The time for Free Public Transport as a solution to the climate crisis is now.
We urgently need to shift people out of private transport and onto public transport.
This would have an enormous benefit on the poorest amongst us who pay 20% of their wage on transport while taking vast numbers of people off the roads in their cars.
We must nationalise our public transport fleet and look at vast new investment inside cities and intercity.
That includes a vast upgrade on rail.
The Truck industry have had political dominance for too long.
Rather than continue to subside the NZ Trucking Mafia, we should subsidise public transport.
The floods you are seeing, the scorching temperatures, the heat waves – ALL of this is happening at speeds and jumps in temperature far outside where Scientists were expecting.
The climate crisis is here and we aren’t ready.
New China crisis poses fresh global threat as ‘extreme’ disaster unfolds
China is facing its most extreme heatwave in 60 years – and the impact is set to be felt worldwide.
Severe heat and drought has plagued the world’s second-biggest economy for weeks on end, with temperatures soaring above 40C in a string of large cities.
As a result, the unprecedented demand for airconditioning has caused the power grid to buckle, while the drought has also reduced water levels and therefore the ability to generate electricity at hydropower plants.
It’s a nightmare scenario for the nation of 1.4 billion, and has seen some provinces resort to drastic measures.
Free public transport and vast upgrade of that infrastructure is a solution and part of the future.
Dairy and meat on the other hand are not.
We have conned ourselves into believing organic farming is the silver bullet.
Turns out it is not…
The most damaging farm products? Organic, pasture-fed beef and lamb
Analysis: You may be amazed by that answer, but the area of land used for grazing is vast compared with the meat and milk produced
…so organic farming is disastrous because the grazing space needed is so destructive.
We urgently need to reset the farming industry from feeding 50million to simply feeding us and our immediate Pacific Whānau.
Anything beyond that is a climate crisis luxury we can’t afford literally.
We need to stop seeing meat and dairy as an export industry and purely as a domestic and limited Pacific region product.
Globalisation is dead and dying.
Synthetic milk and meat will become cheaper than real and once that occurs, the mass manufactured food industry who buy the majority of our milk powder will dump our products.
The entire backbone of the agricultural industry will be snapped.
1 cow makes enough shit for 14 people.
There are 10 million cows in NZ, that’s 140 million humans shining in our streams?
This is no longer tenable.
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Free transport and a reduction in car omissions in dense urban areas should be looked at another way. Sure it costs but we should net out how much taxpayer money would be saved and employee productivity increased by reduction in pollution related respiratory disease. No doubt it will still be a cost but I think we under estimate the benefits. The 2016 estimated costs in relation to vehicle pollution were huge.
You can add the cost of servicing private vehicular transport, the cost of repairing the road network, the cost of policing the traffic flows, and the space taken up with parking buildings to accommodate them.. Within 5 years, the NZ economy will be better of to the tune of billions of dollars…
EV car to all citizens who own an ‘ old’ car. Is way better than free public transport. As not many people use public transport. Because the system is poorly designed compared to Aus and Europe.
I would point out that while councils and government are pouring concrete for Cycle ways tester day in the Press newspaper were 5 pages of adverts for travel to every corner of the World in planes and ships Boeing has orders for 5000 737Max planes so itvis obvious that smarter people than me are predicting air travel for a long time to come . Travel agents are looking for 1000 staff and are bring in staff from Australia ro help out.
While on this climate problem I read yesterday that 80 percent of new batteries for EV car are produced in the evil Empire of China and the factories are powered by the cheapest dirtiest coal going .So much for the looking out for our Pacific cousins.
The problem is that every action has an opposite reaction so solving one problem makes others down the track .We saw a glimpse of this with the last 2 years of covid and no real travel taking place .It seems no lessons were learnt
Yeah it’s the same with say cutting NZ meat production for the climate. Some other country will just take up the slack. As long as there is demand, there will be supply. And if it’s a country with which we have a free trade agreement you can’t even do anything about it. The bright side is that the more pressure we put on domestic farmers the cheaper beef and dairy produce here will get since the countries we’ll be importing from won’t bother with any of our regulations (even current ones). Environmental arbitrage is the future (i.e. exporting our pollution), and it obviously won’t solve a thing. But the greenies I’m sure will be rubbing their nipples like crazy with the “massive gains we’ve made protecting the climate”.
But no, the solution is in giving almost 8k to struggling 8k electric car buyers, so they can virtue signal their support for artisan Cobalt mining in DRC and pollution in China.
Public ownership of public transport would be a heresy. Almost as evil as suggesting that all staff must use AT busses and trains instead of flash new cars.
We also need more private cars on the roads to ensure healthy return on umpteen thousand cameras.
Politicians should also be forced to use public transport as Olaf Palme did.
Martyn, it’s a YES from me.
Getting people onto public transport is essential for congestion and emission reduction.
Like hyper-tourism hyper-farming is unsustainable.
The passing of the Land Transport Act in 1981 caused an immediate upsurge in the costs of maintaining a road network that. in the North Island at least, wasn’t built to handle heavy traffic.. This has amounted to at least hundreds of millions of dollars a year at a minimum, and as the necessary upgrades, and extensions to the network undertaken by, in the main, Labour governments are added, has added to that cost.. This won’t ever stop becoming more expensive by the year to maintain, even when we have a government that doesn’t steal roading money to pay their patrons for their support at election time… Another tory government, and we can pretty much give up on having a road network that would be superior to a goat trail… The National party policy of attacking unions, and destroying the rail network as part of the strategy to return NZ back to the “good old days” of the Empire has done nothing but teach any who had the wit to listen, just how much we need to divest ourselves of the “Colonial descendants” who care nothing for the country, above their own self interests… The economics of Georgian England are no longer, and haven’t been workable, or rational since before they arrived here to take over the resource base here.. Time they were sidelined, permanently…
Overpopulation, overconsumption and greed tackling these points along with better and fairer use of resources would seem too be good starting points to clean up our planet.
It will be interesting to see if recent changes at the KiwiRail Board and Executive changes translate to the critical upgrades of the track network in order to enable mode shift from road to rail for both freight and passenger transport. If they do it’s been a long time coming. KiwiRail’s poor performance to date has been an important tool for the road transport lobby.
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