Matt Cowley Tauranga City Councillor

I love how easy it is to get around Tauranga, especially since we're NZ's fifth largest city.

But many of us have been caught in traffic since the New Year. Getting around the city is easy, as long as it's not during the peak morning or evening commutes.

The higher prices for children to bus to school hasn't helped. It's cheaper for many parents to drive their kids to school than to pay for multiple bus tickets. The Government recently stopped funding free school buses in urban areas.

There's no immediate solution to ease traffic, except asking people to start their daily commute either a bit earlier or later. People have said leaving 20 minutes earlier in the mornings can make a huge difference in missing the worst of the traffic.

Another way to ease the school traffic congestion is to make it super safe for students to cycle to school. Tauranga City Council plans to finish the city's cycle network in the next few years.

The long-term solution to ease traffic is complex. We have awesome roads aimed at getting freight to the Port of Tauranga as quickly as possible. But these expressways can quickly clog up with residents commuting to work or school.

Supplying passenger trains will struggle to work in Tauranga with our low population density, easy access to driving on our awesome expressways, and the poor layout of our suburbs.

Many residents live in a labyrinthine of cul-de-sacs, which makes using any form of transport, other than a car, slower and more hassle to get anywhere. For instance, your house in Papamoa might be 200 metres from a bus stop, but you have to walk a kilometre to reach it.

It unfortunately reinforces that buses are ‘loser cruisers' as the only people who take it either cannot drive or cannot afford a car.

Moving people around the city is an expensive service. If we don't change our current approach as our population grows, we could be forced to build a third harbour bridge in a decade.

Local councils – through SmartGrowth – are looking at how Tauranga is going to provide for 70,000 more residents during the next 40 years. This includes where they will live and how they will move around the city.

Feel free to email me your thoughts (matt.cowley@tauranga.govt.nz), call/text me on 0276989548, and follow me at www.facebook.com/a.younger.voice.