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Britomart Train Station, Auckland (Getty Images)
Britomart Train Station, Auckland (Getty Images)

SocietyAugust 19, 2019

Shrink time, not space: How trains could revitalise the regions

Staff Writer
Britomart Train Station, Auckland (Getty Images)
Britomart Train Station, Auckland (Getty Images)

High speed rail links between cities could play a massive role in revitalising regional New Zealand, says a visiting transport infrastructure expert. Professor Andrew McNaughton spoke to Alex Braae.

Imagine commuting from Hamilton to Auckland, and it only taking an hour to get there. 

It’s a vision of how the right transport infrastructure, based around trains in particular, could reshape how people get around the country, and where they can live to do that.

It’s not just that trains could help bring the cities themselves closer together, says Professor Andrew McNaughton, a globally recognised expert in high speed rail. The benefits of such an investment could also turn the fortunes of small towns that run alongside the tracks around.

Professor McNaughton has recently been working in New South Wales. Before that, he has consulted in the Czech Republic, and spent decades working in transport infrastructure engineering in the UK.

He’ll be making the keynote speech at the upcoming Building Nations conference being run by Infrastructure NZ, to talk about the role transport plays in revitalising regional economies, and “spreading the social benefits of having thriving regional cities not getting left behind.” Professor McNaughton spoke to The Spinoff ahead of the conference.

So tell me about some of the things you’ll be talking about at Building Nations.

I don’t talk about trains and technical stuff. What I talk about is how you shrink time.

That’s an idea that has come up a few times in your other talks – talking about time rather than speed. Could you unpack what you mean by that?

I call it the geography of time, for want of a better strapline. Here’s what I’m doing in Australia: What investment in better transport would make a difference to the regional cities of New South Wales, and their connectivity? I know that’s a horrible word, connectivity. But it basically says people are in places ultimately because of jobs, so how do you attract jobs to a place? Business will go where there’s good connectivity.

So what does connectivity mean to you then?

It’s not just about the chief executive going to see his mates for coffee. It’s a sense of isolation, and it’s not about kilometres. You measure in time: How long does it take me to commute? How long does it take me to meet the people I want to sign a contract with? How long does it take me to get to where the financiers and corporate types I’ll need from time to time? Can I attract people with the right skills, and why would they ever come to this city?

But people’s choices of where to live are also influenced by other factors right?

Well, yes, they might have great lifestyles. You can get more for your money, and get a great house and kids can play in the backyard. But actually, it’s a bloody long way from anywhere. So what I’m doing in New South Wales is thinking about places like Wollongong and Newcastle, [places] out west like Bathurst. It’s not about the Chinese-style, high speed trains whizzing across the face of the earth. This just says, you know what, the area south of Wollongong, just 100kms away from Sydney, is depopulating. New industry won’t go there, because it’s three hours from Sydney.

When it comes to depopulation, and thinking about the case of regional New Zealand, does our relative lack of population make this more difficult to support this sort of infrastructure?

You have to think more cleverly, and be more selective. You’re not going to be able to justify a transport infrastructure investment for every 20,000 person town in the country. But you can look very carefully at where you can make a difference. So it’s not a one size fits all, and if you’ve got a 20,000 person city that’s 400 kilometres from Auckland –

Something like Gisborne, for example –

Then what sort of infrastructure does it need? It probably needs a decent regional airport, and to not have fares that are beyond the reach of all but a plutocrat. What is the right solution? What is good enough? If it won’t make any difference, don’t waste the money.

So in terms of picking out modes of transport then, why rail, as opposed to massive investments in the roads?

If you’ve got a critical mass of people, [rail] is very efficient. It’s very economically efficient. It’s not one person each in a two-ton tin box. It’s a high capacity system. And if you can line it up so it has multiple uses – and this is more relevant in a country like New Zealand – then it’s not just about end-to-end travel. Rail is efficient from a people-moving capacity, and a freight-moving capacity. It’s low energy, and for the 21st century, it’s green. I don’t buy the electrification of road transport as a reality, except in deep cities, because you’ve got to have a huge investment in battery technology to go long distances, and you look at what goes into a battery, and what needs to be mined to make them.

What can rail offer in terms of economic development along the route of the line?

Well, do we decide that, say, the area on a line becomes rezoned as a ‘technology corridor?’ It gives the opportunity to grow small places in between cities that would have never justified their own link, but because they’re on the route they get lucky.

What is the optimal time for a commute in your view?

It works really well if we can put cities within an hour of each other. When people ask if it’s high speed, or fast, and this is another strapline of mine – it’s as fast as it needs to be, to get people within a certain time distance. So start with two cities, and say they need to be an hour apart. And we need to get real about it too. If it’s Wellington and Auckland, an hour apart is an aeroplane.

I’m not coming to New Zealand to sell snake oil, I’m coming to New Zealand to show what has been achieved in other places around the world, with population densities not to dissimilar to your own. But also, recognising the realities of New Zealand means there will only be certain places where this makes a difference.

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The big question then: how?

