Auckland Transport Blog

One of the most concerning aspects of how the structure of local government in Auckland is shaping up is the structural separation that will be created between those in charge of land-use planning (a fairly large chunk of the policy and strategy part of the future Auckland Council) and those in charge of transportation planning (the completely separate Auckland Transport CCO). I have a real problem with the structural separation between these two agencies, as I think the inter-connectedness of land-use and transport is under-valued in Auckland, leading to many of the problems that the city currently faces.

Making matters even worse is the part of the most recent Super City Bill which repeals the 2004 Local Government (Auckland) Amendment Act. While a lot of this Act was based around the establishment of ARTA, and it’s obvious those bits need to go, fundamentally the LGAAA was concerned about ensuring better alignment between land-use planning and transportation. In particular, it gave legal effect to the Auckland Regional Growth Strategy and required councils to make plan changes that gave effect to that strategy. This was all done on the basis that ‘where’ and ‘how’ Auckland grows needed to be linked in with the transportation network, as well as future additions to the transportation network.

This is what a “Key Issues” paper that formed part of this process had to say about the effect of the LGAAA and how it relates to the Growth Concept included in the Regional Growth Strategy:

In response to the LGAAA, the Auckland Regional Council undertook a lengthy process to alter the Regional Policy Statement through Plan Change 6. While this plan change is still subject to a number of appeals, it strongly guides closer integration between land-use and transport – generally by trying to focus development in areas that have good public transport access.

So in short, there is a reasonably decent amount of effort that has gone into aligning land-use and transport planning better over the past few years. Unfortunately, over that same time period we have continued to build motorways that encourage sprawl, and haven’t really shifted the thinking of transportation policy towards something that will support our land-use plans, hence the general problem that the Regional Growth Strategy has had mixed results. This was noted in the ARC’s “State of the Auckland Region” Report, which said the following about the implementation of the Growth Strategy over the past decade:

Fast-forward to the current legislative changes proposed for Auckland, and this whole “Spatial Plan” pops up in the Third SuperCity Bill as a high-order guiding document for Auckland’s future growth and development. The Spatial Plan seems like it will be a replacement for the Regional Growth Strategy although its legislative force is rather unknown at this point. The Spatial Plan is generally a good idea I reckon, seeking to align land-use development with transport and other infrastructure investment. But I do wonder how it differs from the provisions outlined in the LGAAA, that are slowly (but surely) being given effect to through Plan Change 6 to the ARPS and the various accompanying District Plan changes going on throughout Auckland. It is either reinventing the wheel, or (being a bit more cynical) trying to effectively go through the same process but end up with a different outcome about how Auckland should grow than was worked out the first time around. Given the general distaste for urban limits, the second option seems fairly likely.

But this is all real high-order strategic stuff. What about when we get down to the real nitty gritty? How is Auckland’s future local government structure going to go about integrating land-use and transportation planning? How are we going to make sure land-use planning decisions take full account of their transport effects and (perhaps even more importantly) how are we going to assess the land-use effects of the transportation policy decisions that we make? This is where I get worried.

From November this year onwards, all the transport parts of the current councils are going to be split off from the rest of the council organisation and thrown into the Auckland Transport CCO – along with ARTA. While in many respects this will be good for getting transport stuff done (although I have a lot of concerns about the detailing surrounds its set up, as I have repeatedly noted in previous posts) one thing that I think may well be lost is the integration between land-use and transport, because they’re going to be undertaken by two different organisations. Every time the Council wants to put together some sort of plan for improving an area I worry that they’ll be stymied by the fact that “they can’t do transport” and Auckland Transport may not agree with what they want to do. And, as should have been quite clear from my post the other day about Mt Albert, unless you can “do transport” when talking about upgrading anywhere or changing any land-use planning documents, it’s a damn waste of time.

It would seem as though this magical Spatial Plan is meant to ensure proper integration between land-use, transport and the various other aspects that go into urban planning. However, there is no set timeframe for when the Spatial Plan must become operative, there is currently no legislative power to the Spatial Plan and it seems to be aimed at high-order strategic stuff, not day-to-day aspects. I don’t exactly know how this is going to be fixed without completely getting rid of Auckland Transport and rolling transport back into the council’s operations – but something needs to happen to ensure we integrate transport and planning better than we have done so in the past, not worse.

There’s a fascinating article in the NZ Herald today about how trips on Auckland’s public transport system are getting longer and longer (distance wise, hopefully not time-wise!) These sections are particularly noteworthy:

Although a 7.7 per cent rise in public transport patronage in 2008-2009 was hailed as impressive when announced late last year, a table at the back of a report presented to the Auckland Regional Transport Committee yesterday disclosed a far higher proportional leap in kilometres travelled…

…The Auckland Regional Transport Authority reported 58.62 million subsidised passenger trips in 2008-09, covering 435.4 million km, at a cost to ratepayers and taxpayers through regional and Government subsidies of $143.5 million.

That was a 39.4 per cent leap from 312.4 million km in 2008, covered by $125.6 million of subsidies.

