It’s been a while since I posted anything so I thought I’d step in while Josh is away to help keep things ticking over, my apoligies for the length and wordiness of this one!
The outcome of last Sunday’s motorway closure in Newmarket left me with some sense of vindication as a public transport advocate. After coming out with predictions of mass gridlock while the Newmarket viaduct was closed, NZTA developed strategy of scaring people away from travelling anywhere at all (much to the chagrin of the Newmarket Business Association!). To me that seemed a bit draconian with the distinct flavour of the old ‘auto-apocalypse’ line of thinking. Would the city really grind to a halt with one motorway out of action? Did they really think that the only way to manage a motorway closure was to stop people going anywhere at all? Is Auckland really so dependent on it’s motorways that there is no other conceivable transport management strategy than a virtual curfew on leaving the house?
Luckily ARTA saw what was going on and came to the party by providing free trains and a more frequent timetable all day long. Certainly many people took advantage of that offer and patronage counts of 30,000 were reported, six times those of a normal Sunday . At the end of the day there was no car-mageddon, Auckland didn’t have a fatal heart attack because one if it’s arteries was pinched.
Now of course we don’t really know how much of this was due to people shifting to trains for the day and how much was due to people taking the advice of NZTA and not going anywhere at all… although Mike Lee of the ARC suggests that over 80% of train trips last Sunday (25,000 journeys) were due to drivers shifting to the train for the day. I have to question that figure myself: it seems he’s attributing everything above normal Sunday patronage to car drivers making the switch which seems a little too simplistic to me. However at the end of the day the massive increase in train patronage and the lack of gridlock does suggest one thing: that a combination of public transport ‘carrot’ and road ‘stick’ will get some people to shift their mode of travel, if only temporarily.
So this outcome got me thinking again about one of the great debates of public transport, should we make public transport free all the time? If one-off free trains sextupled the average Sunday patronage should we look at doing it every day?
Suggested benefits of fare free public transport
With this in mind I went off to revisit some of the websites around that promote free public transport, and at first glance they make a compelling argument. They talk about greater mobility, better transport efficiency, social justice, clean air and people friendly streets. For example, Fare Free NZ list the following as the benefits of free public transport:
Drastic decrease in emission of exhaust gases
Less noise
Less traffic jams
Better traffic safety
Enormous savings in energy and raw materials
Creation of new jobs
Ascent of efficient economical development
Considerably lower public and personal expenses
Empowering of social justice
Higher cultural dialogue
Creation of friendlier urban environment
Assumptions around going fare free
Now this all sounds fantastic, but if you think about it this isn’t a list of the outcomes of free public transport, this is simply a list of the benefits of people driving less and using public transport more. None of this necessarily has anything to do with fares and I guess my number one issue with the fare free concept is this assumption. Advocates seem to automatically assume that getting rid of the personal cost of public transport will mean that people will ignore any other problem they have with it and all of a sudden the system becomes efficient and very well patronised. So at this point we have to examine a few assumptions in turn:
Is the cost of public transport the main reason most people don’t use it, or even a major reason?
I guess the argument is that the cost of travel is a major barrier to use, or perhaps that if there wasn’t any cost people would overlook the other barriers. If you look at the results of surveys or comments on forums and in the papers cost does come into it but there is plenty else going on too. The main issues seem to be about service levels and accessibility, things like “the bus doesn’t go anywhere near my work”, “I live miles from a train station”, “the bus only comes once an hour”, “the last train is half an hour before I’m finished”, “it takes just too long, two hours by bus for a twenty minute drive”. Now it is obvious that going fare free isn’t going to change any of these nuts and bolts problems about timetabling, routing and speed, although in cases of minor inconvenience we might trade off a little time and effort to save money. My view is there are much bigger problems holding people back from public transport than the price of a ticket, and addressing those first would reap bigger gains. There is only so far people will go out of their way to save money.
Would free public transport mean people shift from driving, or would they simply keep driving the same amount but also increase their public transport usage?
Classic economics tells us that consumption and price are interlinked. Basically the cheaper something is the more we use it, and that usage doesn’t always have much to do with our needs. So, subject to those function constraints outlined above, making it free should result in more use. Perhaps the biggest issue is that those routes that work well already might be swamped, while those that don’t work well wouldn’t see much gain.
It seems quite common to assume that any increase in transit patronage is a good thing, but is that necessarily so? In terms of efficiency and environmental impact the first goal should really be to avoid making trips in the first place. Not taking a trip means no energy usage, no emissions, no congestion. I guess the point I’m trying to make is that simply increasing travel for travel sake isn’t a good idea. The goal should be to limit travel in some cases and shift the mode of travel in others, it should be to improve efficiency and meet the mobility needs of the populace. One reason we have such traffic problems is that there isn’t a direct charge for using roads, and road pricing has been suggested as a way to address that. But on transit there is a direct price, and perhaps that is actually a valuable demand management tool that stops people making wasteful or frivoulous trips? At the end of the day if the roads still see just as much traffic but the buses and trains are clogged too have we achieved anything?
Can the system actually handle a major increase?
This is a potential issue when it comes down to the economics of public transport supply. There is only a limited amount of spare capacity in the public transport system at peak times, but perhaps a fair bit more outside of the peaks. So free fares might mean the system gets used more off peak, but it might place a huge amount of strain on it during peak times. To stop service levels degrading too much there would need to be additional investment in new vehicles, new buslanes and the like, so going fare free might just cost a lot more than the lost fare revenue alone.
Direct benefits of fare free public transport
So there are a few things to think about there, if one or a few of these assumptions are actually true then maybe it’s a good idea after all. However if we put the general benefits of increasing public transport usage to one side, there are a few things that we can attribute directly to having no fares:
The big one is that free fares means no fare collection costs. It takes a lot of money to collect money! Lets consider the amount of time bus drivers spend collecting cash and issuing tickets, the number of people employed on trains and service counters whose job is simply to sell tickets, and all the back end work required to count, check and bank the funds. It becomes apparent that collecting fares actually costs a fair amount of money in terms of labour. Right now it’s pretty hard to put a dollar figure on this cost in Auckland due to the fact there are so many separate organisations involved in public transport. However we can get an idea of the costs involved from Melbourne where all the ticketing in handled by a central state run company called the Transport Ticketing Authority. This company employs 103 people just to operate the backend of the ticketing system, let alone actually sell any tickets. Apparently the Transport Ticketing Authority alone costs the state about $50 million a year to run, albeit for a much larger system that Auckland’s. Both Melbourne and Auckland are working to introduce smart card ticketing systems that will hopefully reduce some of these costs, although the initial outcome from Melbourne has been massive budget blowouts. The new Myki ticketing system is costing over a billion dollars to install and run for ten years, that’s a lot of fares covered.
