Long story short, the Government’s myopia of only choosing transport policies that reduce travel times means we’re missing out on the health benefits of more cycling and walking, along with the health cost savings from fewer accidents, less pollution and mentally healthier ways of getting around.
In our first solutions interview in The Kākā Project of 2026 for 2050 (TKP 26/50), University of Canterbury Professor Simon Kingham analyses the limited analysis used by Transport Minister Simeon Brown in deciding on a roading-heavy and high speed approach to Transport.
In particular, Kingham calls for much more limited use of time savings in investment decisions, as is the case overseas, and the inclusion of the health benefits, climate benei and climate benefits of more active modes, including cycling and walking, and lower speed limits in urban areas.
We spoke after he and Global Road Safety Partnership CEO Dave Cliff organised and sent an open letter to the Government from dozens of road safety and transport experts globally arguing against its plan for higher speed limits illustrates again just how little real economic analysis is being done by the Government. They cited a 2024 World Bank report which argues that lowering speed limits, not raising them, facilitates economic development via improved public health.
Potential policy ideas for TKP 26/50:
only measure time savings in cost-benefit analyses (CBA) for transport projects and policies that apply to business and freight travel;
include productivity and health cost savings, including mental health cost savings, accident reduction cost savings and respiratory condition cost savings from the health benefits of active modes of transport, such as walking and cycling in CBAs;
include emissions credits savings in CBAs from transport projects and savings; and,
only adopt projects and policies with the highest Benefit to Cost Ratios (BCRs).
Further questions, interviews and deep-dives?
We’d welcome suggestions for further interviews, deep-dive topics and suggestions for policies in the comments.
From my point of view, I need to find out more about Wales’ approach to CBAs for transport projects and ask ministers and Waka Kotahi NZTA more about the BCRs on the RONS projects, and how they compare to walking and cycling.
Here’s the full transcript of the discussion:
Bernard Hickey (00:03.465): Well, kia ora and welcome to Simon Kingham from the University of Canterbury. Simon, great to have you on The Kaka.
Simon Kingham (00:07.982)
Thanks so much. Nice to be here.
Bernard Hickey (00:12.157)
For an audience who maybe aren't aware of what you've been doing, what you do, could you give us a brief precis of what gives you some authority to talk about these things?
Simon Kingham (00:25.838)
So I'm a professor of Geography at the University of Canterbury. Obviously you can tell from my accent I wasn't born here. I came from England nearly 25 years ago. And for the last six years until May this year, I was seconded from the University to the Ministry of Transport two days a week as their Chief Science Advisor. I was advising. My job really was to try and ensure that any policy that went up to ministers was evidence -based. That was kind of one line of what I did. So I remained at the University teaching and researching, but for two days a week the Ministry paid for my time. And there are other ministries do the same. So there's a network of us who are seconded and in some cases fully employed but mainly seconded into government ministries and we're meant to provide independent free and frank advice to ensure policy is evidence-based.
Bernard Hickey (01:10.28)
What is the evidence that you consider when you're thinking about transport policies. The way transport policy works in New Zealand, the central government has a very big role. You could argue a bigger role than a central government in some other countries. We've just seen the government change quite a few transport policies. I just thought we would start off with this issue of, you know, what evidence should be considered when you're thinking about how much money you spend or what type of transport, these sorts of things. So what sort of evidence base should be in front of a minister or a ministry?
Simon Kingham (01:41.966)
I mean, you should be pulling evidence from anywhere and everywhere. And in my case, I mean, I didn't pretend to know everything, so I'd go and seek people, but it should be coming from everywhere.
And I think one of the neat things the Ministry of Transport has, and it still has, and it's actually kind of talked about by other governments in other parts of the world and other ministries, we have a thing called the Transport Outcomes Framework, which is actually really neat. And it actually says … we have a transport system that improves wellbeing and liveability. So that's the central thing.
Our transport system is there to improve wellbeing and livability. And it has five outcomes. Inclusive access, so we're trying to make it so everybody can access stuff. Healthy and safe people, so we want people to be safe on the roads. We want to reduce vehicle casualties, deaths and serious injuries. We want air pollution to be low. And we want people to be able to choose to use active transport because that's healthier.