Although subsidies worked out at an average of $2.45c for each passenger, which was 5.9 per cent higher than in 2008, the cost for every km travelled by that passenger fell 17.6 per cent to 33c.

A 39% leap in kilometres travelled on public transport in just the one year is quite staggering. For a while now I have thought that simply counting the “number of trips” was a fairly crude method of measuring patronage – as a 50c bus trip up Queen Street doesn’t really feel as though it should count the same as a train trip from Pukekohe to the CBD, for example.

Considering that fuel prices throughout 2009 were significantly lower than in 2008 (generally), to have public transport’s “trip kilometres travelled” to leap by such a huge amount is excellent news.

Hopefully the Regional Council will put the report up in full on their website so we can have a good look at all the numbers.

A couple of great posts are doing the rounds of transport blogs at the moment, and I think they’re essential for me to comment on. Ultimately, they focus on the question of whether our transport patterns result from some sort of ‘culture’, or whether they simply respond to what the logical decision to make is.

Firstly, there is this post on the Psystenance blog, talking about what is known as the Fundamental Attribution Error, which in social psychology means the over-emphasis “…on the behaviour of others to personality or disposition and to neglect substantial contributions of environmental or situational factors”. In terms of transport matters, this is very applicable – as the post goes on to state:

Thus, the fundamental attribution error in transportation choice: You choose driving over transit because transit serves your needs poorly, but Joe Straphanger takes transit because he’s the kind of person who takes transit. This is the sort of trap we find ourselves in when considering how to fund transportation, be it transit, cycling, walking, or driving.

Let’s say you live in a suburban subdivision. You can afford to drive, and it’s the only way you can quickly and easily get to your suburban office and to the store, and pick up your child from daycare. How do you interpret the decision of other people to take transit? Is it something about the quality of transit where they are? More likely you are going to attribute it to something about those people themselves — they’re poor, or they’re students, or they’re some kind of environmentalists. It’s difficult for people to realize the effect of the situation, e.g. one with frequent transit service to many destinations along a straight street that is easy to walk to. (I’d also point out that students, the poor, and even environmentalists do drive as well.)

Why do Europeans walk more, cycle more, and take transit more? Surely it is something about their culture? But this is an excessively dispositional attribution. I won’t deny that culture plays some role in transit use, especially in the decisions that lead to the creation of transportation infrastructure. But that infrastructure itself and the services provided on it are a strong influence on the transportation choices people make. The European infrastructure situation facilitates those other modes of travel much more so than does typical North American transportation infrastructure.

Where our infrastructure gets closer to the European model, so does the transportation mode choice, and conversely, where Europe is more like the North American model, Europeans turn out to drive more. If culture were really the driving force, you wouldn’t expect to see much fluctuation in transportation choice. But just as North America suburbanized and fell in love with the private automobile, so did Europe, albeit to a lesser extent. Only recently has Europe started again building new tram lines and clawing back space from the car. Copenhagen, now viewed as an urban cycling mecca, wasn’t always one. The rise of the car drastically lowered cycling there in the 1960s. Copenhagen owes its recent fame to restrictions on parking and to its dedicated cycling infrastructure, which have led to a cycling renaissance.

The excellent Humantransit blog picked up on this post, and added some further comments that I find particularly noteworthy. These sections of the post I find particularly relevant to the situation in Auckland:

We’ve all heard the term “car culture” about places like Los Angeles. I’ve always hated the term, but now I understand why: it’s an expression of the attribution error. When we say that Americans drive because they’re a car culture, we imply that that the choice of most Americans to drive isn’t a rational one, in light of each person’s situation, and therefore requires a cultural explanation. Situation includes origin, destination, available infrastructure, available vehicles, special needs (wheelchairs, traveling with children, etc) and the time/cost tradeoff (the urgency of the trip vs the desire to save money).

But in the places most Americans live, given the current economics of driving, and transit options being as they are, the decision to drive is rational for most of the people making it. If most Americans are in situations where driving is the rational choice, we don’t need the “car culture” to explain their behavior, and we can see a clearer path to changing it, by helping to change people’s situations.

Conversely, car advocates who cite current car use as evidence that people want to drive cars are also making the attribution error; they’re implying that everyone who rationally chooses to drive is culturally committed to driving. That’s wrong; some of the people driving cars would like to be in a situation where they didn’t have to.

If I think about my transport situation rationally, I take the bus because parking in the CBD is very expensive and it makes more financial sense to simply catch the bus to work. Being able to check the internet on my phone while being on the bus is also quite nice. For most people who don’t work in the CBD (and many who do whose parking is subsidised), the same economic process doesn’t work, and as a result they logically choose to drive – generally unless they’re too poor, young or old to afford to buy and run a car. This isn’t because Aucklanders are lovingly attached to their vehicles (although that might be the case for a small proportion of the population) but rather because it’s the most logical thing to do. Taking the bus or train when travelling on a suburb to suburb trip is probably going to take you three times as long, cost your more and not even work half the time.