Another big issue zero fares could remove is the amount of time it takes to pay fares. This is particularly obvious on commuter routes leaving the CBD in the evening peak, sometimes it can take ten minutes for everyone to line up and pay the driver in cash as the board. I remember in my uni days of commuting from the Shore it would often take more time to load up the bus at Victoria St that it would for the bus to make it’s way out of the CBD and over the bridge! No fares means people can effectively just hop on and off buses as they please, using whichever door is convenient. Having no fares would almost eliminate boarding time, but there are of course other ways to get rid of the boarding delays. However a smart card system in conjunction with punitive cash fare rates would also slash boarding time, as effectively payment would be done at a ticket machine or over the internet and getting on board would just be a case of swiping the tag post to verify payment. Another option would be to have clippies on buses the way Auckland’s trains do currently, collecting fares after people have boarded. Other options would be fare-paid areas in the city and more ticket machines at bus stops.
A third potential benefit of free fares is that it also means free transfers. Right now if you want to swap trains, buses or ferries you have to pay another full fare regardless of how far you are actually going. Effectively this limits people to travelling in the one direction their local route goes (i.e. toward the CBD and back), despite the fact that you can get just about anywhere in the city by making a connection. Get rid of the ‘transfer penalty’ and all of a sudden you have the entire network available to you, you can hop on and off vehicles to you’re hearts content to make a journey. Creating this penalty free ‘network effect’ would go a long way to replicating the convenience that private cars afford when you need to make a series of small trips. There are of course other ways to avoid the transfer penalty, the obvious one being a time-based fare structure such as Auckland already has with the Northern Pass on the busway system.
But what are the costs and problems of going fare free?
Perhaps the biggest problem with going fare free is the loss of revenue. Again it is hard to tell just how much fare money is collected in Auckland each year due to the mix of operators and the whole issue of some routes being entirely commercial. However, looking at a few figures I think we can make a stab at it. The latest ARTA monthly report states there were 60.6 millon public transport trips made over the last 12 months, and that figure is climbing rapidly. Now a lot of those trips were made on concessions or the gold card scheme, and we have no idea how many stages was paid for each one. But assuming the average fare works out to a couple of dollars then we are looking at annual fare revenue of well over a hundred million bucks. This means it would cost the city over a hundred million dollars a year to go fare free.
Considering that the Auckland Regional Council’s annual rate revenue was $160 million last year, funding free public transport under the existing arrangements would require ARC rates to be more or less doubled, which is of course a political impossibility. While there might be big savings to be had in terms of reduced labour costs and time savings, none of that is going to result in cash payments back to the ARC although in the long term they could probably negotiate better terms of their deals with the operators. So to go fare free would require a new funding arrangements, something like an ongoing grant from the central government, a regional sales taxi or a regional petrol tax (about 7c a litre would cover it from my estimates). So while a hundred million dollars doesn’t sound much compared to some of the capital expenditure on transport infrastructure in Auckland, it is still a hundred million that the city would have to pull out of thin air. We need to bear in mind that this extra hundred million a year is the cost just to maintain the existing system as it is today, the city would have to find this money before it even started to think about improving the service provision.
Another sticking point of no fares would be the required changes of contracting laws. All buses and ferries are run by commercial operators, they gain their revenue from a combination of fare sales and council subsidies. The train system is a little different, effectively it is entirely subsidised while the council keeps the fare money. The provisions of the Public Transport Management Act allow the council to do the same with the buses and ferries too, but so far it hasn’t happened and the government looks set to change the law back again. Basically the ideology of past and current governments is that public transport should be run as a commercial business wherever possible and going fare free would obviously prevent this from happening. Therefore free fares would require the support of the central government to change the laws appropriately, and that isn’t likely to happen.
Going fare free would almost certainly mean a much reduced human presence on the PT system. On trains and ferries there would be no need to have staff onboard to sell tickets, and regular interaction with bus drivers would be gone too. There would be little incentive to have staff at stations or stops either… however this is also a potential outcome of a smartcard ticketing system and many paid systems throughout the world have only sporadic security staff as their human presence, so I guess it is moot.
There are all sorts of equity and social issues involved too, things like whether it is desirable to have ‘just anybody’ able to get on board any time they like, and whether things should be user pays or socialised public goods etc. I won’t really go into this here because it is a whole other kettle of fish but they could have a large impact.
My concluding thoughts
There are huge gains to be had by improving public transport patronage and the efficiency of the system in Auckland, but until the cost of public transport fares is the major barrier to PT use I think we should avoid going fare free.
Certainly removing user costs would make public transport more attractive and boost patronage, but there are perhaps much better ways to do that while still recouping some revenue from the users, Indeed patronage has increased in leaps and bounds over the last few years despite the requirement to pay fares, as each bus and train capacity and performance improvement have been met by resulting improvements in use. Zero fares would remove much of the time and delays associated with collecting fares and would remove the transfer penalty, but so would an improved ticketing system based around an integrate fare structure. Furthermore using the provisions of the PTMA act to shift to a totally gross contracted model with a central ticketing agency would gain a lot of the proposed benefits.
Perhaps the only unique benefit of going fare free would money saved by removing the labour and back end costs of fare collection. However as long as these costs are lower than the amount of fares collected and patronage is growing regardless, then the system is better off with that additional revenue stream.
I think free public transport is something for mature, wide reaching transit systems to consider, as much for social and equity reasons and functional ones. However in Auckland’s relatively undeveloped network there are much more pressing needs for spending those millions. At a billion dollars a decade free public transport is anything but free. Personally I’d rather see a city rail tunnel or a couple of busways built with the money that have ten years of fare free transport but no additional improvements. If anything, we should be looking at pricing private car travel, rather than un-pricing public transport.