If you want to make a difference, you line up the whole of government. You say, where are we going to put our science parks, to provide the jobs of tomorrow? And they drive off universities, so where are we going to encourage campuses to grow? And not just wherever the vice-chancellor thinks there’s a great golf course. Are we going to line up land-use planning and rezoning? Does the local authority want to grow, or is it a nice rural place that says actually, we don’t want that. You can’t force that on people if they don’t want it. But if you’re looking at new industries, people need to be able to connect with each other.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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All of New Zealand looks like this always. Photo: Getty
All of New Zealand looks like this always. Photo: Getty

SocietyAugust 19, 2019

Everyone says they’re moving to New Zealand – ray of light in a bleak world

Contributing writer
All of New Zealand looks like this always. Photo: Getty
All of New Zealand looks like this always. Photo: Getty

New Zealand has long been the world’s imagined lifeboat – and increasingly for something more than just escape, writes Elle Hunt.

One Friday morning in January 1847, Charles Dickens wrote to his friend John Forster that he was “disposed to go to New Zealand and start a magazine”. The quote was circulated in an editorial by The Listener last week as the seed of the idea whence it came. But Dickens’ comment – made after a poor review in the “good old Times” of London had left him sleepless, irritable and “hardly able to work – came from a place of exasperation, not serious inquiry. Forster wrote of Dickens: “soon he sprang up, as usual, more erect for the moment’s pressure”.

Dickens’ passing remark reminded me of those I hear with some regularity in London: “Time for the cabin in the South Island,” posted beneath a story about Brexit or Trump or global warming; the cheery chorus of “Let’s all move to New Zealand!” whenever any of the three crop up at the pub or a dinner party. It’s heartfelt, but said with all the sincerity of Homer’s suggestion that the Simpsons flee to under the sea.

No one ever actually intends to relocate to New Zealand, as I find when I launch into advice for aspiring emigrants. Yet we know, whenever there’s a shock upset in global politics – Brexit, Trump, or a new, always equally evil Australian prime minister – Google searches for “how to move to New Zealand” spike. The BBC reality show Wanted Down Under has wrung 13 seasons out of disillusioned Brits imagining a better life in the Antipodes. Even 172 years ago, Dickens’ response to a bad review was to escape to the other side of the world.

For members of the middle classes watching their own countries’ decline with dismay, New Zealand – peaceful, English-speaking and, most importantly, geographically remote – is their imagined lifeboat. This has long been the case, according to 20th century Kiwi critic and historian Eric Hall McCormick, who wrote that New Zealand in the 1800s “became the focus of a stock Romantic sentiment that, though Europe might be decadent or even doomed, in the newer countries across the ocean its civilisation would be renewed and perpetuated”.

Now that at least Britain’s doom seems inevitable, it’s no wonder that New Zealand has been reaffirmed as a distant symbol of hope. Even the global appetite for news of Nigel the lovelorn gannet and frenzies over impending Ikea suggests enthusiasm for a place where those are the biggest stories of the day. Of course locals know that that was never the case, that New Zealand is not a utopia – but it’s understandable that foreigners reach for that faraway fiction when their reality is “Food shortage warning in event of no-deal Brexit” or “How to Get Children Out of Cages” or “Mass shootings: The most American way to kill and die”.

Jacinda Ardern is often received as the physical embodiment of this progressive paradise, regarded with open envy by leftwing voters, parties and media that would love to be led by a “pretty communist” – a recent opinion piece in Guardian Australia swooned imagining Ardern as “prime minister of Australasia”. The reality of her leadership and life under her government is undoubtedly different to what Joe Nunweek called the “good feeling” that surrounds it: poverty remains an intractable problem that disproportionately affects Māori, and the standoff over Ihumātao reflects disillusionment that this government has their concerns at heart.

Nevertheless, the fact remains: at a time when Britain is wilfully pursuing a recession, while the US sits on its hands over gun laws, Australia does the same with its detention policy, and both with climate, New Zealand is taking several steps in progressive directions.

Abortion may, finally, be treated as a health issue, not a criminal one. Next year’s referendum might see recreational and medicinal cannabis legalised. An euthanasia bill passed its second reading, 70 votes to 50. Nearly $2 billion was earmarked in the budget for mental health services, including for depression and anxiety – the biggest investment on record. The PM, the privacy commissioner and chief censor are taking hard lines against extremist and violent forces online, and companies at home and abroad are listening. And the response to the Christchurch attacks, a test of unprecedented tragedy, was swift, uncompromising and compassionate.

Of course, I’m following all this from afar; I am sure that on the ground it is not without controversy or questions, and much of it may not come to fruition or achieve the desired result. But having wondered if New Zealand would ever reform its abortion, drug and euthanasia laws as a student journalist nearly a decade ago, I can’t help but feel cheered to even see those issues now on the table. From where I’m sitting in Boris Johnson’s Britain, doomed to never wake up from this Brexit nightmare, it makes me feel a rare glimmer of hope to see cross-party politicians even debating the possibility of a more humane world. And the rest of the world is paying attention.

This year there has been a notable downturn in “Odd Stuff” escapism coming out of New Zealand, less fuel for idle imaginations longing to escape the world on the shores of Lake Tekapo, and more news of bills, budgets and big ideas to make it a better, fairer place to live, at a time when that seems to be very low-ranking in most governments’ priorities. New Zealand is not a utopia – it never has been, and on many fronts, as always, there is more to be done. But it’s increasingly a place where people might actually, meaningfully aspire to live – and not just in comparison to everywhere else.

Society