Economic prosperity, so we want business to be able to go around. We want people to be able to deliver stuff. We want to be able to get goods and services. We want to be able to get people to the workplace. Environmental sustainability as we want to reduce emissions. So that's greenhouse gas emissions, but air pollution. want to enhance biodiversity, et cetera, et cetera. And then resilience and security. And there's two parts to that. One is kind of international. So we're resilient to international shocks so that our airlines can get people in when COVID happens, that sort of thing.
But we're also resilient to sea level rise, climate change, storms, all these other things that are happening. So we had these five outcomes and the idea is that notionally what was meant to happen is that when you looked at a policy, you assessed them against those five outcomes. say, what is this policy going to do to this outcome? And it doesn't mean that every policy is going to be really good for all the outcomes, but you at least have to assess it against them and say, these are the outcomes we're trying to achieve through the transport system.
Bernard Hickey (03:43.668)
So you'd look at things like if you change the policy how many extra deaths or fewer deaths how many how much extra cost of the health system, know lost hours working you know number of deaths from air pollution or cost of air pollution, climate emissions, you know the number of extra tons that sort of thing. So we've seen
Simon Kingham (04.06.00)
Climate emissions are interesting. I'll just start you if I can just quickly. But when we look at, for instance, electric vehicles, know, electric vehicles are a way to reduce emissions. But actually, electric vehicles don't do quite so well against, for instance, healthy and safe people. They're good for emissions, but they're not, you know, you're not reducing, you're not making active travel more attractive by them. They're not any different for resilience and security. If we're relying on electricity, that's good because we're not relying on oil. But that's kind of an example where if you compare, if you want to reduce emissions and that's a policy or thing you're wanting to achieve, electric vehicles are one part, but actually active travel probably ticks off more.
So that's kind of an example where you can have two policies and one can hit multiple outcomes and one might only hit one.
Bernard Hickey (04:52.569)
So this government has shifted the emphasis in spending from trying to encourage active travel, a bit more cycling and walking, maybe look to use buses, trains, maybe try to not to build quite so many motorways, and shifted from there to it's all about the roads of national significance and the roads of regional significance.
And this government has talked a lot about, you know, just ‘make the economic boat go faster’, which is, you know, that's one aim you can have. And it struck me when looking at the decisions being made, I wondered if they'd done a proper, wider economic analysis of the potential costs and benefits of, you know, shifting that. For example, moving away from electric cars perhaps back to cars that are petrol and diesel, you know, might increase your fuel costs and it might increase the number of people with health problems from particulates. Reducing reliance on cycling and walking may mean you know that you have more people who are have mental health issues or health issues, it means they have to go to the hospital and the government has to pay for that. So i just wondered if you were looking at shifting from what we had to what we have now, what sort of aspects would you think about, what sort of evidence should have been in that decision?
Simon Kingham (06:29.58)
Yeah, it's a very good question. think they're very much focusing, if you look at the five outcomes, they're very much focusing on economic prosperity and they've been quite overt about that.
But they're also looking at economic prosperity in a very narrow lens. It's very much about productivity in the context, so that's, if you listen to all the information, the things we've read recently about speed limits, it's very much in the context of economic productivity from a very narrow lens. So actually, for instance, if you look at, we talked a bit about walking and cycling and the the government policy statement and the funding, they basically cut all, there's zero funding left for walking and cycling. So the only money that's actually in their budget is funding that's already committed. So there's no extra. And that's because they don't, when we look at benefit cost ratios, they're not including wellbeing benefits, health benefits. So they're very much saying, on the one hand, we're interested in crashes. So we are looking at deaths and serious injuries. And on the other hand, it's time savings.
And there's a number of problems with that. So time savings, if I ask you when you go to work or when you go somewhere and you get back a minute earlier to home, what do do with that minute? And we know that when we do a benefit/cost ratio is what we do is we multiply that minute up. So we say, we multiply the minutes up by the number of people doing that journey and we get a big number and we quantify it according to a value of somewhere upwards of $30 an hour and you get a really big number.