As always folks feel free to leave your comments. Cheers -Nick R.
Next time you catch the bus, especially a bus like the Link which stops frequently, have a think about the amount of time the bus spends between stops and the amount of time the bus spends halted, waiting for passengers to hop on and off. Actually measuring the percentage of a trip spent still is something I’ve been meaning to get around to for ages, but I am pretty sure it would be significant.
Let’s say each passenger takes about five seconds to load, and that’s assuming they don’t dig around in their bags for change or hand the driver a $20 note – even for 12 people that would be a minute in total spent waiting at the stop. A full bus load of people could take more than five minutes to load – once again assuming that everyone actually loads quite quickly. There are a number of reasons why loading is so slow:
A relatively high proportion of people pay with cash. A contributing factor to this is that using your “pass” is generally only 10% cheaper, plus with a number of different operators around Auckland and the passes only being valid on some of the buses, probably results in more people using cash than need be.
Even those who do pay with their bus passes require interaction with the driver. For my stored value card the driver needs to wait a second or two for it to load up on his screen, and then press three different buttons before the ticket is issued. Multiply that level of interaction up by a large number of passengers and you have the source of a great number of delays.
Because everyone needs the driver to issue them with a ticket, if someone does take ages, through loading up their stored value passes (like I often do $40 at a time), digging through their bag to find the last 10 cents to make up their fare, giving the driver a $20 note and therefore forcing him or her to dig through their change or even asking for directions – everyone else is held up.
Yet again due to the need to interact with the driver, everyone needs to load through the front door – which is a bottleneck in itself and slows down loadings.
Long loading times mean that, unless you have a bus lane or some other form of priority measures, it is literally impossible for travelling on the bus to be anywhere near as fast as driving the same distance. The bus will still get caught in traffic, and if it spends half its time stopped – while passengers are loading – then catching the bus will take twice as long as driving (plus time spent waiting for the bus in the first place of course). Add all this up and it’s reasonably easy to see why most people shun using Auckland’s bus system – it’s just so damn slow most of the time.
Furthermore, and in some ways this is even worse than the slowness caused by loading times, when passengers take forever to load this horribly impacts on the reliability of the service. If your bus is late, chances are either it got stuck in traffic or unusually high demand meant that loading times were slow. This problem is compounded because late buses are usually incredibly busy, as they collect both passengers waiting for that bus and the next – and the slow loading times compounds the problem making the service later and later. This inevitably means that the bus behind starts catching it (as the first bus has taken all the passengers so the second one can zip along without having to stop) – with the result being the dreaded “bunching” of buses.
While this all sounds like bad news, in actual fact it’s extremely good news for one simple reason – all these problem are exceedingly simple to fix: just speed up boarding times. In comparison to building busways or even putting in bus lanes (where it’s not cost, but politics which tend to be the biggest hurdle) speeding up boarding times should be enormously simple and easy to implement. And think of the benefits – all trips being up to 20% quicker, reliability improved dramatically and frequencies able to be higher while using the same resources because speeds are faster (it takes 6 buses to keep a 10 minute frequency along a route that take 60 minute, if they can do the route in 40 minutes then those 6 buses can now deliver 7 minute frequencies).
So how could we go about making boarding times faster? Well perhaps the biggest step is underway already in terms of implementing integrated smart-card ticketing. The new tickets will not require interaction with the driver, so you’ll be able to board even while someone is stuffing around digging out the last 10 cents for their fare. Furthermore, smart-card boarding is incredibly fast. So a lot of improvements are already in the works – and I don’t think it has quite been appreciated the level of difference this will make for those catching the bus.
However, being the hopeful person that I am – I actually think there are a few further steps that we should take to make boardings even faster, particularly at points where a lot of people get on the bus (such as the CBD stops for Northern Express and Dominion Road services). Recently I took this photo of the queue of people waiting to catch the Northern Express outside Britomart:
In these locations I think we need to allow travellers to board through both front and rear doors, and also potentially ‘pre-pay’ their tickets before shifting into a fenced off area – which they could then just pile onto the bus from once it arrived. It seems reasonable to think that such a system could load 60 people onto a bus in around half a minute – massively faster than the current system.
Something like the diagram I’ve drawn below could do the trick:
This is a bit of a “bells and whistles” example, and it could be much simpler with just some ticket ‘posts’ for you to swipe over (fare evasion would be tracked by people on board reading whether you had swiped your card).
Thinking about the impact of such a system a bit more, it could do wonders in reducing bus congestion around points such as Britomart and the busy bus stop for Dominion Road services. I have often seen Northern Express buses blocking up Customs Street waiting for a place to move into – because there bus stop is full of Northern Express buses that are slowly loading up. Eliminating this mess would hugely improve the efficiency of our bus system and also probably eliminate quite a bit of general congestion too.
Let’s hope we start to see some of these sorts of improvements, so we can squeeze the most out of our bus system, so that we can make catching the bus significantly faster and so that we can make buses more reliable. It’s relatively cheap and easy to achieve pretty massive benefits.
We are still yet to hear anything much from ARTA about the progress of integrated ticketing, aside from a rather bizarre press release from NZTA a few weeks back that some agreement had been reached on a technical standard. Big questions like whether we will have zoned based ticketing, whether we’ll have free transfers, whether we’ll have time-based ticketing and so forth remain unknown for now, although hopefully ARTA will decide at some point in the near future to share their grand plans for integrated ticketing with the rest of the world.
However, tonight at the monthly Campaign for Better Transport meeting, a couple of people from Thales, the contractor who is implementing the smartcard integrated ticketing system presented a progress report on what they’re doing, gave us a bit of an idea about what we can expect from the system and also gave us an idea about the timing of how the system will roll out. I can’t remember every detail of what they said, but here are a few key points that I do remember:
The ticketing system, in terms of the actual card and how it works will be very similar to overseas cards like London’s Oyster Card and Hong Kong’s Octopus Card.
There will be a range of different “products” that can be loaded onto a card – stored value, monthly passes, weekly passes and so forth. ARTA will determine the final range of products – Thales’s job is simply to implement it.