And why is this the case? Well most probably because we’ve spent most of the past 60 years building masses of roads and completely ignoring public transport investment. We’ve also put in place planning regulations (particularly in the case of minimum parking requirements) that are huge subsidies for those that drive. It’s not that we want to have to drive everywhere, or want families to own four cars, it’s that the way we have built our city or even more importantly the way we have built our city’s transport network, that effectively forces us all to act as though we have a car culture.

Where public transport improvements have been made that make catching the bus or train the logical choice for people, the results have been outstanding. The huge patronage growth on the Northern Busway over the past couple of years is probably the best example of this – a service with excellent frequencies, one that is pretty damn fast (faster than driving critically) and one that is super comfortable to ride. Proving the point that where you offer a superior option to driving, people will act logically and make the change.

The term “Greenwash” is quite well known, meaning situations where companies disingenuously promote their products as environmentally friendly when they aren’t, or over-sell what are really quite modest environmental benefits. Wikipedia defines the term as follows:

Greenwashing (green whitewash) is the practice of companies disingenuously spinning their products and policies as environmentally friendly, such as by presenting cost cuts as reductions in use of resources. It is a deceptive use of green PR or green marketing. The term green sheen has similarly been used to describe organizations that attempt to show that they are adopting practices beneficial to the environment.

An interesting phenomenon that I have seen in transport circles, particularly in Auckland, is what could be called “public transport-wash”, or “PT-wash” for short. It is when road projects have tiny or pointless little supposed public transport improvements tacked onto them in order to help “sell” them to the general public. Road engineers and other people who generally promote big roading projects realise that what people really want is better public transport, so that’s why they add on these supposed public transport benefits that most of the time don’t really exist, or at best are extremely minor compared to the project as a whole.

A classic example of “PT-wash” is the proposed widening of State Highway 16. As noted in the NZ Herald last year, around $860 million is going to be spent on widening SH16 between St Lukes and Westgate over the next decade. In that original article you see the following paragraph:

Bus shoulder lanes would also be extended over the full distance, boosting an existing “patchwork” of peak-hour priority sections.

At the Waterview Connection Expo I attended on Saturday, there was a bit more information on the extent of these bus shoulder lanes. Somewhat unsurprisingly they will continue to abruptly end at each on-ramp, off-ramp or over-bridge, and in general seemed to be a continuation of the “patchwork” of priority lanes that exists at the moment. In reality, we’re probably going to merely end up with slightly wider shoulder lanes that are a bit smoother – and that’s it. Yet the project is being sold to the public as helping to improve public transport. AMETI is another classic example of “PT-wash” in my opinion. A whole pile of massive road upgrades that justifies itself on the basis of adding a few bus-lanes, when really what’s needed is a whole new rail corridor.

I may seem to be overly grumpy and exasperated here, but I really do think that we need to keep an eye out for “PT-washing”, to ensure that we’re not being taken for a ride here. If a project does nothing significant to help public transport then we shouldn’t be tricked into thinking that it does.

There are three interesting articles published in the NZ Herald yesterday and today, including two editorials, raising further concern about the power that will be wielded by the “Council Controlled (controlling?) Organisations” that are being established as part of the Super City.

First, here are some good extracts from yesterday’s editorial:

[last week]…the Herald said the current proposal could not stand. This week’s articles on the extent of the work to be undertaken by the CCOs and the powers at their disposal have served only to reinforce that verdict.

In several ways, they will bring an undemocratic element to the Super City. First, they will operate out of the public eye and be virtually unanswerable to Aucklanders. They can meet behind closed doors, and do not have to issue agendas and minutes, apparently to lighten the administrative burden.

Such a paltry attempt at an explanation can only underpin the view that the directors of the CCOs are deliberately being cushioned from local pressure and political influence. In no way can this be healthy.

The “secrecy” of how Auckland Transport and the other CCOs are proposed to operate is to me the most unpalatable part of the proposal and it is relatively easy to fix. Somewhat surprisingly, neither Rodney Hide nor Steven Joyce have shown any inkling to make changes to this aspect of the CCOs.

There are more fundamental issues here though, as the editorial explains further:

There is also no guarantee that Super City mayors will be able to deliver the platforms on which they were elected. The Auckland Council will also find its hands tied.

Under the third and final Super City bill, the transport CCO can, for example, prohibit the council from exercising any transport functions unless it delegates them. The directors wielding this power will, in the first instance, be largely appointed by Mr Hide and Mr Joyce. Thereafter, the council will appoint but not directly control them.

In essence, the CCO boards will run more than 75 per cent of services in the Super City at arm’s length from its elected representatives. The councillors will be restricted to writing spatial plans and statements of intents with the CCOs. Even the most worthy of these will be a pallid expression of democracy when every level of the decision-making is in the hands of unelected directors. Local-body politicians of every hue, including the leading mayoral aspirants, John Banks and Len Brown, have voiced their concern over this flight from democracy. They sense, correctly, that this is the recipe for a frustrated and disappointed citizenry.

