Transporting Aucklanders: Capitalist Cars versus Socialist Trains
Mike Lee embraces the future of public transport.
WHY CAN’T WE get public transport right in New Zealand’s largest city? Visit any other world city and you will find buses, trams, light-rail networks and extraordinarily fast and efficient heavy rail services. Literally millions of people avail themselves of these services every day. Just imagine London, Paris, New York and Sydney without their light-rail services (both over and underground). Imagine Japan and China without their bullet trains. Then ponder the indefatigable prejudice of New Zealanders against anything that runs on rails.
To hear Kiwis tell it, you would think that everywhere else in the world trains have gone the way of the horse and buggy. That there is no modern city foolish enough to rely upon anything other than the private automobile to get its citizens from A to B.
Railways? Locomotives? Steel wheels? It’s all so very Nineteenth Century!
Where does this prejudice come from? The answer, as always, is a combination of economic, political and cultural factors. The combination of big oil, big auto and big construction companies had a huge vested interest in a post-war future than ran on roads – not rails. American industry was geared-up for the mass production of motor vehicles. The GIs who had bounced around in jeeps and lorries during World War II would be looking for a smoother ride in peacetime.
They would also be looking for homes in the brand new suburbs that were springing-up on the fringes of all the big cities. Increasingly, travelling to work in those big cities would be undertaken in private motor vehicles on vast freeways. In Los Angeles, just to make sure the future belonged to the automobile, the powers-that-be ripped up the city’s highly efficient light-rail network. The same thing happened in Auckland.
The demise of the railways wasn’t just about General Motors, Firestone and Texaco, however. There was a powerful cultural element to the automobile-centric post-war world. Ever since the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, the popular vision of the future was one in which the ordinary man drove himself.
Invented in the late nineteenth century, the automobile has always been a symbol of individual freedom. Initially, the thrill of escaping at speed was reserved for the very wealthy. Thanks to Henry Ford, however, automobile ownership could be democratised. Progress towards universal car ownership may have been slowed by the Great Depression and the needs of the war, but the vision of vast freeways filled with cars – all travelling towards their owner’s suburban Shangri-La – which had enthralled those millions of visitors to the 1939 World’s Fair was simply too good a future for politicians to refuse.
Besides, the individualism which automobile ownership both encouraged and expressed offered a visceral political contrast to the carless proletarians of the Soviet Bloc. Packed into their precious “Metro”, the dragooned masses of Moscow were in no position to choose – let alone steer – their own path towards life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Road versus Rail thus became yet another Cold War stand-off. In a nutshell: socialists rode trains; capitalists drove cars.
Nowhere was this cultural-political dichotomy more thoroughly internalised than in post-war New Zealand. And nowhere in post-war New Zealand was the automobile culture, and all it stood for, more aggressively enabled than in Auckland. The rail-centric plan for Auckland’s post-war development which Labour and its radical state-planners had appended to the 1946 edition of Hansard (unearthed more than a decade ago by Dr Chris Harris) would have produced a very different city to the one our politicians are frantically struggling to retrofit in 2018.
The underlying planning assumption which would have guided the growth of post-war Auckland was that cities are, in essence, exercises in collective well-being – not individual self-fulfilment. Not surprisingly, National was having none of that. New Zealanders didn’t want the dreary socialism of grimy public railway carriages. What they wanted were bright new cars from England and America – Humbers and Fords. New vehicles and new horizons. Just like in the movies!
And so it has been in Auckland for the past seventy years. The denigration of public transport and public housing. The false characterisation of railway technology as uncomfortable and inefficient (just like socialism!) and the misrepresentation of automobiles and motorways as the only alternative that works (just like capitalism!). Even when the brute realities of urban engineering forced both central and local government to acknowledge the claims of collectivism they only did so reluctantly, truculently, inefficiently and stupidly. Even the Greens, rather than rub shoulders with the bus- and train-travelling working poor, devote their energies instead to promoting the solitary middle-class vice of cycling.
Lone voices of sanity in this sorry saga: the former Auckland mayor, Sir Dove Meyer Robinson; the former chair of the Auckland Regional Authority, Mike Lee; are derided as cranks and dinosaurs. How could they not be? Both advocated staunchly for rail: the only mode of transport that offers Aucklanders the slightest hope for a sustainable urban future founded on collective well-being.