There will be “tag-on” and “tag-off” at each railway station and ferry terminal and on each bus. The Thales equipment is being installed for train stations and ferry terminals, while on buses it could be different equipment but will obviously have to understand and recognise the Thales card.
Britomart and Newmarket are to be the only train stations with ticket “gates”. The gates at Britomart will be at the top level (obviously there will be gates at the eastern end too).
Other train stations will have “tag posts”. You will need to make sure you’re tagged on by the time you get on the train as there will be ticket checkers who can read your card and tell whether you’ve tagged on or not.
Buses will have two tag points at the front entrance, so even if someone is holding up the bus by digging through their bag for change you’ll be able to bypass them on the right side of the bus entrance.
Each reader will display how much money (or how many trips etc.) you have left on your card when you tag on/off.
You will have the option to register your card, which means that you will be able to link it up with your bank account and if you choose, have your card be automatically topped up by a certain amount once it gets below $10 (or once your monthly pass runs out it will be automatically renewed etc.)
By August next year there will be a ‘limited functionality pilot’ operating, which means that the system will be up and running in some form on some trains, buses and ferries. I think the goal is to have the rail system operable by the time of the Rugby World Cup.
Full operation is likely by mid 2012.
Overall, it all sounds really great. Thales clearly know what they’re doing (as they have done this many times before) and are delivering a world-class quality product for Auckland. It is pretty exciting to think that in less than two years time we’re finally going to have our version of an Oyster Card.
There is still the issue of what fare products will be available, whether we’ll have free transfers, zone based ticketing, time based ticketing and so forth. Whatever fare options exist, the Thales system will be able to handle it. I just really hope that ARTA sorts out the fare policy in a good way that makes it far easier for people to transfer between services. We wouldn’t want all this great work in creating the integrated ticketing system to be somewhat wasted by not updating our fare system and bringing that into the 21st century too.
A week or so back I blogged some preliminary thoughts on the changes to bus routes that ARTA is currently consulting on. In general, I supported the changes as they provide some level of simplification – although I noted that it could be argued the changes didn’t go far enough and some level of unnecessary complexity remained.
I sent off a few questions I had on some of the changes to ARTA, and they’ve come back with some interesting answers:
Green Bay:
It is worth keeping in mind that the Green Bay review is the first stage of a two-stage review of bus services in this area in which the second stage will include the current 18- series services operated by Go West.
1. Why is the 104 a “one way loop”. This seems to be something that would make the route useful to pretty much nobody as you will inevitably have to go around the wrong way for half of your trip, meaning that it takes forever. If ARTA need to provide such a bare minimum level of service, then wouldn’t the “targeted services” proposed in the RPTP be a more efficient use of resources?
The 104 service provides a vital connection between New Lynn and the Rosebank Peninsula which is currently poorly served. By running the route one-way, we can provide an even frequency. In addition, the core customer base for this service are the elderly and people with reduced mobility. These users live around Wairau Ave, New Windsor Road and Ulster Street. The one-way loop means that none of these users have to cross the road to get to the service. For these customers, our feedback tells us that proximity to bus stops and not having to cross busy roads are much more important considerations than vehicle operating speeds. As the service has plenty of time to run its route, it can accommodate the longer time needed by its largely elderly customer base to get on and off the bus (including getting seated before the bus moves off) without compromising on on-time operation and reliability.
2. Why the 207 and 207X have been kept. These routes seem to duplicate other routes and it’s just strange and unnecessarily confusing having the route on the map when it only runs once a day.
These services are very well used and hence popular with current customers as they avoid the chronic congestion on the Waterview Straight, meaning a faster travel time than services operating via Great North Road. They also provide a connection between Blockhouse Bay, Mt Albert Grammar and Auckland Girls Grammar School around school start and finish times.
3. What is the point of the Blockhouse Bay to New Lynn sections of the 198 and 199 routes? Surely nobody catching a bus between New Lynn and the CBD would take the 198 or 199 as it travels in the wrong direction for quite a long time, while also surely for trips between New Lynn and Blockhouse Bay the 185 is providing the “LCN” that you want as a feeder to the New Lynn Train station. The 199 takes a particularly convoluted route, which seems wasteful.
Up to the late 1970s, the Blockhouse Bay to Downtown and Green Bay to Downtown routes were separate and part of this structure still exists for the peak services. It is something that we intend to look at when we do the second stage of this review, involving the current 18- series services. We acknowledge that the 199 is quite circuitous but, given current funding constraints, we cannot afford to operate both the 185 and 198 services late at night. We will look at this again in the second stage of the review of Green Bay services. It is also worthy of note that the 199 also provides the only service to Seabrook Ave, Parker Ave and West Lynn Road when the 180 and 181 services are not operating.
4. There also seems to be a few unnecessary complication still. Like why does one need to distinguish between the 198 and 199? Why does the 197 need to be different again? Why does there need to be a 191? Couldn’t all four of these routes be simplified into one (probably along the 197 alignment).
The 198 is a quite direct service between New Lynn, Astley Ave, Golf Rd and Green Bay while the 199 service is a cover-all service for when we cannot afford to operate both the 185 and 198 services. The 197 is a peak only express service between Green Bay and Britomart that is designed not to duplicate the current 18- series services operated by Go West. Again, we will look at this when we do the second stage of the review of Green Bay services. Meantime, as these routes are completely common until the 197’s end point, we will consider having a common number for both 197 and 198 services with a different destination sign to distinguish their respective end points. The 191 service maintains the existing level of service on Taylor Street and St Georges Road while reducing the route numbers from four to one (for Urban Express services). These services are very well utilised.
5. Couldn’t you simplify things down to four main routes: the Green Bay to Britomart, the 009, the Green Bay Local (185 route as proposed or simplified even further) and a 180/181 Titirangi feeder bus? Wouldn’t simplifying and reducing the number of routes mean that resources were available to run the remaining routes at higher frequencies?
The proposed service design is a considerable simplification within the constraint of not duplicating the existing Go West bus services. We see the proposed service structure as the basis of a solid core network for the Green Bay and South Lynn areas. The 185 service is an example of a shorter feeder route which will enable us to double the current frequency in Green Bay in its hours of operation.