In response, the Government has hinted at minor changes to make the CCOs more accountable to the council and ratepayers. But there has been no sign that it might, say, shelve the transport CCO or limit the waterfront agency to development issues. It seems resolved to impose this model on Auckland.

Better sense must prevail. If not, Aucklanders will, indeed, feel locked out of the major decisions on their city’s future. It is hard to think of the Super City starting life under a more serious handicap.

There has been quite a lot of debate about whether you want to only have the high order strategic parts of transport politicised and debated, or whether the more operational and delivery elements should also be under the control of the council. While certainly there are poor decisions made by politicians when it comes to transport matters, such as the Helensville rail service and cutbacks to bus lanes along Tamaki Drive, this has to be balanced against what is lost when these operational matters are put behind closed doors. Will unelected officials give as much of a damn about how unreliable Auckland’s train services are as an elected politician would? Experience so far this year suggests not.

Nevertheless, on balance I think that ARTA has been good for Auckland, having an agency that is dedicated to improving transport has had its benefits. But then it’s fairly strongly (though arguably not strongly enough) under the control of the ARC. So having some level of structural separation can be a good thing, but I guess the question is where you draw the line between what should be “in” council and what shouldn’t be. That is a difficult question, and surely one should err on the side of more political accountability rather than less. The current proposal errs enormously the other way.

The reason to do this is perfectly illustrated by the concerns of mayoral candidates Len Brown and John Banks. Clearly, in Auckland transport is going to either be election issue number one or very damn close to it. While both candidates seem sensible in their approach to the need for a balanced transport system (rather than the roadsfest central government seems keen on), there will undoubtedly be debates about which project should get priority, which candidate’s going to be best at getting the CBD rail tunnel built, which candidate’s going to ensure the reliability of trains in Auckland’s improved, which candidate’s going to promote more bus lanes and so forth. The same will be true of all the councillor candidates – who will actually be pretty powerful politicians given how few of them there are. And yet, while we could end up electing a hugely pro public transport council (or anti-public transport I suppose, although that seems unlikely in my opinion) they may be powerless to actually implement the policies on which they were elected. That just seems wrong.

Another article in yesterday’s paper, by John Roughan, explained in a very well thought out manner, why having CCOs for debatable issues like transport and the development of the waterfront is a bad idea:

Non-elected boards have worked well for government departments that can charge for their services, and for the chargeable services of local government. They can be given a measurable financial objective and left to decide how to organise and price the service to meet it.

The system works when the public doesn’t care how the service is organised so long as it remains reliable. The boards that will manage the Auckland Council’s property, water supply, stadiums, events and the like, should be fine.

But the system is problematic when the public cares about the means to an end. It is the means, not the ends, of solving traffic congestion or developing a public waterfront that are likely to arouse public interest and political disagreement. The ends are readily agreed.

While I disagree with other parts of Roughan’s article, I think he’s hit the nail on the head here in distinguishing between situations where CCOs make sense and situations where they don’t. It we compare water to transport, the difference becomes most clear. With water (wastewater and water supply) we don’t really care exactly how we get clean water, or how our wastewater is disposed of, as long as the water is good quality, the wastewater doesn’t end up in our harbours and it’s all done as cheaply as possible. Transport is hugely different to this, as while we are likely to all agree that the “ends” of less congestion, greater choice and so forth are what we’re aiming for, we really do care how we get there.

Whether we try to build our way out of congestion through massive motorway investment, or whether we build new railway lines, or whether we focus on improving bus lanes or whatever, are all matters of great public interest and debate. There is no clear right and wrong answer, the problem is not one that some engineer can simply work out with a computer programme and the different paths we take to getting the outcome we’re all aiming for will have tremendous impacts on people’s lives. It’s not a matter of debating whether this water pipe is plastic or concrete, transport is about debating issues that affect lives in a huge number of different ways. It’s complicated, it’s ugly, it’s debatable – and that’s why it needs to be accountable, transparent and democratic.

Today’s Herald on Sunday has an editorial that again looks at the CCOs. While it’s largely similar to previous articles, it does involve some interesting parts:

But an unelected mega-board looking after transport is even more chilling: if one thing unites Aucklanders it is the lament about how hard it is to get around the place, whether by public or private transport. Neither area is one that any sane Aucklander would want under the control of someone beyond the reach of electoral accountability. Ditto water, council investments, economic development, regional facilities and the city’s property holdings.

There is nothing yet in the proposed organisational set-up that says the council – and by extension the voter – will not be able to exercise control over these boards. But there is nothing explicitly to say that they will, either. Hide and his Cabinet colleague, Transport Minister Steven Joyce, have been quick to make placatory noises: in a jointly written op-ed piece in the Herald, they said that “transparency and accountability is [sic] a key feature” of the plan. But if the lines of accountability are not plainly laid down, that is so much cant. These boards are called “council-controlled organisations” (or CCOs), but there is no provision for the “council” to exercise any “control” over the “organisations”. The ministers seek to respond by saying “Trust us: we know what we’re doing”. We say “yeah right”.

