Are you really “subsidising him driving his gas guzzler through my taxes, because I am paying for the Kyoto credits to cover his greenhouse emissions.” Surely the Kyoto credits can be purchased with the windfall GST on petrol and diesel thus avoiding placing any burden on taxes paid by people who don’t use these fossil fuels.

How are you “being partially paid from the public purse to reduce congestion.”? Do you mean because you live in subsidised accomodation within walking distance of Parliament? Hopefully you are not suggesting that public transport reduces congestion. That approach is doomed to failure for the same reasons that building more road capacity is doomed to fail, albeit both can briefly reduce peak congestion before triple convergence kicks in. If you bring together enough people with enough money and/or time to travel you will always get congestion - on footpaths, on trains, on roads. When the time cost of congestion gets too great people and businesses will move somewhere where they can save on time costs without incurring other costs, such as being too far away from a decent latte or a must be seen at nightspot.

There is a thoroughly researched spatial relationship between road capacity building and residential and commercial building developments. The activity generated by the latter consumes the benefits of the former, generally in less than a decade. I have not seen any surveys of property developers to see if they would have built these developments somewhere else with less congestion if the road capacity increase had not happened. But the anecdotal evidence suggests they would have, sometimes on greenfield sites instead of brownfield and sometimes vice versa. Curiously this encouragement of development/redevelopment is one of the alleged benefits of building light rail. The evidence from BART is that rail doesn’t disrupt established communities enough that they are prepared to accept further loss of character in the form of intensive TOD developments. Without TODs around the stations rail simply can’t provide a fast enough aggregate travel time for enough people to make the investment work. By contrast freeways disrupt existing communities sufficiently to encourage redevlopment as low-rise commercial centres with convienient transport access. Both are the result of a commitment to transport planning without a commitment to land use planning. While there are many environmental advantages to be gained from light rail/land use or bus priority/land use schemes no one should ever claim that these schemes will relieve congestion, the best they can hope to do is allow further urban growth with less congestion growth.

Ultimately the solution to congestion in Auckland and Wellington is to do nothing. Let businesses migrate to one of the other regional centres. They’re unlikely to move to other countries because Sydney, Tokyo, Singapore and Mumbai are all more congested than Auckland can ever hope to be. An honest appraisal of the Auckland and Wellington economies reveals congestion as the flipside of agglomeration. Encouraging businesses and government to decentralise their management and administrative functions will have a nuetral impact on the national economy. Less agglomeration efficiency balanced by more transportation efficiency. The only losers will be the current residents of Auckland and Wellington who will lose their excuse to suck at the national tit and will have to pay if they want new infrastructure aimed at enticing even more businesses to centralise their operations in those regions.

The 1976 Auckalnd Transport Review provides some very useful travel survey comparisons between 1963 and 1973. There is some astonishing information on the changing reasons for travel and it’s impact on traffic growth for both private and public transport and especially what it reveals about the dramatic fall in public transport’s share of travel in Auckland.
http://www.petroltax.org.nz/PDF/AucklandTransportReview1976.PDF
The travel survey appendix starts on page 18 of the pdf.
Alternatively access the same pdf from this page which is in chronological order:
http://www.petroltax.org.nz/documents.html

Regards Kevyn

My criticism was more that Paul Henry gave John Key such an easy ride, rather than that he was tough on Russel Norman. A good interviewer would have been tough on both.

Russel has admitted above that he could have done better and should not have allowed himself to be dragged off-topic onto the cross-subsidisation debate.

If you want an example of soft questions then you only need look at the tape of that interview.

Henry reacted to an outrageous (and incorrect) comment made by Russ, perhaps Russ might think a bit more before answering questions next time, either way you cannot blame Henry for the fact that Russ had a bad day.

But, speaking of Fox News, that’s exactly what the Paul Henry interviews with John Key and Russel Norman came across like.

Henry asked Key patsy questions, while he immediately tried to divert Norman off his main point, which was the subsiding of transport emissions by the taxpayer, and onto the more general topic of the complexities and merits of cross-subsidisation - i.e. he tried to prevent Norman from getting his main point across, while he did everything possible to assist Key getting his main point across.

Now, Paul Henry is a former (failed) National Party candidate from a few elections ago, and often talks about how much he loves his gas guzzling cars (owns several of them), so I guess we should expect his interviewing to be “fair and balanced” (as in Fox News)!

Are you suggesting that those of us who have “white” heritage should feel guilty?
How does that work for those with Maori/European blood, should they only feel half as guilty as the full blooded “white” man?

He is being paid from the public purse to produce greenhouse emissions and I am being partially paid from the public purse to reduce congestion.

So yes it is cross subsidisation, but I would argue that paying someone to pollute is a bad subsidy, while paying someone to reduce congestion is a good subsidy. And I failed to get that point across. But you can’t get every point across and i managed to communicate some of the arguments. I actually enjoy a good argument!