By John McDonald (CityWatch NZ Editor and 2024 Hamilton East Ward By-election Candidate)
The issue of raised crossings has been a major focus for the CityWatch NZ website and myself.
This week, I got involved with the debate on the $689,000 proposed raised crossing on Hamilton’s Heaphy Terrace. I sent in written feedback and spoke at the 26 September 2024 Council committee meeting on the issue.
Voting against a raised crossing has been politically difficult for councillors due to the following reasons:
- It is framed as a vote against “safety” with emotional stories of the injured and dead pedestrians often used in the council chamber.
- It is basically a vote to reject the offer of “free money” from central government. Often this “free money” is in the form of a 90% or 50% subsidy from NZTA (Waka Kotahi) to build the raised platform.
- It can involve disagreeing with the experts, questioning the claimed consensus, and questioning the recommendations of council staff.
- It could contribute to the council breaking their debt limits, due to the way “free money” has been used in city council financial management.
Each of these reasons can put daunting pressure on a councillor to vote for installing another one of those raised platforms.
Why would anyone be opposed to “safety” and “free money”?
There is widespread public opposition to “traffic calming” measures in a city where most of the voters still commute in automobiles as was evident in the recent Hamilton East Ward by-election. With the new government, New Zealand has seen a more public shift against installing raised crossings in the last year. Auckland Transport has removed at least one raised crossing and changed its policies around designing crossing safety features. A range of groups organised public opposition to the four raised platforms proposed for Wellington’s Thorndon Quay. The NZ Herald, RNZ, and Waikato Times have started covering the issue more. Many Hamilton projects involving raised platforms have been delayed, stopped, or modified. Raised platforms have been removed from designs and the slopes on some remaining platforms have been decreased to make them less disruptive to emergency vehicles. Hamilton City Council staff are now including some negative impacts of raised platforms in the information they provided to Councillors, an improvement over what they were not mentioning to Councillors last year.
We know for a fact that the negative impacts of raised crossings/platforms have often been downplayed, ignored, and dismissed by officials. At CityWatch NZ we are continuing to investigate how this happens locally, nationally, and internationally as well as the role of the consultants who have spent years promoting traffic calming measures. In the context of the negative impacts being systematically downplayed it is reasonable to suspect that the benefits of raised crossing are often exaggerated by officials.
Slower vehicles should cause less damage in collisions. Simple physics gives us the equation where kinetic energy = ½ mass × (velocity) squared, therefore speed is often the major contributor to the energy going into an impact. Raised crossings can slow down vehicles, if the driver is trying to avoid a jarring journey or damage to their vehicle. Fire and emergency crews face both jarring journeys and vehicle damage as they try to respond quickly in a city with so many raised platforms on major roads.
Fatal collisions are thankfully a rare event on our City’s roads, often involving unique circumstances which might not be addressed by a generic ‘we slowed down normal traffic, therefore people are now safe crossing the road’ argument. I raised these concerns in the document I sent to Council before the Thursday meeting.
“The assumption that raised platforms reduce speed significantly in crash situations needs to be investigated further. Are drivers going to be slowing down for raised crossings if they are dangerously impaired with drugs or alcohol, having severe psychological issues, in the process of committing crimes and fleeing police, or having a major medical event such as a stroke. Could they have their foot on the accelerator as they approach the crossing? Does a drop in average speeds of normal drivers always translate to safety in the extreme situations of rare fatal crashes on our City’s roads.”
My comments to Hamilton City Council’s Infrastructure and Transport Committee, 26 September 2024.
The Heaphy Terrace site is in urgent need for a less dangerous pedestrian crossing. An improved crossing should have been installed many years, if not decades, ago. I argue that a signalised crossing further away from the busy roundabout will be the more suitable solution in order to minimise conflict and confusion during the interactions between drivers and pedestrians. Even though the Council’s cost estimate for a signalised crossing is still expensive at $300,000-$500,000, it is still a lower cost than the proposed raised crossing. In the document I sent to Councillors, I also emphasised better sight lines and improved visibility as potentially the more important safety measures.
On the issues of “free money”, the funding is not free. It will result in greater debt. Often this will be intergenerational debt, where your grandchildren will be expected to pay the interest. NZTA funding can be sourced from fuel taxes, climate change levies, other taxes, or potentially added to central government debt. Within the City Council, there appears to be a practice of treating NZTA subsidy for a project as revenue, then using that “revenue” as a justification for considerably more borrowing.
A clear example of this practice was explained by Hamilton City Council staff in a previous agenda item about the Eastern Pathways School Link project (an issue in my neighbourhood that I have been following closely).
“61. Given the government’s stated priorities on transport, staff believe there is a growing risk that NZTA Waka Kotahi will not provide the expected subsidy of $14 million over the first three years of the Long-Term Plan for the Eastern Pathways School Link (Te Aroha St) project.
62. As well as meaning that project would not be able to go ahead (unless we can find replacement funding), this would have a significant impact on our debt to revenue ratio noting we are already close to our limits. Every $1 million of revenue that Council loses represents $2.8 million it cannot spend.”
Item 8, on page 48 in 20 February 2024 Hamilton City Council Agenda v2
Spending $689,000 for one raised zebra crossing, with a 90% subsidy from central government, could be used as an excuse for a city council to get $1.7 million deeper into debt.
$689,000 × 90% (for NZTA subsidy) × 280% (LGFA’s allowed debt-to-revenue ratio) = $1,736,280 (increase in allowed debt spending)
For an organisation deliberately operating very close to its debt-to-revenue limit, which Hamilton City Council is currently doing, this situation creates a perverse financial incentive to approve the more expensive crossing option over a more modest and suitable crossing option.
It appears that the large numbers of raised crossing and raised platforms installed throughout Hamilton City has been part of the journey to get the Council over $1 billion into debt.
Is genuine safety or debt limit increases the greater motivation for these Council decisions around raised platforms?
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