Straight from city council with councillor Steve Morris

Tauranga's use of public transport is frequently panned by experts and politicians as if by using a car we're guilty of some mortal sin against the community and the planet. We, the great unwashed, are to be punished without further road upgrades on Hewletts Rd or four lanes on 15th Ave until we're made to walk, cycle, or ride the bus like good socialists to work, the shops, or out for dinner. Really? A walk from Papamoa to Tauranga takes three-and-one-quarter hours. Riding a bike up to an hour, and a bus will take you one-hour-and five-minutes.

Experts compare our transport habits as a tiny city of 128,000 to European capitals or 8.5m Londoners, with an underground since 1863, and we're meant to feel ashamed?

But Tauranga isn't a city hundreds of years old where owning a carriage was a luxury for the nobility and all journeys had to be made on foot. We're developing in an age of individual freedom; we are not confined to inner-city slums like our ancestors – we're free to travel outside the CBD and have a backyard to raise our families.

While efforts to encourage public transport are to be applauded they mustn't ignore the reality that our road network isn't even up to a late-20th Century standard yet.

We have to be big enough to admit that ours is a small city; without the population, geography or density yet that's needed for the kind a system of trains and frequent buses we'd all like to be viable.

That's why we need projects like four lanes on 15th Ave to take pressure off Hewletts Rd, until we reach a population when better public transport becomes viable. Ignoring that fact is wishful thinking and consigns thousands of us to a long commute for years to come.