And the problem is time savings and productivity are not the same. Productivity is someone being able to do an extra delivery or get some products, some slightly quicker so they can get the next product to the next place, et cetera. It's not you and me or other people getting home 45 seconds or 51 seconds earlier. That's good. It's nice to be home earlier, well, in some cases, but not always! But it's also not productive.
Now, the other thing of course is actually taking longer on your, if you walk or cycle, some people who walk and cycle actually go a longer route because they enjoy it. And actually that's beneficial, right? Because it's good for exercise.
In many cases, people choose to go a longer route because it's more attractive. It's good for mental health. If you walk slowly, I mean, that's a really interesting example: if you walk down your street and you talk to a neighbour, economically, that's really bad. Mentally and physically, and in terms of society, of course it's good, but we have this bizarre thing that we treat time savings in this really odd way.
And the minister, I don't know if he quite understands that time savings and productivity aren't the same, but certainly you discount a whole load of really, really positive things. So the example of walking down the street talking to your neighbour, that's a really good thing, isn't it? You talk about your neighbour when there's a natural disaster, as we know from Christchurch. Talking to your neighbour is a really good thing because when that bad things happen, you know, someone who can help you.
Bernard Hickey (09:08.198)
So there must be quite a bit of research on this area of taking account of time savings, doing the simple blunt multiplication and calculating it. You think all over the world, there must be transport departments and ministries and people going, the whole, way that we've thought about transport, about our motorway systems, about people driving in cars, is really being driven by this time saving drive. So what's the state of the world's research on using that as your, as your, you know, north star?
Simon Kingham (09:42.862)
Two things about it. One is we know that if you make it easier for people to travel further faster, they often choose to live further away from things. So there's heaps of research. It's a concept called induced demand, which I'm sure many people listening to this are familiar with. In our minds, many people have this thing that we want to spend about 20 to 30 minutes getting to and from work. So if we can get further in 20 to 30 minutes, we travel further. And that actually has loads of dis-benefits. So we have to provide more infrastructure if we live further away, bad for the environment.
Now what's interesting, the example I've heard of recently is in Wales. So I met the former Minister of Transport in Wales recently, guy called Lee Waters who was in Australia and I was there as well at the same time. And he said in Wales now, private time on journeys is now not allowed to be included in decisions about road building. You can only include the time for freight and business journeys. And so of course that takes out the vast majority.
And that means that your benefits from time savings are dramatically decreased. And the reason they've done that is they said it is inconsistent with their transport strategy. And actually, if you think about the outcomes framework in New Zealand, it would be inconsistent with what we're trying to do for many reasons. So they've actually taken it out. They did that to some work, and they actually cut a whole lot of road building projects because they suddenly realised if you take that out, they don't make the cut. They still included some. They're not getting rid of road building projects, but they just said, let's look at it a slightly more science -based, evidence -based lens. And many of these roads don't cut the mustard. They don't meet the criteria. And so suddenly, when you start doing that, you actually design your transport system in a quite different way, and you value things really differently.
Bernard Hickey (11:21.861)
And also this business of understanding the health benefits, for example, of more walking and cycling, and also the equity benefits of having affordable public transport and buses and trains. How do you think about the of health benefits, economic benefits of walking and cycling, and what sort of benefit to cost ratios, what sort of analysis do we get if we do $100 million into cycling infrastructure or $100 million into one kilometre of a motorway? How would you measure the cycling, walking, public transport side of things?
Simon Kingham (12:05.774)
Really good question. So we know from the last round of roads of national significance, they did benefit/cost ratios on them. And many of them had benefit/cost ratios of under one and the good ones had benefit/cost ratios of just over two. And we know, of course, with all those projects, with all big infrastructure projects, the actual cost of the project goes up way more than when you actually do the benefit/cost ratio. So many of those, they would have had benefit/cost ratios of under one. And I remember probably a decade ago, hearing the then-Minister of Transport say when they realised the benefit/cost ratio was so bad, they said, ‘well, this is actually a resilience project’. It was the second route into, I think, Wellington. I think it was one of the roads into Wellington, which is OK if that's your primary driver. On the other side is, if you look at the cycleways, if you look at the big cycleway projects, when they ran the benefit/cost ratio on the Christchurch cycleways, this was before they were built, they came up with a benefit/cost ratio of eight.
