Photo: 123RF
Legislation to allow congestion charging on roads just failed to make it over the line in the last Parliament, but is parked up ready to go.
Auckland Council will meet on Thursday to discuss introducing congestion charges for some of the city's busiest roads.
The Transport Ministry took a paper about a congestion charging bill to the government in the rushed few weeks before the October election, a weekly report to the minister shows.
In late August it had sought "Cabinet agreement to introduce the Land Transport Management (Congestion Charging) Bill, with changes following discussions with other parliamentary parties".
The most recent chair of the transport and infrastructure select committee, who lost his seat in the election, Labour's Shanan Halbert, said this was derailed at the last minute.
"The sticking point would have been the regional fuel tax," Halbert told RNZ on Wednesday.
"On the hustings over the election period, National was very clear that they didn't support the regional fuel tax and that that was the compromise required to push congestion charging forward.
"That's not realistic when we think about the infrastructure that we need."
Former MP Shanan Halbert said the regional fuel tax would have have the sticking point. Photo: RNZ / Angus Dreaver
The regional fuel tax generates about $150m a year to pay for Auckland transport projects.
Mayor Wayne Brown raised the prospect with RNZ week of a big bus project being dumped if National went ahead with its election pledge to end the tax.
Halbert had not seen the ministry paper on the bill - and the ministry has not released it to RNZ - but he said he would not be surprised if in the end the paper, and the talks between the parties, had got to the point of agreeing to dump Auckland's regional fuel tax - "nobody wants to add another tax to Aucklanders" - but he said in his view this was not fiscally doable.
National transport spokesperson Simeon Brown has been approached for comment.
Highway cameras with automated number plate recognition technology can be used for congestion charging.
Waka Kotahi was upgrading the network with new cameras.
A board paper in 2022 said a related back-office software upgrade "is necessary to ensure that Waka Kotahi has a supported system, and to provide functionality for upcoming toll roads as well as to support new capability that may be required, eg congestion charging".