Onehunga:
1. In the longer term, how useful is it to even keep the Onehunga transport centre open? If the buses just went straight up Onehunga Mall then they would be able to take a direct line, making the system easier to understand, faster and also creating a much nicer environment for bus users to wait in.
We acknowledge that the current level of passenger amenity in the Onehunga Transport Centre, is not ideal. However, the scope of this exercise is to provide a bus to rail connection for the new Onehunga Railway Station, not to review the overall operation of buses in the Onehunga area. This will be the subject of future work. When Onehunga Mall was re-opened to vehicular traffic, it was specifically designed not to accommodate bus services. The low-speed nature of the environment, while appropriate for a town centre , is not suitable as a bus route due to narrow carriageway widths; sluggish traffic and conflicts with cyclists and reversing vehicles.
2. Short of the above, surely the buses heading towards the city enter into Pearce Street (I understand it’s one-way at the moment but surely that could be changed) to shorten the route.
Pearce Street is one-way westbound between Onehunga Mall and Upper Municipal Place which means that bus potentially could use this route as a faster way to get between Onehunga Station and the Transport Centre. We will raise this issue with Auckland City, the road controlling authority, and check whether the roading geometry is suitable for bus manoeuvring.
Waikowhai:
1. Considering that Gillies Ave runs so closely to Manukau Road, whether there is much benefit in running this service via Gillies Ave rather than just making it a service that hooks into Manukau Road and adds to the significant number of buses running along there. I imagine that Manukau Road is a QTN route, so therefore focusing services on that road, and improving the level of bus priority for that road, would seem to be more logical in the longer term. The distance between Mt Eden Rd and Manukau Road seems fairly similar to the distance between Dominion Road and Mt Eden Road.
Manukau Road would provide some useful linkages, however it was important to keep the revised routes close to their current route structure at this stage. However further route standardisation in Newmarket may be possible in future, although there are capacity issues at bus stops. Newmarket was also considered as a terminating point at weekends, but same issues as for Marua Road.
2. The proposed route (outbound) seems to have a right-turn out of Peet Ave and into Mt Albert Road – surely that’s a recipe for disaster for delays?
The right turn out of Peet Ave into Mt Albert Road has been in place for many years as it is extremely difficult to turn out of Buckley Road into Mt Albert Road at any time. This is due to its close proximity to the heavy queued traffic at the Hillsborough Road traffic lights. As Peet Ave is half way between the signalised intersections of Mt Albert Road with Hillsborough Road and Pah Road, this allows gaps for buses to make the right turn into Mt Albert Road.
Marua Road:
1. During off-peak times the bus only runs hourly – wouldn’t it make more sense to terminate the route at Ellerslie station (people transfer onto the train or other services) so that you could run the route at half-hourly frequencies with the same resources? This bus appears to be an obvious “Local Connector Network”, so therefore it goes against the hierarchical route structure proposed by the RPTP to have it run all the way into town.
Newmarket and Ellerslie had been considered as terminating points, but the lack of supporting infrastructure (bus stands) and integrated ticketing are the barriers to this change. The advantage would have been a higher frequency or longer operating day. Further route simplification at Ellerslie / Panmure may be possible in future.
2. Some of the detours appear to add unnecessary length to the trip. Why does the route detour down Matapan and Dunkirk streets in Panmure? Why does the route detour down Pukerangi and Amy streets in Ellerslie? These two detours don’t seem to serve much of a purpose in getting too many people closer to the bus stop, and just seem to add unnecessary delays.
The close proximity of the inbound bus stop in the Ellerslie Town Centre to the Ladies Drive intersection means that if buses went direct via Ladies Mile they would not be able to get flush to the kerb at the inbound bus stop. If this bus stop were to be moved closer to Ellerslie Station, this would address that issue and provide better bus rail connectivity in the Ellerslie Town Centre. The outbound bus stop in Ellerslie Town Centre is past Ladies Mile so a new common outbound stop in the Ellerslie Town Centre would be required prior to the Ladies Mile Intersection. Any future signalisation of the Ladies Mile/ Main Highway intersection would also make right turns from Ladies Mile safer for all vehicles as there are very limited sight lines at this intersection. It would also provide a safer protected crossing for pedestrians to access bus services.
People who depend on public transport choose housing around public transport routes. Any change to these routes needs to be carefully considered, balancing the strategic goals of network simplification with maintaining reasonable levels of connectivity for existing users. In the case of this deviation, there is a significant clusters of pensioner housing, who are heavy dependent users of public transport. Route simplification proposals, while often delivering significant network benefits, would have a significant impact on the quality of life for this group of highly dependent users.
I think this provides some useful insight into the thinking behind many of the changes, and the thinking behind why further changes have not (at this point in time) taken place. I thank ARTA for taking the time to put this together.
One thing that does become clear is how limited ARTA’s capability is to improve things until we have integrated ticketing up and running. In terms of their response to the Marua Road route change, and in particular the reasoning behind not cutting the off-peak service off at Ellerslie (citybound) for people to transfer onto other buses or onto the train, it’s clear that they want to be making changes to the system such as this, but until integrated ticketing is properly up and running, it may actually do more harm than good to start forcing people to transfer. This just reinforces the frustration I have with how long integrated ticketing has taken to be implemented.
Feedback on all the changes (except for Green Bay which closed last Friday) can still be made here.
Here’s a great little video from the excellent Streetfilms on the benefits of “open data” for tracking public transport. Essentially, “open data” would include data that outlines timetables, bus stop/train station locations and (eventually) real-time information on where every bus train, train and ferry is in the whole city – with the key point being that the transit agency would make that data available for anyone who wants it. This would enable people and companies to come up with ingenious ways of packaging up the information and presenting it in innovative and useful ways.
I think we’re starting to see the spread of this data away from solely ARTA/Maxx, in that you can now work out when your next bus is coming or the best route from A to B on Google Maps rather than the highly archaic Maxx mapping system. However, having the information freed up so that anyone could have a go at making the most user-friendly way of providing top quality public transport information would be really great.
I look forward to the day when I can easily check my phone before I leave the house to work out exactly where my bus is, and know exactly when I need to leave the house to get to the bus stop just when the bus arrives – rather than having to wait there for 10-15 minutes like I invariably do each and every day.
