Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL (Labour—New Lynn): It's interesting that the House is in agreement that the time for congestion pricing has come. We've heard that from the Labour Party, the National Party, the Green Party, and the ACT Party. There are differing reasons behind it, but nevertheless the agreement is that the time for it has come. And it was interesting—I did not sit on the committee but I did read some of the submissions today and I found that both the New Zealand Initiative and Greater Auckland agreed that the time for congestion pricing had come. There is no particular barrier in terms of what people think about congestion pricing. It does seem to be that the moment is arriving, and that's for good reason.
A couple of weeks ago I was travelling from Matuku Link, a wonderful conservation project in the Waitakere Ranges, to the airport on a Friday afternoon—no, Thursday? Friday? It was an afternoon! I was travelling around about 3.30 or so, and as I travelled down the Northwestern Motorway heading to the airport, I had a comparatively clear journey through the tunnels and on to the airport. But coming along the Northwestern, on the other side of the road as people were heading north out of the city, it was chock-a-block. Car after car after car. All the lanes full and virtually at a standstill. It must have been so hard for all the people sitting in those cars.
This is a regular occurrence on our motorways in Auckland. The congestion is horrendous. But more roads is not the answer, contra the speaker Simon Court, just now—more roads are not the answer. We know what happens when more roads are built. It creates more traffic. It's a really interesting phenomenon which is now well known to road engineers, that simply building another road or adding another lane just actually over time increases the traffic. And indeed, we can see that with what has happened with the Waterview tunnels.
The answer is better use of the existing roads, trying to get our timing right on them, trying to ensure that people use the roads when they need to, but that perhaps they consider alternative modes of transport, or perhaps they time their journeys differently. That is what congestion pricing is about. Again, contra the earlier speaker, it is not about user pays. It's very hard to do that with our roads. They are actually a joint asset owned by all of us and they create the capacity for our joint economy and our joint society to function. Trying to turn it into some sort of user-pays notion sort of a misunderstands why we provide some goods as a public good, not as a private thing that everyone buys into individually.
Simeon Brown: Well, then you'd be opposed to congestion charging.
Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL: The point of the congestion charging is not a revenue raising exercise—and this is sitting in the Government response. The point is to change behaviour, to set the prices, and to charge them in such a way that people consider making alternative decisions about how they get from point A to point B. So it is not about user pricing; it is about changing behaviour.
But there are some important matters to consider when we get around to changing behaviour like that. And I refer in particular to the submission from the National Council of Women of New Zealand, who I find write really sensible submissions. They have pointed out in their submission that if the Government decides to proceed with congestion charge pricing and if local areas, local bodies, decide to take up the opportunity to enable congestion pricing, then we need to have some serious consideration of equity issues. Women frequently have to use the roads at particular times, as they are the ones tasked with getting children to and from school or to and from childcare in time to go to work. So perhaps there are particular issues there. People with disabilities often find that they have to use private cars because they cannot access public transport easily. So there are some particular issues there that need to be considered carefully as well.
Now, the answer is not necessarily to not engage in congestion charging. It's to think carefully about how it's applied, when it's applied, and where it is applied. I think also even part of the answer is, of course, to make sure that we have much better public transport. We know the issues with public transport in Auckland at the moment. We know the things that need to be sorted out, and it's going to take time. But in order to enable congestion pricing to work effectively, we need the public transport as well. Thank you, Madam Speaker.