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people getting on a train in Auckland
Photo: Getty Images

SocietyFebruary 18, 2021

Why doesn’t New Zealand just make public transport free?

people getting on a train in Auckland
Photo: Getty Images

Ditching the fees may seem like an easy way to reduce carbon emissions and help transport poverty. But, as environmental sociologist Kirsty Wild explains, free PT is far from a silver bullet.

When it comes to carbon fairness, transport is a bit of a minefield. Should low-income communities get cycleways because they deserve the investment? Or is this just imposing a responsibility to be “green” on to already overburdened, time-poor communities? Perhaps the cycleways should go into wealthier communities, who should bear a greater responsibility to get out of their cars and on their bikes, given their much more substantial carbon emissions? Put them here, put them there, or perhaps put them nowhere, as many councils seem to regularly settle on.

The issue of “free” public transport is another hella-complex policy call. Ultimately, cities and countries that have decided to go down this route to reduce carbon emissions have also felt a pretty strong call to do something about transport poverty. In other words, if it doesn’t produce striking gains on the carbon front, at least we will have reduced the daily misery of financial insecurity, debt, foregone mobility and forced walking for all the New Zealanders who basically can’t afford any form of transport at all, public or private.

I wish we had an abundance of free-public-transport experimental studies that we could dig into for evidence on carbon reduction, but we don’t. What we do have suggests that just making PT free on its own probably won’t make much of a dent in carbon emissions. You also need to make it better, and you need to reduce public subsidies for drivers (parking, road building etc) and shift this over to PT. And still, there will be an experimental element to it all. Modelling for Auckland Council suggests, for instance, that if we move people onto PT, then this will likely free up the roads a bit which will likely… induce more driving, leading to very modest carbon cuts. Driving reduction strategies are clearly the twin sister of free public transport. 

Free public transport probably matters the most to those on low incomes, and those living with disability. Introduce congestion charges and the like and use them to make public transport free for Community Services Card holders, and the Total Mobility scheme free for people living with disability. Despite the debates about the fairness of congestion charging, so far the evidence suggests that it’s pro-equity if you use it to fund public transport. Low-income New Zealanders and disabled New Zealanders are the ones who most urgently need affordable, low-carbon transport options, so let’s make it happen. Targeting has its limitations, but removal of part charges for these groups is long overdue.

And remember not to tie your colours too strongly or absolutely to the mast of public transport. In public health, we work with the “healthy transport pyramid” that recognises that when you feed all the different goods into the model (health, CO2, wellbeing, user satisfaction), it spits out walking and cycling as your top priority for investment. They are the lowest cost, most health-enhancing, and produce the least CO2. With e-biking, the “active transport radius” has now expanded to compete with heavy vehicle public transport over both short and medium-distance trips (0-15km). In other words, walking and biking infrastructure, and free access to e-bikes, might be a better “public transport” spend in some areas.

Finally, experience suggests that if you want to experiment with more “free” stuff in the transport world as a way to address either carbon emissions or poverty, you will have some serious dogma to confront. Mayors of cities who have experimented with free public transport have had much to say about the need to cut through received and pedalled (mis)information. Debates about making public transport free seem particularly hamstrung by a few sometimes understandable and sometimes slightly mean-spirited and inaccurate objections that have a decidedly neoliberal flavour. Here are the top four contenders, unpacked:

  1. People don’t appreciate free stuff, and they will trash it. Perhaps tell that to all the people who enjoy (and on the whole don’t trash) our free libraries and parks. In fact the evidence suggests the opposite: making things free actually gives them a “premium” that increases their attractiveness over and above the cost savings involved.
  2. Public transport provides both a public and a private benefit so it should always attract “part charges”. This is really only true for middle-class and high-income people. For low-income people, the evidence is pretty overwhelming that it’s a social good, and treating it like a market good at all is creating situations where lower income New Zealanders are having to trade off food and transport costs.
  3. If we make public transport free, then buses and trains will become “mobile community centres”, and vandalism and antisocial behaviour will increase. Drivers shouldn’t have to deal with this. There is a little bit of evidence to support this. But I would argue that it is the same stuff that our free libraries have to deal with, and they don’t deal with it by introducing entry charges to keep people out who might have nowhere else to go or might have drug or addiction issues. This is, of course, yet another argument for dealing with homelessness, which now affects 1 in 100 people in Aotearoa. It is not a compelling argument for part charges on public transport.
  4. We can spend the money on removing part charges on public transport (for some or everyone), or we can spend it on improving public transport frequency and quality: pick one. You can have hospitals, or you can have drugs to put in them: pick one. Come on, in one of the richest countries in the world, this is really an argument?

