Fiscal conservatives should be clamouring for cycleways
Hayden Donnell, telling it like it is for the Spinoff:
During his tenure as transport minister, Brown made it clear that value for money was his top priority in funding decisions and that’s continued under his successor, Chris Bishop. Given that, you’d think cycling investment would stand out as a cheap way to maximise bang for government buck. Instead it’s committed to spending $250bn, a figure otherwise known as “all of our money”, on land transport over 20 years. Much of that investment will be going toward what The Spinoff’s Joel MacManus has described as “roads that suck”. Even after some flattering rejigging to a few mathematical formulae, the official benefit-to-cost ratios barely crack 1.0 on many of the 17 Roads of National Significance the coalition has signed the country up to.
It can be enough to make you wonder which side of this eternal transport debate is actually dominated by ideology.
Simeon Brown screwed up two decades of transport investment in less than a year. He committed the country to spend eye watering sums of money on highways that make no sense. He increased the risk of kids dying around schools with pointlessly dangerous speed increases. He locked in our carbon pollution by saying you can’t spend money on low carbon options like bikes because people don’t use it right now.
It was never about the money. They were stoking a culture war to win votes. The consequence of that crude choice is shittier, more expensive transport in a cooked world. Talk about ideological.
And now… he’s Minister of Health.
