So a regional petrol tax is proposed for Auckland, a really stupid idea.
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Why?
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1.Last time it was tried (early 1990s by National, but don’t expect them to remember it) to help fund Auckland and Wellington public transport, the oil companies levied the tax across the country at a level equivalent to what it necessary to raise the same revenue from only Auckland and Wellington. Why? Because petrol is taxed at the “border” it is the equivalent of a customs duty, and it is was administratively simpler to simply apply it to all petrol sold across the country. Unless a new retail sales tax is applied to petrol on top of fuel excise duty, and oil companies are legally forced to charge it in Auckland alone (better define that), this tax is likely to be applied to the whole country at a lower rate.
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2.Even if it IS applied to Auckland only, it will kill off service stations not far from the Auckland “border”, after all, why would you fill up in Pokeno if you could go to Mercer and pay 10c a litre less?
3. If you have a diesel or LPG vehicles you pay NOTHING extra. Why? Because diesel vehicles don’t pay a fuel tax (because the majority of diesel is not actually used on the roads, and a diesel tax for road use would mean a refund scheme for that diesel), but instead pay road user charges (which charge according to distance and weight). Since road user charges are bought in advance, and there is no way of detecting where in the country they are bought (or used), expect sales of diesel cars to go up in Auckland to avoid the new tax.
4. The money raised isn’t to be spent on roads, but on a rail electrification scheme that at the very best could serve perhaps 10% of Auckland commuters (though so could improved buses at a small fraction of the cost). 87% of Aucklanders don’t work downtown, and around 40% of the remainder wont be anywhere near a railway station. Perhaps an additional 2% work near a station outside the city, but in short this project will do next to nothing for most Aucklanders – except those living near a station who work in town and would rather ride a train than a bus.
This tax is to force you to pay for most of the cost of their journey to work, because the fares raised from these trains pay around a third of the operating costs, and they wont pay a cent towards the capital costs.
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This idea is going ahead, despite official advice, because Helen Clark wants to electrify Auckland rail – it’s like a toy, a big expensive toy she wants to leave for Auckland and be remembered for it. Despite record levels of transport funding through both road user taxes and Crown funding through Land Transport New Zealand (LTNZ), it is telling that LTNZ is NOT willing to fund electrification of Auckland rail. This tells me it is an inferior project to all of the other road and public transport projects that it funds, remember it is spending $2.3 billion this financial year, this is 2.5 times the funding it allocated in the year Labour got elected, and this is after Labour changed the legislation around LTNZ so that public transport projects could be funded at a lower threshold for appraisal than road projects.
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The Greens will support it because they have a fetish for electric trains – the economics don’t matter, it is a matter of pure faith that forcing people to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for trains they will never use is “good”. It is a matter of faith that this will reduce congestion, even though there is a not a single city in the new world that has electrified an existing railway service and seen traffic congestion reduce on the parallel corridors because of the electrification. If you can find, please show me the report on the marginal congestion costs for the parallel corridor before and after the electrification – because I actually would like to see the conditions necessary for that TO work.
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This is about totems – Helen Clark and Michael Cullen are building a electric network of totem poles in Auckland, paid for by a stupid tax that is probably going to be paid for by all petrol motorists, but not paid for at all by around 15% of Auckland motorists who don’t use petrol. Setting aside the foolishness of heavy subsidies for public transport, a network of bus priority lanes across Auckland and luxury buses could do nearly the same job for a fraction of the price – but no, we must bow down to the altar of the railway.
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Auckland is not London, Paris or New York, where new electric metropolitan railways can make a difference (in a few cases). Auckland’s entire rail network carries 3.8 million trips a year with around 70 carriages, in London the Waterloo and City tube line (perhaps one of the least used) alone carried 2.5 times that with 20 carriages (and no the tube cars do not have 3.5 times the capacity of the Auckland ones, they would be lucky to be able to carry double).
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That gives you some indication of the difference in economics.
By the way, you already pay a 0.66c a litre tax to every territorial authority in the country (it's the same for them all making it easy to distribute), you might ask Auckland City Council and all of the others whether they spend their share on transport? Go on, few of the so called journalists in the New Zealand media can be bothered to research these things you see.
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Oh and why are Auckland roads congested? Simple. Everyone pays the same to use them regardless of demand - it is tragedy of the commons. Singapore charges according to demand and congestion is kept at a low level - but no doubt most of you think public ownership and funding of roads works, even though virtually everywhere it happens you get chronic congestion in major cities.