So, deciding to remove part charges on public transport (for some or everyone) as a carbon-emission-reduction strategy might require both a degree of comfort with acting before all the evidence is in and a commitment to tweak and experiment – because urgency might trump perfect empirical resolution. Such a move, however, would be guaranteed to reduce the misery of transport poverty in Aotearoa.

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Pedestrians walk past a person rough sleeping on High Street in central Auckland in October 2020 (Photo: Lynn Grieveson/Getty Images
Pedestrians walk past a person rough sleeping on High Street in central Auckland in October 2020 (Photo: Lynn Grieveson/Getty Images

SocietyFebruary 17, 2021

Those with less getting left behind, new Sallies report shows

Pedestrians walk past a person rough sleeping on High Street in central Auckland in October 2020 (Photo: Lynn Grieveson/Getty Images
Pedestrians walk past a person rough sleeping on High Street in central Auckland in October 2020 (Photo: Lynn Grieveson/Getty Images

The annual Salvation Army state of the nation report shows that for many people already doing it tough, life got much harder in 2020. Alex Braae reports. 

Thousands of new people approached the Salvation Army for assistance over 2020, and Ronji Tanielu is worried about them becoming regulars. 

Tanielu is a lawyer, and a principal advisor at the Salvation Army. He co-authored the Salvation Army’s annual state of the nation report, which was released this morning, with Paul Barber and Ana Ika. The report paints a picture of a country in the grip of a K-shaped recovery – where those with more are going up, and those with less are going in the opposite direction. 

The Salvation Army sees about 120,000 people a year, often the most marginalised and vulnerable New Zealanders. Their lives have got harder as a result of Covid-19. 

“To be honest, Covid, if anything, made the cracks in their lives get worse. So they came into the Covid situation with cracks – addiction, housing, budgeting, child poverty. Covid magnified those cracks,” said Tanielu. 

The number the organisation often focuses on to get a picture of need is how many food parcels go out. More than 113,000 were distributed over the course of 2020. It is a “disgrace for our nation” to have so much poverty, said Tanielu. 

That number is almost double what was distributed in 2019, and a lot of that need came from new people turning up. An estimated 10,000 new clients used Salvation Army services over 2020, primarily coming from food bank referrals. 

“They were probably donating to food banks in 2019, and because of Covid, the hardship and job losses, their dominoes started falling. And they ended up receiving a food parcel in 2020,” said Tanielu.

“That’s what Covid has revealed. There was an existing group of people in hardship who really needed help. But there’s a changing face of hardship that New Zealanders really need to be worried about. 

“Because if they tip over into our normal clientele, who already have numerous complex issues, we’re on a hiding to nothing, to be honest, because we’re just going to continue to be stretched.” 

The Salvation Army’s Ronji Tanielu (Photo: Maria Slade)

The overall state of the country presented in the report is bleak, focusing in on those who are living in the worst economic deprivation and social hardship. It often manifests itself in poorer quality housing, worse health outcomes, and greater rates of addiction. 

Child poverty in particular, and inequality in general, has been a persistent thorn in the side of the current government, which took office promising to start turning it around. The 2018 Welfare Expert Advisory Group report has become a case in point – in the years since, only a small number of the recommendations have been implemented.

The social housing waitlist register has now ballooned to more than 22,000 applicants, with some of those people being single, and others having children and dependents. Tanielu said there are personal stories behind every single one of those numbers. 

“I remember working with a solo mother with several children, who was living in a motel situation that was extremely unsafe. That’s not an uncommon situation for people on the register.” 

“I remember working with some guys who had just been released from prison. No family would take them in, there was no safe place for them to be housed. And so they ended up in a really risky boarding house situation, until we transitioned them into our transitional housing.” 

Boarding houses in particular concern Tanielu, because of the lack of support for the people living in them. He gave examples of people who were trying to recover from addictions having to live under the same roof as people selling methamphetamine. 

People on the social housing register were often those who “nobody wants to house”, said Tanielu, which created situations where vulnerable people are placed with other vulnerable people. 

There is also a big difference between transitional housing and emergency housing. Transitional housing tends to involve more support, while emergency housing can be much more sparse and isolating. 

“There’s about 3,000 transitional housing places around the country, and these are 12-week stays. The Salvation Army works with about 1,000 of them. Over half of our transitional housing clients are Māori. They’re meant to stay 12 weeks, but they end up staying much more because we just can’t transition them out to anywhere safe.” 

The report showed that Māori and Pasifika continue to bear the brunt of poverty at disproportionate rates to the rest of the country. But Tanielu said it shouldn’t be seen as an issue for only a few communities. 

“Poverty isn’t just a Māori and Pasifika issue, it’s a national issue. And that’s why we call it a national disgrace.” 

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