It has been a while since we heard anything about the progress of implementing Auckland’s integrated ticketing system, so it’s welcoming to see a media release by NZTA today saying that some progress is being made in the establishment of the national ticketing standards that will ensure inter-operability between all public transport smart-cards in New Zealand in the future.
Moves towards national integrated public transport ticketing have taken a big step forward with the development of a key agreement between the NZ Transport Agency and ticketing system providers.
The agreement paves the way for the creation of a set of national standards for integrated public transport ticketing.
NZ Transport Agency Group Manager of Regional Partnerships and Planning, Dave Brash says a wide range of industry representatives are participating in the development of the ticketing standards.
He says this is ensuring the best possible system for public transport consumers, transport operators, regional councils and the government.
“We can continue to move forward co-operatively to progress the creation of National Standards by the end of the year,” says Mr Brash.
“It’s important that we are able to work well with ticketing providers to establish a scheme within the overall national framework which creates a fair and level playing field for all parties,” he says
National operating standards define how the central core of a national system will function as well as how operator equipment such as on-board bus ticketing machines will interact with that system.
“This standards approach will enable us to establish a long-term integrated national system that regions throughout New Zealand can cost-effectively link into,” says Mr Brash.
Auckland will be the first region in New Zealand to adopt the national integrated ticketing system and it is anticipated that other regions will follow.
Mr Brash says national integrated ticketing is part of an overall strategy to establish a more efficient and effective public transport system. That is why it is a core part of NZTA’s leadership initiative in public transport.
“It opens the door to contestability on transport ticketing equipment while ensuring the development of a cost-effective, nationally-integrated system.”
The new national ticketing standard is being developed by the NZTA in consultation with industry players including transport operators and regional authorities.
Another big advantage of an integrated ticketing system will be the ability to easily collect common format strategic information about public transport usage. This will enable better long term planning and funding, which will result in a more efficient and cost-effective public transport system.
The national standards process is being assisted by Dutch specialists, Collis, who have also been involved with the development of other multi-modal integrated card systems in Europe and Dubai.
Organisations that are participating in the definition of the integrated ticketing standards are ARTA, Bus and Coach Association, Environment Canterbury, Electronic Ticketing Systems, Greater Wellington Regional Council, Init Pty Ltd, KiwiRail, Snapper, Thales, and HTS Group.
I’m not really sure about how excited I should be getting over all of this. It is certainly useful to hear that progress is being made on setting up the system to allow for nationwide ticketing, but what I really want to know answers to are more mundane questions, like the following:
When will I be able to use the same ticket on all bus services in Auckland?
When will I be able to use my bus pass on the train?
When will I be able to board the bus without having to get the driver to press three buttons and for the whole exercise to take forever?
When will I be able to get a free transfer from one bus to another, if both rides are within the same zone?
When will I be able to get a free transfer between a bus and a train?
When will I be able to top up my card over the internet, or automatically from my bank account so I never run out of stored value again?
Those are the questions that ARTA and NZTA really should be answering.
As I noted in yesterday’s post, NZTA has been undertaking a significant amount of work into finding out ways to get “better value” out of public transport investment. As I also noted yesterday, NZTA currently gets around $4.40 worth of road user benefits for each dollar they spend on subsidising public transport in Auckland, so they’re actually doing pretty well at the moment. But if there are other ways to efficiently improve the delivery of public transport, obviously they should be looked at – and it’s interesting to see what ideas have come out of this project.
They’re summarised in the diagram below:
There’s some good stuff being said here, like the need for simplified fares and ticketing, and the need for a zone based fare system (as an aside, ARTA had better be wording on a zone based fare system that will be rolled out with integrated ticketing). References to the need to focus on a more integrated approach to public transport network planning is also good, while the idea of a “demonstration project” in each city sounds quite exciting. Other things, like improved customer service, probably have some value (I have noticed that bus drivers seem a lot friendlier these days) but in the future we’re likely to be interacting with drivers less frequently, so that might not be as important as other things.
Let’s have a look at some of the details of what’s in these boxes. Starting with improved customer experience, some of the statistics in the section below are quite fascinating – particularly the potential economic benefits of increasing public transport use: So 10% more people using public transport in Auckland would next to an (annual?) benefit to Auckland of over $80 million. That’s a useful number to store in the memory bank. It’s also further confirmation of the significant economic benefits that are brought about by getting people out of their cars and onto public transport. I’d be curious to know what percentage of that $85 million would be benefits to road users.
What is said about integrated networks is perhaps the most interesting thing of the lot, and links in a lot with what I have said previously about “The Network Effect“, which was also the subject of a fairly recent NZTA research report – which public transport academic Paul Mees contributed significantly to. It also has some very interesting statistics regarding the effectiveness of the Northern Busway:
If NZTA are really thinking about how the network effect could be applied in New Zealand, and most particularly in Auckland, then that’s very very good news. While the cost-effectiveness of subsidising public transport in general remains excellent (as outlined in yesterday’s post), over the past 10 years there has been a lot of “adding services” without necessary too much thought going in to the structure of our services – with the result being the incredibly messy route structures that we have. The “network effect” seeks to clean all that up, create a grid public transport network and to base the system around transfers rather than around avoiding transfers. International evidence shows that this works spectacularly well.
Another interesting key issue identified by this effectiveness project is what NZTA has termed the need to strengthen leadership, but what I would probably call the need for everyone to bloody work together for once. The last sentence here is the key one, that what we really need is for the different operators to start focusing on growing the public transport market, rather than just focusing on protecting their little bit of that market. Now this was the point of the public transport management act, to give ARTA a lot more powers to make this happen. I’m not sure whether NZTA has been informed of the Minister’s intentions to ruin that legislation.
There’s quite a lot of further information that I will probably get around to blogging on in the future, but it is quite good to see that some of the thinking going on behind the scenes actually makes sense, and is focused on the very issues that I often talk about on here – the need to simplify and integrate, and also the tremendous economic benefits that can arise from increasing the number of people using public transport.
Toronto’s main business lobby, the Board of Trade, recently called for the outsourcing of public transit services to private companies, part of their free advice to the next mayor on reducing the city’s deficit.