It will certainly be interesting to see what changes, if any, come out of the select committee analysing the legislation that is setting all of this up. They report back to parliament on May 4th.

Perhaps the only good thing Winston Peters ever did for New Zealand’s politics was introduce the “Super Gold Card”, allowing elderly free off-peak travel of public transport. There are a number of reasons why this is a good policy:

• It’s a good boost to off-peak public transport services by giving them the patronage they need to operate at decent frequencies.
• In places like Waiheke Island the local economy has significantly benefited from travellers taking the ferry for free.
• It enables those too frail to drive to still be well involved in their communities by being able to get around for free.
• It’s just a damn nice thing to do.

However, its costs have turned out to be fairly significant – around $18 million a year, of which $2 million alone is for the Waiheke ferries.

As a result of this cost, the government and NZTA are currently reviewing the scheme:

Transport Minister Steven Joyce says the government is committed to the scheme but some changes will need to be made because it is currently stand on track to exceed the available budget.

“The highest priority of the review process is to consider how to keep the scheme within the available budget of $18 million a year, while continuing to provide improved mobility for older people.”

Among other things, officials will consider:
• the level of reimbursement operators and councils receive
• how “off peak” should be defined
• the eligibility of certain high cost services- including the Waiheke ferry and the train service between Wellington and the Wairarapa

“The transport concession of the SuperGold card has an annual budget of $18 million dollars across the country – $2 million of that is currently spent on the Waiheke ferry alone,” says Mr Joyce.

The current review began in October last year and is expected to be complete by May of this year.

I reckon it’s pretty obvious why the costs have blown out, and it is symptomatic of what is wrong with public transport in Auckland at the moment. Because of the way public transport currently operates, generally routes are either subsidised or commercial (a small minority are gross-contracted where ARTA pays a set fee to an operator to provide the service and ARTA gets the money from fares). Subsidised routes are those where fares are ‘topped up’ by ARTA so that a decent service can be provided, while commercial routes effectively operate outside ARTA’s control.

This system will eventually be changed by the Public Transport Management Act to make it possible for all services to be ‘gross contracted’. This Act was passed in 2008 but hasn’t really taken effect much yet because… well I’m not exactly sure why, something to do with the timing of contracts being rolled over I think. Steven Joyce has indicated he doesn’t really like the PTMA very much, and is likely to amend it at least to some extent to reintroduce the current distinction between commercial and subsidised services, while still retaining a greater level of control over commercial services than currently exists.

But anyway, how does this all relate to the Super Gold Card? Well, most services that operate off-peak are subsidised services, meaning that ARTA assists the operator in making providing the service commercially viable. This happens everywhere around the world and is done to recognise the wider benefits that public transport provides, such as reducing congestion, improving environmental outcomes and alleviating the need to build more and more roads. When someone with a Super Gold Card gets on a bus, train or ferry their full fare is paid directly by NZTA to the operator. So let’s say the Super Gold Card doubles the number of elderly using public transport, then the operator receives twice as much money as they used to – and as a bonus doesn’t have to worry about handling it as NZTA send around a big fat cheque every once in a while.

What doesn’t happen, as far as I know, is a reduction in the amount of subsidy paid by ARTA (and NZTA who in another capacity help fund ARTA).So effectively the operator gets to “double-dip” on the public purse – enjoying both the increased amount of money they’re getting through the Super Gold Card scheme while still getting to keep all their previous subsidies. No wonder companies like NZ Bus have advertised like crazy to get elderly to use the Super Gold Card, it’s a win-win situation for them and they get to make out like bandits with the extra cash.

The solution is pretty obvious in my opinion, and that is for all services to become gross-contracted by ARTA. If this happened then the Super Gold Card money would go directly to ARTA and would help off-set the costs of contracting the service in the first place. Each dollar of Super Gold Card money would actually go into improving the provision of public transport in Auckland, rather than into the rather deep pockets of the various service operators. There would be no “double-dipping” by the operators and either the amount of NZTA funds required for the Super Gold Card could be reduced, or (preferably) the extra cash could go into helping to fund improved public transport services – like filling that $11 million hole in ARTA’s rail budget.

It beggars belief that Steven Joyce is so keen to improve the cost-effectiveness of public transport through crude measures such as imposing arbitrary farebox recovery ratios that (by forcing higher fares and therefore reducing patronage) could end up making public transport even less economically viable, while at the same time is also looking to weaken the very piece of legislation (the PTMA) that is designed to improve the cost-effectiveness of public transport.

I noticed on the bus yesterday that BP had put their prices up to $1.829 a litre for 91 octane petrol, and thought that was the highest price I’d seen in a while. It turns out that prices haven’t been this high for around 18 months, since the tail end of the oil spike in mid 2008. The NZ Herald says more:

AA PetrolWatch spokesman Mark Stockdale told NZPA the weaker exchange rate was partly to blame for the price rise.

Petrol was “hitting an uncomfortable price point” and motorists would be feeling nervous after prices passed $1.80, he said.

