'Rail the exciting option says Greens Ash Holwell'

With a new highway we are ushering with open arms the gridlock of Auckland to our relatively traffic-free oasis of Whangarei. Without roads there is no traffic, and we all dislike being traffic. A single truck trip damages a road 10,000 times more than a car trip. Every. Single. Trip. Do the people who are profiting from the degradation of Northland’s roads pay 10,000 times more than us? When we build a railway, we build it once. We build it to withstand loads that our roads simply cannot. We build it to keep ourselves safe. Too often we are swept off the roads like a sandflies by massive trucks. Trains are huge because they are designed to be huge. They do it safely. Efficiently. Trucks do not. If we build this rail link, and once again begin to connect ourselves to the rest of the country, it will not be long before we are on an electric commuter train to work in Auckland, to catch the All Blacks at Eden Park on a Saturday night, and our markets are opened up to the 1.2 million people needing a retreat from a gridlocked urban jungle. We don’t need to sit in traffic. We don’t need to battle trucks on passing lanes. We need to be sensible, and respond to the massive growth in rail worldwide – closing in on $300 billion NZD annually by 2021 – now that’s a chance we need.