On one level, it’s an unremarkable proposal: just the latest in a chorus of business demands that governments fix their deficits by selling, contracting out or eliminating public services. But it caught my eye because I am residing temporarily in Auckland, New Zealand’s biggest city, where the transit system is the most fragmented, expensive and maddening I’ve ever used. And it’s 100-per-cent private. The gory details provide a caution for those who believe the private market always does things better.
In the 1980s and 1990s, New Zealand municipalities were forced by conservative national governments to sell off many public assets, including transit. They assumed free-market forces would cut costs and improve productivity. The reality has been the opposite. Indeed, since the 1980s, productivity has fallen far behind other OECD countries, yet costs and taxes remain relatively high. The government even had to buy back some of the privatized companies that failed entirely, such as Kiwi Rail and Air New Zealand.
Today, Auckland’s regional government contracts a dozen different private firms to supply bus, rail and ferry services. A complex network of interlocking ownership links many of these suppliers. So much for “competition.” The biggest, Infratil, is a $2-billion giant with a broad portfolio of privatized assets, including transit, electricity and airports. (That’ll surely catch the Board of Trade’s attention!)
This hodge-podge is all the worse because each company accepts only its own tickets, and not those offered by competitors. Since inter-company transfers are impossible, bus routes can be insanely circuitous. My daughter’s bus trip to school takes three long detours through different neighbourhoods, doubling what should be a five-kilometre route.
Tickets are expensive. Passengers pay according to how far they travel (and then pay again if they need a transfer). Trips of just a few stops cost as little as $1.70 – but another $1.70 is added each time the bus passes through another invisible “stage.” Travelling 40 kilometres from the city’s north to south costs $12.70 to $16.50 (depending which company is used) and takes two hours. A passenger travelling the same distance in Toronto (say, from Scarborough to Etobicoke) would pay $3 once, and require less than half the time.
City planners impose various pseudo-quantitative performance indicators on the contractors, such as sophisticated GPS systems to monitor on-time performance. But even this minimal nod to public accountability produces unintended consequences. Bus companies fear being fined for missing schedule targets, but are driven by the profit motive to ruthlessly minimize outlays on equipment and staff. The resulting pressure is intense on drivers (some of whom don’t even get paid overtime) to meet unrealistic timetables – a media exposé last year showed this often requires breaking the speed limit. Several times, we’ve watched an awaited bus race by without stopping, the driver shrugging helplessly and pointing at his watch.
That anecdote sums up perfectly the system’s irrationality. The top priority becomes ensuring that a private company reaches profit targets, not picking up people who need a ride.
Yet Aucklanders still pay for transit – three times over. Once through taxes – subsidies to private transit consume half of all property taxes collected by the regional government. Then again at the fare box. And finally a third time through inconvenience. No wonder Aucklanders take transit one-quarter as often as Torontonians.
So before you get carried away with enthusiasm for the inherent efficiency of the private sector, visit Auckland. It’s beautiful. But you’ll need to rent a car.
I think it’s often extremely useful to get a well informed “outsider’s perspective” on issues like Auckland’s transport system. Otherwise we can lose sight of the forest for the trees, as the saying goes.
Keeping up with all the transport strategies, plans and policies that float around in Auckland is a pretty hard task, but it would seem that the final version of a fairly important plan: the Regional Public Transport Plan, has been released today by ARTA. Here’s the media statement:
NEXT PHASE IN PUBLIC TRANSPORT PLANS FOR AUCKLAND, RELEASED.
The Auckland Regional Transport Authority today released its Regional Public Transport Plan (RPTP).
ARTA Chairman, Rabin Rabindran said, “The document provides the context for moving public transport further forward in Auckland.
“In the last few years in Auckland, public transport has experienced the highest growth for twenty five years, with rail patronage doubling in five years. This success is due to a planned approach; considerable investment from government and the region in redeveloping the rail network, the highly successful Northern Busway, major service level improvements and much improved customer information. “ARTA is now focused on public transport making an even greater contribution to moving people around Auckland, which frees up our congested motorways and arterial roads for freight and commercial trips that cannot use public transport and are vital to economic growth and prosperity. This requires a step change in public transport performance.
“The policies and actions outlined in the RPTP outline the next phase in the drive to increase growth making public transport even more accessible, attractive and easy to use. The Plan sets out ARTA’s proposals for service improvements in some detail. As such it will form the basis of key aspects of our public transport policy, service development and contracting activities over the next few years.
“The proposed improvements to Auckland’s public transport system will require a significant investment of public funds. ARTA has taken steps to ensure that the proposals contained in the Plan will deliver economic and social benefits that justify that investment.
“We also recognise that there will always be limitations on the amount of public funds that are available for transport initiatives and the need to prioritise how those funds will be spent. For this reason the Plan contains policies to guide the prioritisation process”.
Mr Rabindran said the Plan was prepared in consultation with required stakeholders including operators and public sector agencies and taking into account submissions made by the public consultation process.
The RPTP, from my understanding, starts to formalise the shift away from our current public transport system – which is generally characterised by an amazingly complex array of different routes each running at very low frequencies, often inefficiently competing against each other and trying – in vain generally – to offer people direct trips from anywhere to anywhere. Instead, the RPTP seeks to shift public transport routing towards a hierarchical structure of Rapid Transit Networks (RTNs), Quality Transit Networks (QTNs) and Local Connector Networks (LCNs). There are also specific targeted services for the transport disadvantaged.
I support this shift, as it should result in a far more efficient and effective public transport system. Having lots and lots of routes duplicating each other means that we often have to run services at very poor frequencies to limit the amount of resources spent on providing public transport – and as everyone should know, if a bus only comes every hour chances are you won’t bother even trying to use PT.
However, having a public transport system based around this hierarchical route structure (which is not altogether that dissimilar to ‘the network effect’ that I have blogged quite a lot about in recent times) means that the transfer is critical. Fundamentally, transfers are a pain in the ass, however when you structure a public transport network the advantages that they offer (in terms of allowing anywhere to anywhere trips and of using resources more efficiently) do outweigh the disadvantages, but only if the transfer is made as painless as possible. That means three things to me:
The transfer doesn’t cost you anything – integrated ticketing is crucial for achieving this.
The transfer mustn’t delay your trip for very long – this means you either need very high frequencies or very well timed transfers.