‘Even the Greens, rather than rub shoulders with the bus- and train-travelling working poor, devote their energies instead to promoting the solitary middle-class vice of cycling.’
That really is pretty outrageous, Chris, to describe cycling as a vice! -especially when cycling is one of the few forms of mechanised transport that is does not require massive daily inputs of fossil-fuel-derived energy and does not produce significant life-threatening emissions.
Whilst the general theme of your argument -poorly planned transport in Auckland and control of the political processes by vested interest groups- is valid, please do not pretend that rail transport has a long-term future. It may have a slightly longer future than mass transport by car if a future government can organise itself better than any government that has existed in the past 40 years has.
‘…rail: the only mode of transport that offers Aucklanders the slightest hope for a sustainable urban future founded on collective well-being.’
Here we come to the nub of the matter. Just how much hope is ‘the slightest hope’?
We do need to recognise that industrial civilisation is at the heart of the ‘problems’ we face, and no amount of switching from one component of industrial civilisation to another will fix the predicament humanity is now in. At the moment I suspect that less than 1% of the NZ populace recognises that essential truth.
For the moment the Auckland economy is being propped up by huge inputs of physical resources -oil, gas, water, food, clothing etc.- from elsewhere; some from other parts of NZ; much from overseas. How long that can continue is uncertain but there is plenty of evidence it will not continue for much longer, i.e. not even one decade into the future.
In addition to the unsustainability with respect to resources, there is the matter of how the ongoing overheating of the planet will impact the Auckland region; there will certainly be increased stress on infrastructure (and finances and energy resources) as climate chaos increases and delivers ever-greater torrential rain episodes and flooding (probably interspersed with record heatwaves and droughts); longer term a very significant sea level rise is certain. Again, the timing is uncertain but reasonable analysis indicates between 1 metre and 7 metres of sea level rise by mid-century. Even a low-side rise would inundate much of the rail infrastructure currently in place and cut the motorway link south of Otahuhu (and cover the airport near Mangere; Ardmore won’ t be inundated but there won’t be any fuel for planes in the not-too-distant future)
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People like Mike Lee were confronted with all the evidence relating to climate and energy over a decade ago, and chose to ignore it. And people like Mike Lee still choose to ignore the evidence.
One of the most interesting websites at the moment is the Australian Bureau of Meteorology because it publishes daily rainfall data; each day that passes with little or no rain raises the likelihood that the NSW economy will soon collapse, and that a little further down the track (pardon the rail metaphor) the major urban centres of the east coast will run out of water. They will still have superb rail systems but will effectively be uninhabitable. I guess there is a lot of praying at the moment.
http://www.bom.gov.au/jsp/awap/rain/index.jsp?colour=colour&time=latest&step=0&map=totals&period=daily&area=nat
I’m not quite sure AFKTT in what way a system of mass transit, based on electrical energy, derived from renewable sources (hydro, wind, solar) can be considered unsustainable.
Your assumption seems to be that industrial civilisation is about to disappear altogether. That the human population will crash to at least pre-industrial revolution levels. That, essentially, humanity will either revert to iron-age conditions, or become extinct.
Promoting such views may well turn out to be the most realistic response to climate change. But, it is also a response which takes you out of all the other less apocalyptic discussions about humanity’s future.
Personally, and like Mike Lee, I prefer to conduct myself as if there is some hope we human-beings can come through this existential challenge as a humbler and much more ecologically sensitive species.
More constructive, I think, than howling at the moon. (Although, I will concede, howling at the moon can be a very cathartic experience!)
Ah, hope. That is an interesting topic in it’s own right, isn’t it Chris.
Is it a blessing or a curse? There are differing opinions on that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora%27s_box
I see that oil prices have risen lately (now around $78 for Brent crude), thereby increasing the price of fuel.
Do we hope that the international price of oil increases dramatically and makes motor fuel less affordable?
It is probably the only thing that will force a rapid change in attitudes, yet would impact the poor much more than on the rich.
When you say any other city, you clearly don’t mean Wellington where out transport turned into its own version of hell.
The common denominator between the two cities is that the chaos was preceded by tendering out the contract to run buses. Thank goodness I have a car.
Z, hell is too kind a word to describe the torturous Wellington bus system. There is no word. Just some strong arguments for re-establishing psychiatric hospitals for both the enablers of the new bus system, and its stress-engulfed victims. It is indefensible.