Until the rises of last week retail fuel prices had remained unchanged since January 19, when they fell 3c a litre across the board.

Crude oil and refined petrol prices rose between 4 and 6 per cent during February, with refined diesel up 10 per cent – reducing oil company importers’ margins.

In June 2008 there was a record fuel price jump of 12c per litre in just 48 hours. By the end of the month, petrol was selling at $2.11 per litre.

I don’t expect prices to go above $2 a litre any time particularly soon. The February 2010 “OilWatch Monthly” indicates that the amount of oil being produced is still well down on its mid 2008 peak, meaning that global demand for oil still has not hit uncomfortable heights of 87-88 million barrels a day, instead settling around 85-86 million, as shown in the graph below: In particular, the second graph shows that OPEC production is significantly less than it was in 2008. As a result, OPEC has some significant spare capacity that they can turn on to ease price issues should they so please, so there’s no real worry of a sharp spike for now.

However, the question in my mind is what happens when demand starts to jump above that 88 million barrels a day that was the max output during July 2008 when prices went completely nuts? That’s when I think things could get interesting again, with the result probably being that either prices will go incredibly high again (maybe even higher than July 2008) and stay there, or that the high prices will kick off another financial crisis like what happened in 2008, and prices will crash as a result.

I do wonder what petrol price would make Steven Joyce start to worry about the sense of spending $11 billion over the next decade on motorways. $2.50 a litre maybe? Or $3?

We haven’t heard much about progress on the implementation of Auckland’s integrated ticketing system recently, although I have been assured by ARTA that things are “coming along”. The winning tenderer, Thales, has set up an office in Auckland and it seems that things are slowly grinding into action. It would seem as though there will be a big push to get as much as possible of the integrated ticketing system operational by the time of the Rugby World Cup next year. This is utterly essential in my opinion, as our current fragmented ticketing system is an absolute joke that will make us the laughing stock of the world (along with our continuously breaking down trains).

However, perhaps what it even more important than implementation of the actual integrated ticketing system is the design of an integrated fare system for Auckland. What’s the difference between the two? Well the fare system will establish what kind of fares are available, whether we continue to have a “stage-based” system or shift to a “zone-based” system like there is in cities such as Melbourne and London, whether we have fare capping, what kinds of unlimited travel passes will be available and so forth. All the integrated ticketing part of this is getting the right software and hardware in place to implement the fare system.

I’m quite curious to explore what an integrated fare system would look like in Auckland. I have outlined my thoughts on this matter a few times in the past, as well as the matters what will need to be considered when putting together the fare system. It might be worthwhile stepping back from the end-point of coming up with various different types of tickets that should be available to answer some more fundamental questions, and then to examine possible options that would help achieve what the fundamental goals are. So let’s have a look first at what I think should/would be the aims of any integrated fare system in Auckland:

1. Complete multi-modal and multi-operator integration (same ticket can be used on any bus, train or ferry in the Auckland region.
2. The fare system should be designed to increase patronage and encourage more people to use public transport.
3. The fare system should, in particular, make it easier for people to transfer between one service and another.
4. The fare system should be generally revenue neutral compared to the current system, or if possible generate even more revenue.
5. The fare system should seek to maximise the efficiency of the public transport resource.
6. The fare system should ensure riders get ‘the best deal’.

Let’s look at each of these matters in turn in more detail:

Multi-modal, multi-operator integration:

To me this aspect is fundamental to creating an integrated ticketing system. Unless you can use your particular ticket on any bus, train or ferry then you don’t have an integrated ticketing system. However, in a way I don’t think it’s enough to simply say that there must be a ticketing option that works on all possible transport options, as we actually already have that in the form of the Discovery Pass (just that nobody uses it because it’s really expensive and incredibly poorly marketed). The point is that whether I buy a multi-journey pass, a monthly pass, a weekly pass or use a stored value system it needs to be valid on all buses, trains and ferries in the Auckland region.

I have a worry that what we could end up with is having an integrated stored value system, but any other ticketing options will remain in the disjointed mess they currently are. This would be similar to the situation where you can call a Telecom cellphone from a Vodafone one, but many of the special deals apply to the people you’re calling being with the same company as you. I wouldn’t want to see NZ Bus offering their own ticketing passes alongside a citywide integrated fare system as that would be incredibly confusing and not much better than where we are at the moment.

Increasing patronage:

Increasing patronage levels and encouraging more people to use public transport is, of course, the ultimate goal of any improvements made, and it will be a complex process to achieve this outcome. However, there are a few things that I think would encourage more people to use public transport, but perhaps even more specifically, to encourage those who do use public transport to use it more often. To get those who catch the bus or train to work during the week also catching them to shopping malls on the weekend. Or to get school kids using public transport to visit their friends after school and so forth.

