Genter Julie AnneREGULATORY SYSTEMS (TRANSPORT) AMENDMENT BILLSecond ReadingDebate resumed from 25 February.Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): Tēnā koe Madam Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. I rise in support of this bill the Regulatory Systems (Transport) Amendment Bill. It's been some weeks now since the first part of the debate so I'll just very briefly for people watching at home outline what this bill is doing. It's really just tidying up certain processes so that things can move a bit quicker in the transport space. One is providing for the creation of transport instruments. There's a whole lot of regulations and rules that affect the transport sector anything from the maximum penalty that you might be charged for when you park your car illegally and it gets towed that type of stuff—there's all sorts of things like that. At the moment there isn't the type of instrument that means that the officials can kind of just get on with it and make the sorts of updates that need to happen regularly over time and everything has to go through a Government process. This allows for a more streamlined process which means that the Minister of Transport can delegate accountability for certain rules and regulations to lower-level authorities through the creation of transport instruments. I think what that will mean is just that our rules and regulations in transport can stay up to date and fit for purpose. Otherwise it just gets kind of caught up in a massive process which isn't always necessary for small changes.It also makes some changes to the powers of exemption from regulations and rules made under the land and maritime Acts. It increases the board size of the transport agency Waka Kotahi. Also some of the other organisations like the Civil Aviation Authority and Maritime New Zealand can have the ability of having more people appointed to their board. I think that's a particularly good thing in the case of Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency which has nearly 2000 staff and an incredible mandate huge amount of responsibility right across the country. In order to have effective governance for an organisation that is that large you really do need more than the current number of board members. This is only making a slight change from at least six to more than eight to at least seven and no more than nine. Then there's some changes to maximum fines allowed in regulations made under the Maritime Transport Act increasing the time period a vehicle can be impounded to collect evidence after a serious crash or incident and making the Chatham Islands Council a regional council under Part 3A of the Maritime Transport Act.All of this sounds like—I guess it's a little bit difficult to relate this bill necessarily to people's everyday lives but I did during this debate just want to take the opportunity to respond to some of the arguments that were put forward earlier in the debate by Michael Woodhouse the spokesperson for transport for the National Party. I think that there's a whole lot of misconceptions particularly from the National Party on what effective transport investment is in the 21st century and I can really understand their confusion about it. They've long been advocates for significant investment in very short very expensive bits of highway. You know it is understandable that people would think Oh if we have these really expensive highway connections it's going to make it easier to drive from point A to point B." Unfortunately the overwhelming evidence from the second half of the 20th century where we did a lot of highway building is that it doesn't reduce congestion and make it easier for people to get around. It does have a lot of negative unintended side effects which have to do with the way that land use is influenced. When you build a highway you very briefly reduce congestion maybe up to the first five years—but of course the design life of the road itself should be more like 20 to 40 years—but after about five years there's overwhelming evidence from North American cities and also from here in New Zealand that within about five years there's no reduction in congestion because the highway—Simon Court: Waterview Tunnel's fantastic.Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: Well it's not quite been open five years has it Mr Court? The thing is that when you make it easier for more people to drive at peak time what happens is more businesses and households make decisions to live further away and then they rely more on their cars and then after about five years the congestion comes back because you get an increase in VKT—vehicle kilometres travelled.Simon Court: Tell that to the tradies of West Auckland.Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: I mean one would think that the ACT Party would understand markets and what I'm hearing right now from their resident engineer is that engineers actually don't understand markets. They've been planning around more cars coming no matter what the price—Simon Court: My turn next and we'll let the voters be the judge.Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: —no matter what the cost is. This is just empirical; it's not a matter of opinion Mr Court. If you look at the papers The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion done by the Toronto University Department of Economics that looks at data from 50 cities it really overwhelmingly concludes that every time we spend billions and billions of dollars investing in a small number of cars to be able to get on the network it results in more congestion a more car-dependent land use pattern which actually reduces people's choice it reduces their ability to get around. Not everybody can afford a car; not everyone can drive. We have unintentionally created towns and cities where our youngest residents—you know children aged 12—are no longer able to independently get around. They're forced to be driven by their parents from place to place.Simon Court: Nothing to do with motorways.Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: So whether it's motorways the reality is that there's an opportunity for a much more efficient transport system and this means investing in the modes that have been under-invested in. When we start to reduce the unintentional subsidies that exist for single-occupant vehicle trips—that's one person driving alone in a car at peak time which is of course the average vehicle occupancy at peak time in all of our major cities is 1.1. By unintentionally planning everything around one person one car we have made it difficult if not impossible for people to do anything but use a car so we have unintentionally taken away those choices from people. The whole system will work more efficiently when we invest in those missing alternatives like safe cycling for short trips; like frequent reliable affordable public transport. The more we invest in it the more we put it out there the more people take it and the less congestion there is on our roads. Then of course the people who need to use the road network in their cars and trucks are better off if parents don't have to take their kids to school if they can get on their bikes and walk and scoot safely. The tradies are better off because they are a minority of cars on the network. They're better off when you invest in the alternatives. I guess what really reigns here for the right—it's really clear from the interjections from the ACT Party here—is they're not interested in empirical evidence they're not interested in efficient solutions; they're interested in a culture war that says we should build stuff for cars no matter how ineffective it is at helping people get around our towns and cities.Simon Court: We're interested in relieving congestion.Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: The way that you can reduce congestion—yes you can do it through congestion pricing Mr Court and there are five to seven cities in the world that have implemented congestion charging. There are some commonalities amongst those cities—so Singapore the City of London Stockholm Gothenburg Milan; all of them had much higher investment in public transport before they went to congestion charging so when they went to congestion charging that infrastructure was already there and people could switch to it.Simon Court: Let's have both.Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: They also had much higher prices—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Order! Mr Court.Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: —and smaller supply of parking. So you know we've still got room to go here in New Zealand but the reality is that the number one priority if we want to make it easier for people and goods to move around this country the best way to do that is to invest in rapid transit in our cities in frequent rail between our cities and improving the options for coastal shipping and rail to move goods. That actually costs less than putting the next car or truck on the road.The beauty of investing in green alternatives to the roading network is that they free up the roading network itself. Those investments help the people who use the roads. The roading network is there; of course it should be made safer and that's something I worked on quite a lot in the last term of Government. It's not made safer through mega-projects that cost billions of dollars for 3 to 5 kilometres; it's made safer through things like median barriers through slight widening through safer passing lanes on thousands of kilometres of roading network that we have across the country and through safer speeds where that's appropriate.So the Green Party will still be here talking about a sensible transport investment. We invite our colleagues to the right in the ACT Party and the National Party to come on board because this should not be a political football. New Zealand has so much to gain from a rational sensible investment in transport from this day forward."