Auckland’s bold plan to cut transport emissions by 2030

Achieving the Transport Emissions Reduction Pathway won’t just cut carbon emissions – it will make New Zealand’s biggest city healthier and more liveable.

Aug 17, 2022

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Image credit: Liam Spicer.

Tomorrow, Auckland Council will vote on whether to adopt the Transport Emissions Reduction Pathway (TERP) – a bold roadmap for reducing transport emissions in our biggest city by 64% by 2030. “It is big and gnarly, there’s no doubt about that,” says council transport strategy manager Robert Simpson of the 64% goal. “But we know that it's very important that we do follow this pathway too.”

Here’s what Aucklanders need to do

Chuck on your walking shoes, don your bicycle helmets and have your Hop cards at the ready. We need to:

Leave the car at home, and take more trips on foot, by bike and by public transport. We need to push this up to 62% from 17%.
It’s especially important for local trips. At the moment, half of all car trips are less than 6km.
Consider swapping out your petrol-powered car for an electric vehicle instead. The TERP sets an ambitious goal of 32% of the vehicle fleet being electric by 2030.
Reduce the number of trips you make – maybe by working from home, or making appointments online instead of in person. We’ll need to reduce the total number of kilometres travelled by private vehicle by 50%.

Council wants to make these shifts easier

This requires a transformation of the city – free-flowing motorways and neighbourhoods built to serve people, not just cars. The pathway lays out 11 areas for transformation with a bunch of actions under each, including delivering a frequent and reliable public transport system with fair fares and repurposing road space to make way for pedestrians, cyclists and scooter riders – a process which could be made smoother with the government’s proposed Reshaping Streets programme.

Cycling has increased by 25% in London

Simpson points out that none of these interventions are “radical” and cities overseas are already doing these things. For example, chief sustainability officer Matthew Blaikie was inspired by a recent trip to London, where cycling has increased by 25% since the start of the Covid pandemic. “If a city like London can reallocate road space between Euston Station and King’s Cross, and enable people to cycle on separated cycling infrastructure that used to be a car lane, vehicles in Auckland can do the same,” says Blaikie. And as for those who say we’ll never get people cycling because of the weather? Simpson says there’s “data from squillions of cities” overseas with way harsher weather than us, and a much higher percentage of trips by bike. And hills? With an e-bike, forget about them.

Plan well supported

Despite the odd naysayer, the pathway has received support from sustainability advocates and has been endorsed by the Auckland Transport board. Now, we just need to do it. But of course it won’t be easy. “In order to get there, we have to pull every single available lever as hard as possible,” says Simpson. While the pathway maps out rough timelines (“immediate” or “medium term”) for actions, specifics and costs still need to be figured out. But it’s a bold step toward an Auckland that doesn’t keep people stuck in traffic for more time every year than they spend on annual leave. Because this plan isn’t just about cutting carbon. It’s about creating a city that’s quite simply better to live in – one that’s easier to get around quickly and safely, with cleaner air. Tim Adriaansen on The Spinoff summed it up nicely ahead of the release on Monday. It’s a future that sounds pretty good.

Helping the planet with off-peak power
By moving your energy usage off-peak on Electric Kiwi’s MoveMaster plan, you can reduce your environmental impact and save money on bills. With different tariffs at different times, cheaper off-peak rates and half price power overnight, MoveMaster is perfect for EV owners and those with solar – offering a highly competitive solar buyback rate.
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Visit the Electric Kiwi website here to learn more.

More cycleways in the works?

In more transport news: a recent Ipsos poll found that New Zealand has a low rate of people who cycle, despite lots of us knowing how to – which could be partially chalked up to a lack of safe and accessible cycling infrastructure. So it’s encouraging to see potential plans for 150km of cycleways in cities and towns with funding from the Government’s Transport Choices fund, as reported by Newsroom’s Marc Daalder.

Tauranga dramatically reduces waste destined for the dump

A year on from introducing a new style of kerbside waste collection, Tauranga has nearly halved the amount of waste they’re sending to landfill. The new system provides separate bins for recycling, organics (food scraps and garden waste), and your regular rubbish. Now, instead of festering in landfill and releasing methane, organic scraps are being turned into compost for farms and orchards across the Bay of Plenty and Waikato.

Goodbye plastics, hello shrooms

Polystyrene is among the hard-to-recycle plastics that the government is phasing out, so could native fungi offer a sustainable alternative? The Spinoff’s Reweti Kohere visits Auckland biotech start-up BioFab and meets 26-year-old chief scientific officer Jess Chiang. She’s scouring through Manaaki Whenua’s fungi collections to find native species with special properties we could use to create new materials.

The environmentalist taking on New Zealand’s biggest climate polluters

Activist Mike Smith (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Kahu) wants to take the “Polluting 7” to the Supreme Court, reports Stuff’s Olivia Wannan. His legal reps are currently seeking a full hearing complete with expert evidence and witnesses. Smith believes these seven companies are breaching common law – and tikanga – by contributing one third of New Zealand’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Ultimately, he wants an injunction from the court to halt the companies’ polluting activities, but first he has to convince the Supreme Court to hear the case.

Will climate change make your property a hot potato?

What happens when climate change projections get incorporated into LIM reports? On last week’s episode of When the Facts Change, Bernard Hickey talks to James Shaw, Minister for Climate Change, about the realities of climate change adaptation for coastal properties.

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