Now the figure of eight, I think the problem with the figure of eight, it's almost too big. So people then go, I don't believe it. It can't be that much better than roading, but it's actually utterly consistent with projects all around the world. And in Christchurch, they've actually recalculated and the cost of the cycleways went up from when they were predicted, but the benefits went up. And I gather, I think that the benefit/cost ratio went up over 10. And this is with them now being built.
So … I almost think the government, if they said, we're only gonna go, on benefit /cost ratios, I would go ‘fantastic’, because when you lined up all the projects that anyone's ever put up, all the cycleway projects would be at the top and the roading projects would be at the bottom.
And even Auckland Light Rail, which is very criticised because of the cost, the benefit/cost ratio, I think I've heard someone say was about two. It's still not great, but when you put in the wider economic benefits, the urban development benefits of that project, it actually didn't do too badly, but it doesn't get anywhere near cycle projects which are consistently up around 10 and in some cases over - because, and it's primarily the health benefits, it's partly the environmental benefits, but the health benefits are so great. Because New Zealand is one of the most obese countries in the world. We are very physically inactive, diabetes is a big problem. And that's before we get into mental health. And we know now there's a very strong link between transport and mental health. If you walk, cycle, you meet your neighbours, your mental health is enhanced, you don't get stressed. You hear people talk about road rage, you don't get road rage when you're walking. You you walk, you talk to your neighbours.
One of the best quotes I ever got in a project recently was someone, we did a research project post-Christchurch earthquake, and we asked people what they liked about the community. And one person said, “I really like where I live because it takes such a long time to get anywhere”. And what they meant was, it sounds like it of comes over as a negative comment, what they meant was, I walk down my street, I keep talking to people, I bump into people, can't, you know, in a really positive way.
And yet somehow we discount that, but actually the mental health and community benefits of walking and cycling are also good. And that also applies with public transport because when you get off at either end, you get physical activity. And when you get off near your home, you walk down the street and you see people you know. And seeing people you know is difficult to quantify, but increasingly people are, and they're saying it's really important.
Bernard Hickey (15:19.36)
Another way to look at these things is to look at the health costs, in terms of accidents, in terms of particulates from pollution and how that affects people's asthma and various other chest conditions and the likes. What is the current evidence around, let's say for example, as the government has done increasing speed limits on some roads and sometimes outside schools at different times of the day, what do we know about how much that increases, with a purely economic lens, deaths, injuries, that sort of thing.
Simon Kingham (16:01.326)
So we know as an example since the in the last 12 months up till end of August this year, the number of deaths on the roads is 20% down from last year. And it's difficult to know. Obviously, there's lots of things doing that. But the one consistent thing that's happened in the last 12 months is councils have targeted speed limit reductions according to safety. They've consulted on them. And that's kind of the big thing that's happened in the last 12 months, lots of reductions of speed limits. And so most people are saying it's almost certainly a big part of that reduction [in deaths], is the reduction in speed limits. And we know that when you, you know, when we look at the value of life and that it's a controversial topic, how we calculate that, and you'll know far more about that than I do. But I think it's, we're valuing it around somewhere upwards of what, $6 million or $7 million a life. And so when you're saving, what's this about overall, that would equate to about 60 lives a year. That's a really big number.
The other one people often forget, I mean, obviously greenhouse gas emissions are talked about, but the current government is saying we don't really care about them going up because we're going to offset. They're really focusing on offsetting. But what they forget is that alongside carbon dioxide coming out of your exhaust is nitrogen dioxide. And nitrogen dioxide in this country at the moment is killing over, you know, and vehicle fumes across, killing over 2000 people a year. Now, I know it's staggering.
Bernard Hickey (17:18.353)
Hang on a minute. How does that work? I haven't seen any, you know, death road toll from pollution. I mean, how does that happen? Do people, what sort of diseases, what sort of, you know, what does it say?
