The following is an op-ed I wrote which ran in the NZ Herald on November 3. It’s turning out to be even more topical than ever – read to the end for an update with recent events…
In July 2016, dignitaries geared up to ride along a brand new cycleway on Quay Street in Auckland. They included the Prime Minister himself, John Key, who proclaimed that one of the keys to Auckland’s growth was “making sure that it’s a place that people can get around and have fun and enjoyment, and part of that is the cycleways.”
Quay St is now one of the city’s busiest bike paths and, as an opinion piece suggested in 2017, “Sir John Key’s legacy may be his cycleways.” But the current National-led government’s transport legacy for Auckland will be the polar opposite of the pragmatic approach of Key and then Minister of Transport Simon Bridges.
John Key & Simon Bridges on the opening of the interim Quay St cycleway the last National Government funded
Instead, this government is funnelling millions of dollars to consultants to design frankly unaffordable billion-dollar mega-motorways. Meanwhile, a struggling construction sector faces the ongoing collapse of the pipeline of smaller, smarter projects.
This is due largely to one person: Simeon Brown.
As Minister for Transport from November 2023 until January 2025, Brown rewrote the Government Policy on Land Transport (GPS), gutting all new funding for walking and cycling, and snatching funds intended for hundreds of shovel-ready locally significant projects to pour into a few overscoped expressways.
Worse, Brown imposed unprecedentedly detailed mandates against multi-modal design, such as forbidding ‘local roads’ funding being used for walking and cycling improvements.
In Auckland, as in other places, Brown’s diktats wreaked havoc on the pipeline of long-planned transport projects. One high-profile example: the long-awaited fix for “New Zealand’s worst intersection”, the dangerous Hill St crossroads in Warkworth in the National Party stronghold of Kaipara ki Mahurangi.
The Hill Street upgrade emerged from years of community co-design, and coordinated with water infrastructure upgrades in order to “dig once”. But in November 2024, NZTA declined Auckland Transport’s (AT) request for funding. Why? Brown decreed that because it included safety upgrades that contravened his GPS, the project needed to be re-designed to ensure funding. Locals were appalled.
Another highly-visible aspect of the Minister’s culture-war transport crusade: the blanket speed limit increases forced on towns and cities by his rewritten Speed Rule, with ratepayers footing the bill. Brown’s rewrite of the Speed Rule shocked expert observers, as a perverse swerve away from all evidence and official advice, which also repudiated his pre-election promises to raise speeds “only where it was safe to do so”.
A key part of the Speed Rule required cities to undo any speed reductions from 2020 that involved the presence of a school. To widespread dismay, AT obediently complied, reverting over a thousand residential streets from 30km/h back up to 50km/h, affecting more than a hundred schools – including a quiet cul-de-sac outside the Blind and Low Vision Network’s Manurewa campus.
In June, Councillor Shane Henderson quizzed an AT lawyer on the logic, or lack thereof, of Brown’s new Speed Rule. Let me get this straight, Henderson asked. “If we lowered speeds to protect children, it gets captured [by the rule] and the speeds [must be] raised. If we didn’t lower speeds to protect children, the safer speeds can stay. Is that correct?” AT’s lawyer agreed: “That’s how the rule is drafted.”
Based on AT’s evaluation of its Safe Speeds Programme, these reversals mean an estimated 564 people will be needlessly killed or seriously injured in our biggest city over the next 10 years. An added outrage is that even by Brown’s favoured measure of ‘productivity’, safe speeds were a huge success. AT’s economic assessment estimated that every dollar spent on safer speeds returned $9 in benefits. And a May 2025 AustRoads study enumerated the many wider benefits to the freight industry, local businesses, and traffic flow.
Editorial cartoon by Rod Emmerson for the NZ Herald September 2024
AT’s safety programme was world class, reducing deaths and serious injuries by over 30% where it was implemented. In December last year, the programme won an international award. Brown immediately retorted via media that the prestigious award was ‘woke’, reflecting the years he has spent, in opposition and then as Minister, as the tip of the spear in riling up culture war battles and spreading disinformation about lower speed limits.
Again and again, Brown shrugged off expertise and evidence. Although minister for scarcely more than a year, his tenure will likely be recorded as one of the most harmful in this country’s history. The greatest irony is that his petty culture-war legacy of cancelled projects, now handed to Chris Bishop to salvage, means the government will struggle to start, let alone finish, many transport projects before the next election.
Hence their endless reannouncements of the same old RoNS.
Whereas, smaller, faster transport projects win hearts and minds across the board. They also give you a chance to cut plenty of ribbons and give crowd-pleasing speeches. That’s something Key and Bridges clearly understood, when they jumped on their bikes back in 2016.
And here he goes again…
Coincidentally, Simeon Brown decided this week – just one month after a jubilant post on 1 October proclaiming “How good is the new Reeves Road flyover” – to lobby Auckland Transport for a last-minute redesign of Rā Hihi/ the Reeves Road Flyover intersection.
He’s claiming the brand new layout is poorly designed, on account of some current congestion in the evenings.
Of course, what’s happening is that the flyover is doing exactly what it was always going to do – move the main intersection (and thus the congestion) from Tī Rakau Drive to Pakūranga Road.
Which is exactly what AT stated was going to happen back in 2016, when announcing that the (previously scrapped) flyover was being revived after intense political lobbying:
“The Reeves Road flyover will not solve traffic congestion in the area. However it is highly effective at offering significant local congestion relief on the roads outside Pakuranga town centre. Shifting traffic off those roads allows the busway and cycle lanes to be built on them.”
Brown’s letter dives right into the details, pressuring AT to redesign the project at the last minute – something that always comes at great cost, but who pays? You can also see Brown ramping up one of his favourite culture wars, attempting to blame a (currently non-existent) planned stretch of cycleway for the traffic issues, and claiming the space is urgently needed for yet another traffic lane.
The intersection in question: aerial image by Anton Benadie, via the Eastern Times.
I’m definitely sure Brown’s culture war diktat for “just one more” traffic lane will totally work to reduce congestion this time.
A widely shared (for good reasons) cartoon by Côte (2017)
So, it’s good to see (at least initially in this case), AT has put out a very sensible response.
“With tens of thousands of vehicles a day using roads in the area, a major change like this can have impacts on the wider roading network, particularly when further work on the Eastern Busway, to replace utilities on Tī Rākau Drive at the intersection with Pakūranga Highway, involves temporary traffic diversions.
“Integration of new major infrastructure can take several weeks to settle in to new patterns as user behaviours change.”
Small said Auckland Transport is taking a number of actions to sort out the issues, including reviewing the design of the intersection and a potential third eastbound lane on Pakūranga Rd.
A new layout, especially one that’s not yet complete, will always need time to bed in, as the people become familiar with it, and transport agencies work to optimise signal timings, and the like.
Brown’s attempt at preemptively reshaping this new piece of roading – based on a complete misunderstanding of how transport actually works – is incredibly counterproductive. Hopefully AT won’t take his direction in whatever review is happening.
We’ll aim to take a deeper look at the flyover situation next week. For now, suffice to say that this kind of hands-on-the-wheel takeover has been Brown’s modus operandi for the last few years, to the point that transport officials have started to pre-empt his meddling and try to proactively assuage his whims (with complete disregard for consultation outcomes, community preference, evidence, or indeed reality).
Regardless of what happens with Rā Hihi, and unfortunately for all of us, the compound legacy of Brown’s overreaching tenure will be felt across the years to come, even as more reasonable and pragmatic politicians try to get back to actually making progress on freeing people from traffic.
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