There are a few ways I think a fare system could help achieve this goal. The first is to get as many people as possible purchasing “unlimited travel” weekly and monthly passes. Customers who purchase these passes are precious, in the same way as subscribers are precious to those who publish magazines and newspapers – because they are your core base. These people will want to get the best value for money out of their pass so they will want to use them as often as possible. This means that they might use public transport more at the weekends or in the evenings than they would otherwise, because they’ve effectively already paid for the trip. At the moment in Auckland it’s only really worthwhile purchasing a monthly pass if you live three stages or more from your destination, as otherwise the numbers stack up. If we had more options for unlimited travel passes then I think more people would use them (unlimited travel within a particular number of zones if we’re using a zone system for example.

Another way of boosting patronage is through time-based rather than trip-based fares. This links in with the point below about making transfers easier, because if one ticket effectively bought you two hours of travel, rather than one entry onto a bus or train, then the public transport system would become that much more useful to you as connecting services would effectively act as simple the second part to your trip, rather than another trip entirely. As I explained a few weeks back, this brings the network effect into play, which potentially hugely improves the attractiveness of public transport. Which leads to higher patronage.

Making transfers easier:

As noted above, one of the most important tasks of a new fare system will be to make the process of transfering easier. ARTA’s long term plans for public transport in Auckland do rely upon transfering between trunk and feeder services a lot more than we see at the moment, which is definitely the right approach so that resources can be used far more efficiently. However, as Paul Mees has said: “…from the passenger’s point of view, transferring between services is an inconvenience: requiring an extra fare for the disservice is like adding insult to injury”.

Having time-based ticketing, based around a zone system where the city is divided into chunks and passengers pay according to how many zones their trip passes through in a 2 hour, daily or whatever time period regardless of how many times they get on or off a bus or train is absolutely critical here. Unless our future fares system makes transfering dramatically easier then it will be a failure, no doubt about that.

Revenue neutral or better:

While ideally we would all like a new ticketing system to make our trips cheaper, I think it has to be recognised that ARTA does not have a huge pile of funding available to make up for any loss of revenue, so therefore the changes will have to be revenue neutral at worst.

Now this does not necessarily mean that fares have to go up. Mobile phone companies do not need to raise the per-minute rates for calling in order to make more money – what they do is try to offer options that will get people calling more often or using their phone for more stuff that is valuable enough to the user for them to be charged. The same sort of thinking should apply to public transport I think, in that there is a need to think cleverly about ways to increase revenue. For example, if you have 30 people willing to pay $5 for a particular trip, but 50 people would take the trip if it cost $4, then you’re actually pretty stupid to keep charging $5 for the trip as you’re effectively giving away $50 in revenue. I’m no expert of the price elasticity of public transport patronage in Auckland, but I expect that in the outer areas in particular big rises or falls in fares could make a big difference to possible patronage more than outweighing any benefit gained from increasing fares.

Another aspect to look at is what I hinted at earlier, in getting more people to buy weekly and monthly passes. Most people in Auckland at the moment who use public transport seem to use multi-journey passes or stored value passes, often because weekly or monthly passes don’t make sense. Many of these people will simply not bother using public transport at the slightest provocation (a bit of rain etc.) because they realise they can simply use that trip next time around. With more people using weekly or monthly passes they will feel as though they ought to catch the bus or train each and every day to make the most of their pass. This means that you’re getting full-time revenue out of that user rather than just occasional trips.

Maximise efficiency:

Just like all transportation resources, the demand for public transport is hugely higher at two points of the day than it is at any other times – namely the morning and evening peak hour. This is an incredibly inefficient use of resources in two senses. Firstly, it means that during peak times you need a lot of rolling stock, and in the case of trains you may need a lot of track capacity. If you’re running peak hour services at close to capacity and you attract another 100 people to use the service, then you’re going to need to buy two new buses to serve those people – even though you’re not going to need to use those buses at any other time of the day. The second way the peak spikes are inefficient is that during off-peak hours most of the stock rolls around fairly empty, meaning that fares really struggle to cover the costs of operating that service – leading to expensive subsidies being required.

The solution is to somehow spread those peaks a bit. Of course many people simply have to be at work by 9am, or at school or at university by a certain hour of the day. But a certain number of people probably would travel off-peak if there were incentives for them to do so. Unfortunately, at the moment on most routes the only time a decent frequency service is offered is during the peak hour so even those who don’t have to travel then are encouraged to do so, making the peak even more extreme. In terms of service provision, one can try to spread the peak by offering higher frequencies during the “shoulder-peak” periods of just before and just after peak hour, rather than buying another bus to operate at peak time. From a ticketing point of view, the solution in my opinion is to make a distinction between fares charged during peak hour and fares charged outside of peak hours. Perhaps fares between 7am and 9am, and 4pm and 6pm go up by 10%, while those outside those times are decreased by 20% (as more people travel during peak times the revenue might balance).

This would enable a far more efficient use of existing transport resources such as buses and trains.

Ensuring riders get the best deal:

There’s nothing more annoying that taking a few trips on public transport throughout a day and then discovering you would have been better off getting a day-pass. Or buying a day pass but then working out you would have been better off simply paying separate fares for each trip. Somehow you feel ripped off.

