartisan agreement in an election year, a crucial third party – Planet Earth – is unlikely to appreciate this particular example, writes Marc Daalder
Comment: It’s election season, which means it’s also big roading project announcement season.
The New Zealand electorate loves nothing more than a promise to see most of the country paved in asphalt in an unrealistically short amount of time for an unrealistically small amount of money.
The National Party kicked off Bitumen Appreciation Month a day early, revealing on July 31 its plans to build 461 kilometres of new highway lanes in seven different regions around the country. As Newsroom reported at the time, the annual climate cost of the new driving those roads would incentivise was equivalent to around two months of full-on coal-burning at Huntly Power Station.
Labour’s only critique at the time was that National’s costings were wrong (and they were – Newsroom found a $2.5 billion hole in the figures last week, arising from National using figures from as far back as 2015 without adjusting for inflation).
READ MORE: * National's roads equal to eight weeks a year of Huntly coal-burning * More debt for Waka Kotahi to fulfil transport plans
Now we know why: Yesterday Labour released its own 10-year transport plan, a 71-page document chock full of new motorways. In fact, some of those are the same motorways National wants to build. As heartening as it may be to see bipartisan agreement in an election year, a crucial third party – Planet Earth – is unlikely to appreciate this particular example.
Somewhere in between the two announcements, Labour also unveiled plans for a new Auckland Harbour crossing. Or rather, crossings. There are a lot of tunnels involved and the total number of lanes for cars, buses, cyclists and light rail will all increase. While the focus on low-emissions transport modes is nice to see, the fact that Labour felt a need to sprinkle some extra rewards for motorists into the announcement tarnishes the whole thing.
The problem with all of this is that we need to slash carbon emissions from driving in order to meet our climate goals. This is a mission parties pay lip service to, but not much more.
Even Labour’s 10-year plan says Waka Kotahi must ensure its overall transport programme reduces emissions in the sector, but that doesn't seem a likely outcome when walking and cycling have been allocated $500 million against tens of billions for new roads.
Those who celebrate Bitumen Appreciation Month will argue their cultural practices are still consistent with reducing emissions because we’re all transitioning to electric vehicles anyway. It’s true that we hit an important milestone in June (hereby titled Battery Awareness Month) when one in every two new vehicles sold was an EV or a plug-in hybrid.
But the maths here for conversion of our entire fleet of 4.8 million cars is pretty grim. First, the majority of used vehicles we’re importing are still fossil fuelled. Second, even if every car (new or used) that entered the country was electric, it would still be more than a decade before half of the vehicle fleet was electric. The small number of new vehicles flowing into the fleet is still so totally outnumbered by the cars we’ve already got, which are on average more than 15 years old.
In other words, it will not be until the 2040s at the earliest that the vast majority of our fleet is electric. And in the meantime, all that new driving we’re incentivising through building new roads will continue to pump carbon dioxide (plus harmful particulates) into the atmosphere. Every kilogram of CO2 adds to global warming and will continue to trap heat for thousands of years.
We simply don’t have the luxury to keep on driving as usual. Fortunately, there’s another option. If we can shift significant amounts of our driving demand to other transport forms like public transit, walking and cycling, we can reduce emissions now rather than waiting for EV adoption levels to reach critical mass.
EVs are still a crucial part of our pathway to a net zero society, but they can’t do it all on their own. When parties promise roads to buy votes, they’re either expressing an intention to renege on the country’s climate pledges or they know those roads won’t get built.
That’s perhaps the silver lining in all of this – the ridiculous ambition of some of these programmes. In New Zealand, we aren’t wonderful at building big things for cheap. We’re not even all that good at building big things for a lot of money.
The climate’s best hope is that these plans all fall over when the true, sheer cost of them becomes apparent. Hopefully, before someone at Waka Kotahi puts in an Everest-sized order for bitumen, parties of all stripes will have come around to the demands of the climate response and redirect that funding to e-bikes instead.