Thank goodness Steven Joyce and his cohort have gone from government. It was he who forced the process of competitive tendering for public transport (the so-called “Public Transport Operating Model”), as well as he who wrong-headedly committed at least $10 billion of precious transport-funding to build a few Roads of Unnecessary Extravagance (RUEs). Mr Joyce has a lot to answer for, in locking us further into the grim scenario Chris Trotter outlines above. Thanks Steven. Now we have to work even harder to extricate ourselves.
Some years ago Stagecoach, which operated Wellington and Hutt Valley buses, and Mana-Newllands Bus Co., which ran the northern suburbs buses, wanted to amalgamate; but The Commerce Commission turned them down, arguing that it would create a monopoly. However having all services under one roof would have provided many advantages – eg integrated ticketing, and better route planning and organisation. Competition between the two companies, I think, brought about much congestion in the city.
The PTOM tendering process yielded 22% more service kilometres in Auckland for the same cost. That’s a real win. If Wellington has messed up the implementation that’s a shame on what has historically been a good and well patronised public transport system.
Oh, and BTW, AFKTT. The comment about the solitary vice of cycling was a joke.
When considering apocalyptic themes, I find it helps to inject a little humour from time-to-time.
Apologies to all you MAMILs out there!
MAMILS ?, Howling? Apocalypse ?
And howling at the moon ???
Well here’s Ozzie and he’s been barking at the moon. And he thinks we’re all barking mad ,…
Ozzy Osbourne – Bark At The Moon – YouTube
Video for bark at the moon ozzy osbourne youtube▶ 4:28
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muzAbAq3Bx8
And that spectacular guitarist is born again christian Zac Wylde , – and a good mate of Ozzies !
🙂
No one in the rest of the country CARES about Aucklands crisis’s, we just wish you lot would stay there.
In the meantime, until the apocalypse arrives, folk have to get to work, kids get to school, and the sick who can’t afford taxis, have to get to the hospital and so on.
Wellington transport is clearly a class issue. It is about people who don’t really matter. It seems like maybe it’s been ok’d by some brain-damaged football player- like not the sort of person who would have the ubiquitous Oxford PhD.
I doubt if anyone involved in its implementation has a clue about what it is like being a parent hastening to daycare, racing for an invisible bus, being dumped in a nutty hub to wait another bus, seeing a bus trundle past too full to stop, arriving at the sort of work place where being late means a black mark – impacting on others’ work, so that everyone involved starts the day stressed and anxious. Standing outside a classroom door too scared to go in late again.
Why ? Because the sort of people who rely on public transport don’t really matter. It’s not like they’re neighbours.
Having lived and worked in London relying on public transport as people can and do over there, and where it is an integral part of successful big city functioning, I suggest that everyone responsible for stuffing up Wellington’s transport should be gifted with a bottle of gin and told to toddle off.
All aboard the train to paradise eh chris. But you’re not really sure that’s where it’s going are you. Not when you look closely at the conductor and the motorman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxTywiItvOo
Good old Muldoon put an end to that socialist nonsense, though he was happy to get his Railways Gold card..
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/77568194/robert-muldoons-free-train-pass-for-sale-on-trade-me
ps its Myer not Meyer. We don’t want to start up any Corbynesque anti semitism accusations.
you could include ol’ Mr. Hubbard in your short list of Lone voices of sanity, it was big on the platform with which he was voted in as mayor before the systematic ad hominem politicking choked his progressive vision and got him voted out again after only one term, by the same Tory snide that he originally defeated no less!
I went to Moscow in the eighties – 5 Kopeks would buy a ticket to take you anywhere in the city on train or bus. If Auckland priced its public transport like that, then multitudes would use it.
Never the less I would still drive my car, because it is incredibly more convenient for getting to multiple places, carrying loads, staying out of the rain, avoiding walks to public transport pick up points, constrains children, tows trailers, carries hitch hikers and is faster in terms of trip time than public transport (efficiency), etc, etc,
Mean while Auckland Transport is narrowing roads to build cycle ways. Commuters dont use bikes and definitely dont use them one day out of two when its raining in Auckland. Take a drive around Auckland, you will see there are no cyclists on the cycle ways except on the weekend. Cycling is a sport and recreational activity. Money spent on it ought to come out of the same budget as rugby fields.
Looking to the future I will load my roof with solar panels and buy an electric vehicle like everyone else. Sustainably powered and convenient transport.