The solution to this is called “fare capping”, where you pay as you got up to a certain daily rate, and then you stop being charged for further trips. This is used on London’s Oyster Cards and is a fantastic idea that must form a part of Auckland’s future integrated fare system.

I’m keen for some feedback on these “overarching principles” for what our integrated fare system should look like. Perhaps in a future post or two I will try to put this into action and come up with something of a proposal for how ARTA should implement the future system.

As I noted a couple of days ago it has been a pretty horrific year for Auckland’s train system so far, with signalling failures, points failures and train failures seemingly occurring on a daily basis (quite literally actually). In that previous post I questioned whether the $11 million cutback to the rail contract was behind many of these problems (the train breakdowns, the daily signal and points failures are KiwiRail’s fault). It seems that trains running in Auckland this evening on the Western Line were subjected to another typical “day at the office” - a points failure leading to 45 minute delays.

I think it’s worthwhile doing a bit of a comparison between how the rail problems faced by Auckland and Wellington in recent weeks have been dealt with. Let’s start with Wellington, where a couple of weeks ago there were some serious problems relating to electric wires  that were not properly fixed during overnight maintenance, causing huge problems. KiwiRail got blasted in the Dominion Post Editorial, which had this to say:

On Tuesday 369 people were stuck on a train to Upper Hutt for two hours after a power failure halted all trains in and out of the capital. “No one told us anything,” complained a passenger. “We were locked up and were going nowhere. We were not allowed outside.”

The previous day 2000 commuters were delayed for up to two hours when another power fault brought services to a standstill. Some passengers waited more than an hour for replacement buses to show up. Others walked to work along the lines.

This week’s breakdowns are just the latest in a string of problems that have infuriated passengers over the past 12 months as historic under-investment in the commuter network and a $600 million upgrade have coincided to create what KiwiRail project manager David Gordon calls a “perfect storm”.

Passengers have been delayed by power faults, equipment failures, slips and contractor errors and, last winter, were left to shiver in carriages without working heaters.

Faced with such a difficult operating environment, KiwiRail might have been expected to do its utmost to retain customer loyalty by informing passengers of the cause and likely length of delays and having alternative forms of transport on hand to minimise inconvenience.

Instead it has operated as if its customers have no choice but to put up with its erratic services.

In response, KiwiRail actually did something. There was a free day’s travel as compensation for the problems and a real commitment to sort things out it would seem. Rail is taken seriously in Wellington and the trains are expected to work, so when something goes wrong because there’s only one agency involved (KiwiRail) things can be sorted out.

Meanwhile, back in Auckland, it’s arguable that we suffer (on a smaller scale, but far more frequently) significantly more problems with our rail network. As I have mentioned in previous posts, there were 406 signal or points failures on the Auckland rail network in the last year alone, and in January only 36% of Western Line trains reached the destination less than 5 minutes late, while 10% didn’t even reach their destination at all. And yet what have we heard from ARTA or KiwiRail about these horrific problems in Auckland?

Zilch.

Instead, we get bombarded with media releases about fun, nice to have, events and promotions that ARTA’s running. Like tomorrow’s Walk2Work promotion, which I’m sure is a good idea, but how about we sort those trains out? Or a “one-stop-shop” calendar for finding out about sustainable travel events, or some promotion with the Blues rugby team, or the refurbishment of the Maxx Website (without actually updating the horrifically outdated mapping system behind the scenes) or the bizarre “Make a Change” campaign. These are all “nice”, but once again please can we get the basics right first? Can we get more than two out of five trains running on time on the Western Line, can we ensure that 10% of trains don’t fail to make it to their destination? Can we get some progress updates on how integrated ticketing is coming along? Can we start implementing a paper-based integrated fare system like was promised “within a few months” back in 2008?

Now I imagine ARTA will throw their hands up in the air at all of this and say “but it’s not our fault, it’s KiwiRail/Veolia/ARC/City Councils/NZTA’s fault….” Which is probably true, but in a nutshell is the problem.

And having a massive Transport CCO is only going to make things worse, as they’ll be even less accountable while we’ll still have the dis-integration between KiwiRail, Veolia and the new Transport Agency. This isn’t throwing the baby out with the bathwater, it’s throwing the baby out but keeping the damn bathwater.

An excellent interview of Rodney Hide by John Campbell last night on Campbell Live. Click here to watch the video. I really struggle to understand how having Auckland Transport operating in secret will help improve accountability of this agency. Yesterday I wondered whether we would see some big changes to Auckland Transport or even whether it would survive the media thrashing it’s getting at the moment. Judging from this interview and comments from John Key in today’s NZ Herald, it seems unlikely there will be any significant changes made to the legislation to improve the accountability of this CCO. Which is a disastrous outcome.

If I were to ask Rodney Hide or Steven Joyce one question about this set up, it would be: “who do I complain to when my train’s late for the 10th time in a row?” The elected councillor who can do nothing about it or the unelected CCO staff member who doesn’t need to give a damn about my problems?