The Government’s Draft Policy Statement (GPS) on Land Transport contains many ideological burbs and inconsistencies. One of those is around the rail network.
For example, the draft talks about how rail freight investment has seen a significant increase in recent years but rail freight usage has dropped. While this might be technically accurate, it fails to acknowledge that much of the investment is once-in-a-generation spending, rail has many other wider economic benefits, estimated at $1.7-2.1 billion annually from things such as keeping trucks off the roads resulting in less congestion, emissions and better safety outcomes (some of this comes from the metro networks in Auckland and Wellington), despite the investment, there isn’t exactly a level playing field, given the larger, heavier trucks introduced from 2010 onwards that don’t pay enough road user charges to cover the damage they do to our roads, which is a key cause of our pot hole problem.
