My cross to bear is that I’ve been a public supporter of public transport. I’m not your average Newstalk ZB host. I regularly take buses, which travel on those detested bus lanes and ride my bike in those infernal cycleways. I’ve recently bought and use a motor scooter to avoid congestion. The only thing I haven’t done is take an e-scooter but that’s because I don’t need to and I’m a tightwad.

So I’m kind of an anti-Mike, even though, in my defence, I do have two cars at home including a ridiculously large, fossil fuel gobbling, SUV which comes out for weekend adventures.

But because I’ve said all this publicly then the public transport advocates think I’m their friend, so last night my channels filled up with people saying have you see this? The people who run Auckland’s public transport were boasting yesterday on just how well they’ve done. Challenged by the mayor six years ago to double ride numbers in 10 years, they’ve announced that they’re two-thirds of the way there with about four years to go. That’s pretty impressive and apparently according to someone in their PR department is one of the fastest uptakes of public transport in the world, with the exception of Vancouver. The cynic in me says yeah, from a pretty low base.

But anyway Auckland now boasts 100 million rides a year - 40 million more than six years ago. So that’s 40 million fewer rides getting in the way of the people that want to drive their cars everywhere. You might want to say thank you to a bus lane rather than swearing at it.

But of course, that’s not the full story. Because despite rising use of public transport, there’s still an increase in car rides and the distances travelled by vehicles continues to climb. That would be because the city is sprawling and there’s hardly any buses or trains in the places we’re building on.

Take Riverhead which is 27 kilometres west of Auckland and booming. Auckland Transport does operate a bus from Auckland to Riverhead every 30 minutes. Tickets cost $5 - $6 a person and the journey takes 42m. A car with 2-4 passengers takes 21 minutes and costs $5. It’s a no brainer to take a car, but the congestion on the road to Riverhead is getting insane.

Someone was not looking at the big picture when they started ripping up the Riverhead farmland.

Looking at the big picture has been our weakness all along. In the past week, we’ve discovered that Auckland’s light rail through the middle of the city is much harder than the politicians envisaged. No kidding. Now the rail people have started saying build a train to the airport. Which frankly is also harder than you envisage.

Winston Peters today has a report landing on his desk about moving Auckland’s port because that’s what Winston promised at the election. I’m pretty sure that the report will say the job is much harder than the politicians envisage.

I’m off to Wellington this weekend for Cuba Dupa. I was there the same weekend last year and the congestion was insane and I’m pretty sure nothing's happened since. In fact, barely anything has changed since I lived in Wellington in the 80s. It’s because everything has been harder than the politicians envisaged

I booked a holiday in Queenstown in September and I’ll just have to grit my teeth and slog my way from the airport to town like every year. Because Queenstown's extraordinary growth wasn’t envisaged at all.

I guess my point is that all this stuff should have been envisaged ages ago. That all these decisions shouldn’t be in the hands of politicians but in the hands of rational logical people with long term vision. Yep for the thousandth time, I’m wondering why we don’t have an Infrastructure Commission.