Since the 1950's transportation planning in new Zealand has been oriented around automobiles. we haven't invested in public transport, we haven't invested in rail and consequently all of our urban development and it's really obvious in a place like Auckland is very automobile dependent, so the urban form has followed the transportation system we have provided. domestic transport is actually responsible for over forty percent of all of New Zealand's Carbon Emissions. in addition to that transport is the fastest growing sector carbon emissions. so not only is it not decreasing as it should have been after we made our Kyoto commitments it's actually increasing and it is projected to increase even further if things don't changed.
In new Zealand most towns and cities are fairly automobile dependent. you need a car at some point to get to a store get to work. now automobile dependency is not only responsible for high carbon emissions, it also has a lot of other negative effects on the city, a lot of negative externalities that costs that are not paid for by motorists: that would be air pollution water pollution even like storm water contamination. other costs include social cost in accidents and health in new Zealand there's a rising obesity epidemic they call it and this can be quite linked to car use. There is also economic costs we all know we hear about all the time how congestion is costing new Zealand economy billions of dollars. the other economic issue has to do with land affordability, we have so much land taken up by transport infrastructure because we're using cars. there's less space there's less room for more dwellings so that means that the price of land is higher and the second problem has to do the amount of money that households have to spend to get around just to get from the house to the workplace or shopping. and in new Zealand household spend a large portion of income i think it's upwards of twenty percent on transportation.
Thirty percent of New Zealanders don't have access to a car whether that's because of the age or disability low-income or choice. that's a huge percentage of a country with very high car ownership per capita that doesn't actually have access to their own car. now in automobile dependent society you are basically at a huge disadvantage if you don't have a car. it is important for people to ask themselves what are the external costs of my lifestyle choices, my decision to live you know ten or twenty kilometers from where i work, or my decision to take the car every time. I'm not saying people should feel guilty about that they should think about it and think is it fair is it fair for you know local government or central government to try to address the problem on automobile dependency by increasing the cost of driving. is that fair? I think a lot of most households feel like it's not fair because it's not their fault but they have to drive, but instead of seeing it as a as a punishment rather a way that we're going to get less automobile dependent society, i think that's ultimately it's not unfair.
What's important about the Northern bus way is that it's a dedicated bus way. so that means that it's not going to change it's not going to move. now some people think it's better to provide buses because they're more flexible instead of a train line for example, because then if depending on the people's demand travel demands change we can reroute buses. but that doesn't provide any certainty for a real estate agents or for people who are choosing a house to live in. if you have a rail line or a dedicated bus way that has the power to affect consumer choices.
If we replace every car in new Zealand with an electric car we may be reducing carbon emissions that have to do with our everyday transport needs. but ultimately there is fossil fuel use implicit in the manufacturing an electric car, there are resource use in the batteries, and those questions about how the batteries are going to be disposed of. can you imagine the costs of every household in new Zealand replacing the current car with an electric car or a car that runs on bio fuels. that will be an enormous cost to the economy we would have to import those cars because we're not manufacturing care in New Zealand. are there going to be carbon emissions related to the transport of cars to new Zealand and how long are they going to last. so I mean... it's not a sustainable solution because ultimately there are carbon emissions involved in manufacturing of vehicles. but moreover it does nothing to bring the benefits of the city where you can walk and cycle and take electric tram to get around in the city, for most of your needs.
I don't think it's a lost cause for New Zealand. we don't have to say all this developments is here and it's so automobile dependent how are we ever going to build a transport system that could possibly cater for all of the trips we need to make. and to look at it that way is to look in the wrong way around. the fact is that trips that we need to make should follow the transportation system that we want to have and not the other way around. i think the best way to go about this is to attack the problem of subsidized motorized transport. if you start incorporating internalizing the cost of all those externalities we talked about into the cost using a car. you are going to see households and different businesses and organizations making different choices about their transport trips. now in the short term they might not be able to make those choices different right away it takes time. but development and redevelopment is going on all the time so we can see a rapidly changing urban form but instead of seeing it spread out, what we want to see it happen is we want to see it pulled in around transport nodes and we want to see it get to a point where people feel safe and can easily take bicycles or walk to do a lot of their daily needs.
This motorway interchange is fairly recent you can see how well it might have done something great for trucks and cars and people who want to get in the city in that respect it necessarily limits the options for other forms of transport, it necessarily takes away the ability to walk to the central area or to cycle to the central area to the domain. so we can't promote both car oriented development and pedestrian and cycle friendly development, we got to choose from one or the other. given the challenge of climate change and other challenges of sustainability that affects the society think it's clear what our choice should be.