No congestion charging, yet

Congestion charging could soon be coming to New Zealand streets, but it’s not on the cards for Nelson Tasman, not yet anyway.

Last week, the Government announced that it plans to introduce new legislation allowing councils to introduce time-of-use charges later this year.

Time-of-use charging would see motorists pay a fee to drive on the busiest streets at the busiest times.

Drivers could avoid the fee by travelling on another route, by other means such as on the bus, or at a different time, which would see fewer vehicles on the road at peak times.

If you’re unlucky enough to join traffic at the wrong time during peak hours, a journey of about 14 kilometres between Richmond and central Nelson can take 45 minutes or more.

However, the region’s leaders say despite the challenging rush hours, it’s not something that Nelson Tasman should adopt just yet.

“I’m not sure that we are quite ready for it yet because peak congestion is only a relatively short time a day,” says Tasman’s deputy mayor Stuart Bryant.

“If we were having people waiting in queues like they do in Auckland for an hour, that would be a whole different kettle of fish.

“But currently, I can’t see people be very sympathetic to that at all.”

Stuart, who is also the chair of the joint transport committee, suggested that the region should focus on other measures to take the pressure off the roading network.

He highlights the eBus service, which has doubled the patronage numbers of its predecessor, and has been a long-time advocate of transit lanes in some “strategic point”.

But the Hope Bypass, a Road of National Significance that would add capacity to the local road network, isn’t slated to begin construction until at least 2030.

And with the Nelson-Richmond area predicted to grow by about 15,000 over the next 25-30 years, Stuart doesn’t think time-of-use charging should be ruled out for the future.

“As the population is growing and it becomes more and more of an issue… then that’s when it could come into play.”

Nelson Mayor Nick Smith is of a similar mind. “Nobody’s going to potentially rule it out.”

However, he points out that the drive for time-of-use charging has been coming from Auckland and that it’s used in other major cities around the world like Dubai, Seoul, Singapore, and Stockholm.

“These multi-million-people cities are quite different to the sorts of challenges that Nelson has.”

Nick says neither the regional transport committee nor the Nelson council have discussed whether they would want to enact time-of-use charging, and that he would need to see the detail of the legislation before deciding.

“I think it’s less likely for a community like ours.”

His interest was in seeing how time-of-use charging would interact with road-user and fuel excise taxes as technology develops in the future.

Minister of Transport Simeon Brown said congestion was a “tax on time and productivity” in a statement announcing the legislation last week.

“Faster, more reliable travel times will increase productivity, and lower costs for businesses and their customers. That is why we are enabling time-of-use schemes to be put in place.”

Money raised from time-of-use charging would be reinvested into transport infrastructure.