Nau mai, haere mai.

Closed streets, urban dead zones, random traffic jams, long delays, scary bike lanes, confusing bus lanes, and rivers of orange cones everywhere you look. Auckland readers will recognise the picture of a city often rendered dysfunctional by congestion and major infrastructure projects.

In myriad ways, New Zealand’s largest city is paying the price for decades of poor planning and under-resourcing. A post-war obsession with the private car and motorway construction has left it struggling to meet modern expectations of decent public transport, let alone climate sustainability.

While previous governments and Auckland councils recognised these deficits and conceived various schemes to drag the city into the 21st century, the new National-led coalition has wasted little time in reversing a lot of those initiatives – including a regional fuel tax designed to pay for some of the most pressing transport needs.

But as Timothy Welch argues today, “Missing in all this is a clear vision of what will replace all the lost policies.” Aside from pledges to increase traffic capacity and not spend money on alternative transport modes, that is.

“Decades of see-sawing government priorities,” Welch writes, “mean New Zealand’s biggest and most economically important city has no clear plan to transition out of its fossil fuel dependence.” Unless the problem can be elevated out of the electoral cycle, he concludes, “it is hard to be optimistic about sustainable progress”.