Making the costs clear

The government today has buckled to right-wing pressure, and "temporarily" cut fuel excise taxes. But at the same time, they're halving the price of public transport for the same period. And the relative costs of these policies are interesting:

[Finance Minister Grant Robertson] said the $350m cost of the petrol change would be met by reprioritised spending from the Covid-19 response fund – notably the smaller expected spend on managed isolation.

The public transport subsidy would cost between $25m and $40m and would also be met from the Covid-19 response fund.

Which seems really, really cheap, and suggests that a full "free fares" policy would cost only ~$200 - $320 million a year at current useage rates. That would be a hefty chunk of the government's $4.5 billion, four-year decarbonisation fund, but given the importance of transport in our emissions, it might be worth it to promote the mode-shift we desperately need. And the current reduction is certainly going to provide some hard data on how public transport use responds to price changes.

It also puts a ballpark on what it would cost to provide free public transport for everyone, that is, if the mode shift is wildly successful, most people in cities use public transport, and only rurals regularly use cars anymore. This would mean a roughly tenfold increase in public transport useage (some people walk and cycle, remember), so ~$2 - $3.2 billion a year. Which is an awful lot of money, but by comparison the government spent $5.3 billion on motorways in 2020, and you don't need nearly as many of them when people are using buses and trains (or rather, you don't need them as big, or to spend as much on maintenance). In other words, this looks like a transition we could make in the long term, without breaking the bank. And we could certainly afford to make it halfway, let alone to Climate Commission's 2030 target of a 120% increase in public transport use. It is just a question of priorities.