Simon Kingham (17:23.17)
It's respiratory diseases and there is a difference obviously, we're talking about 350 people die from in car crashes and one of the things about that is they're mainly younger people and with respiratory diseases, it is mainly older people. It's mainly older people so perhaps we can value that differently or not, but the reality is that there's over 2 ,000 people a year dying from vehicle emissions and that was from the HAPINZ report which I think came out three years ago. It’s very well respected, peer reviewed by some of the top scientists in the world who said, yes, this is really good science. And somehow we forget about that.
We think it's okay to kill people from, we sort of accept the road toll. We even give it a name, the idea that we ‘pay a toll’, but we do actually forget the fact that we're also polluting people. And we don't need to. And if you reduce emissions that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, you also reduce emissions from nitrogen dioxide on particulates. And so again, we can put values on that. So every life we save, we save an amount of money.
Bernard Hickey (18:31.087)
Because in New Zealand, the government funds the hospital system and a good chunk of primary health care. And every one of those patients who has a respiratory illness or death is ending up in hospital. They're spending many nights there. They might be in and out of hospital. They certainly are seeing specialists and doctors forever. You'd think if you were looking at it from an economic holistic point of view, you could look to reduce the number of deaths from respiratory illnesses, from accidents - and therefore free up more space in your A &E departments for other things because apparently they're quite full at the moment.
Simon Kingham (19:12.59)
Absolutely. And if you factor in the fact that if you get people out of their cars and they're either using public transport or walking and cycling, they're also getting physical activity. Public transport vehicles tend to be newer. So we have one of the oldest vehicle fleets in the world. So this is the beauty of a holistic, like you said earlier, a holistic transport system where you actually value walking and cycling and public transport because it actually does really well against multiple outcomes.
And also it's about urban development and how we shape our cities and increasing density and how we use our streets. There's so many things that if you think holistically, you get really good outcomes. And unfortunately, the current government with its heavy focus on road building and increasing speed limits … isn't even delivering the time savings they think it's going to all the productivity benefits. The time savings are generally much smaller than they think. And it doesn't deliver any of the other outcomes. It's very bad for all the other outcomes.
Bernard Hickey (20:08.643)
I'm curious, then, what the rest of the world thinks of us. New Zealanders like to think that we're punching above our weight and we're ‘the little engine that could’ and we've got number eight wire and all of that and it's all great. But interestingly in the letter that you helped organize and were part of saying to the government that the speed limit changes were dangerous, not evidence-based and a backward step. It was interesting to see what the rest of the world thinks of all of this, because in the rest of the world they really are trying to drive down their road tolls to nought and they're trying to get rid of pollution and certainly emissions. So what is the rest of the world saying when they look at New Zealand in the last six months or so?
Simon Kingham (20:58.402)
Really good question. So Dave Cliff contacted me only last week. So this letter was we literally wrote it and got people to sign up in two days. We weren't cruising around the world trying to get people begging people to sign it. We literally sent it out to our networks and we got people a hundred, nearly a hundred signatures incredibly quickly. Backed up by that was a number of people saying, ‘I can't believe this is happening. What is New Zealand doing!?’.
Particularly the Australians, who are now copying what we've done for the last five years and now looking at us going, ‘what are you doing? We're finally on the right track and you're going backwards’. And I was at this conference in Australia a couple of weeks ago talking about science and policy and evidence. And it was, I find myself … it was a bit depressing. And these people are going, ‘can't believe what's happening because you've done so well’. And I even said an email, one Australian guy said, this must be pretty depressing for you. And I said, ‘yes, it's not many, it's not often recently, I've said, [that] I wish we were more like Australia in the context of transport’. And he said, ‘I didn't think you'd ever say that’, because we were doing so, we were certainly on the right direction. We were prioritising well-being. We were still delivering really good economic outcomes. We’re reducing emissions, improving air quality as we've seen in the current figures for road deaths and serious injuries or deaths on the roads, going really well in the right direction. And we've completely turned the ship around. We're going the wrong way at the moment. And it's really sad.
Bernard Hickey (22:22.006)
Simon Kingham, thank you very much for being on The Kaka and talking about this. Really appreciate it.
Simon Kingham (22:29.358)
Thank you, I really enjoyed it.
Too much haste & waste in Simeon Brown's need for speed