The transfer must be physically easy – not involve crossing two major roads, or walking 600m to catch your connecting service.
Unless these three principles are in place, shifting to the kind of hierarchical system that ARTA is proposing may actually do more harm than good, and will be perceived as a cost-cutting measure rather than a measure to actually improve public transport and make it more useful. Probably my biggest worry with the RPTP is that I don’t think we have progressed very well on any of the three principles.
A second factor that concerns me about the RPTP is how ARTA have decided not to use their current powers under the Public Transport Management Act (PTMA) to prohibit commercial public transport services through this plan. Now I realise that at first pass it seems strange, and extremely harsh, for me to be advocating for the complete prohibition of commercial services, but there are good reasons behind this. The main one is to avoid the ‘privatise the profits, socialise the losses’ situation that current occurs in the operation of Auckland’s public transport system. There are a number of reasonably profitable routes and services within Auckland (the Airport bus is the only fully commercial route, although many peak-time PT runs are operated commercially, often explaining the overly complex route structure) and these are run without subsidy, and generally without ARTA having much control over them at all (at least until the PTMA came along).
The remainder of services, those which aren’t commercially viable (but are economically viable because of the wider benefits of public transport such as its decongestion effects), are contracted and subsidised. However, because ARTA aren’t able to use the profits from the commercial services to help ‘cross-subsidise’ those other services, they (and by “they” I mean “we” through our rates and petrol taxes) end up in the worst of both worlds, while the profits get privatised. It is true that the Minister of Transport has made plenty of noise about changing the PTMA to remove the ability of ARTA to prohibit commercial services, removing the ability of operators to ‘cherry pick’ the most profitable services. However, under the current legislation ARTA could have used its powers under the PTMA to prohibit those ‘cherry picked’ services and ensure we get the best value for money out of the subsidies paid for public transport. It is extremely disappointing that they have not done this.
Words like “encouraged” do not fill me with much confidence at all. If operators are able to reject providing their services in accordance with the RPTP service specifications, and are able to reject integrated ticketing, then this whole RPTP will have been a waste of bloody time.
Finally, a third issue that concerns me comes through very clearly in the very detailed service structures provided in the bulk of the RPTP, that appear to completely and utterly contradict all the fancy wording in the document itself. For example, let’s take a look at the Mt Wellington buses service group in the RPTP: …and it keeps going…
Except for the last three services, which appear to be local shopper buses between Otahuhu and Panmure, all the other buses within this service group run between Otahuhu and Britomart, yet we see 14 different service patterns – seven inbound and seven outbound. This is the same duplicating, low-frequency, complicated and impossible to understand rubbish that I thought the RPTP was trying to get away from. Many of those services operate once or twice a day only, and while I understand that you may wish to run a few express buses at peak hour, the complexity of this system is quite unbelievable. No wonder hardly anyone uses public transport in Auckland, I can’t even understand what it’s doing half the time!
Overall, while I certainly like the way the RPTP is going, in terms of setting up its hierarchy of routes and building a system around transfers (a “hub and spoke” system) rather than one which inefficiently tries to avoid transfers at all cost, I continue to worry about its implementation. In particular, I don’t see an integrated fare system that allows free transfers, I don’t see timed connections between services or services at high enough frequencies (beyond a few routes like Dominion Road) for people to not worry about waiting ages while trying to connect, and I don’t see steps being made to ensure the physical process of transferring becoming easier – heck even within the CBD there are connections that require significant walks between Britomart and Midtown.
Furthermore, by not utilising their powers under the PTMA to prohibit commercial services, ARTA is effectively consigning itself to a continuation of the current “privatise the profits, socialise the losses” system, which combined with NZTA’s incredibly harsh farebox recovery policy means that public transport is getting the squeeze in terms of having to operate more financially efficiently, but having a huge tool in achieving that outcome being ignored. And finally, while I am sure ARTA is slowly going through the process of simplifying its route system, the RPTP’s specifics simply appear to be a continuation of the low-frequency, highly complicated route structuring that we see today.
All in all, it is just another typical Auckland public transport plan I suppose – great on the fluffy “feel good” talk, but pretty hopeless when it comes to implementation. I must say I’m somewhat disappointed.
In Auckland transport circles, a lot of attention is given to the rail system, and in particular what is wrong with it, what upgrades to it are underway and what upgrades to it are planned (or should be planned) in the short, medium and long-term future. Of course there are good reasons to focus on the rail system, in part because of its generally poor state and also because of the huge amount of work that’s been done to it at the moment, but we shouldn’t forget that in Auckland buses are the meat and drink of the system. If we are to hit ARTA’s target of 100 million annual passenger trips by 2016, then it’s likely that cost to 80 million of those trips will be on the bus system. Most Aucklanders don’t live in close proximity to the rail system, and for them the bus is likely to be the most convenient and accessible means of public transport. So a huge part of improving Auckland’s public transport system must involve improving the bus system.
In recent weeks, both Nick R and myself have suggested ways in which the bus route system could be altered to make it more popular, but there are many other ways in which we need to improve our buses, with one simple aim: they simply have to be faster. Buses have the big advantage of not requiring any specialist infrastructure (over and above a basic road) and the flexibility that brings, but they generally have the huge disadvantage of being incredibly slow. If a bus is running in general traffic (ie. without bus lanes or other forms of priority) then it is completely and utterly impossible for that bus to do the trip faster than a car would (because it has to stop and let passengers on and off). Therefore, a bus in general traffic will never be able to compete against the private vehicle in terms of time: therefore people will only catch it for price and (potentially) convenience reasons.
At a guess, I would say the most frequent reason why people don’t catch the bus is because it’s too damn slow (as well as it not going where people want to go). As I have said many times before, people are logical with their transport decision making: choosing the option which is fastest, cheapest and most convenient. The fact that a bus in traffic can never be faster than a car travelling along that same road places a huge restriction on the number of people who are likely to use public transport – in reality only those for who the cost of driving will be high enough to warrant them catching public transport. In Auckland that generally means those working in the CBD and those who don’t own cars – a pretty small proportion of the population.
Therefore, in a city like Auckland – with a relatively low proportion of jobs in the CBD, very high levels of car ownership and a rail system that is relatively limited in its geography extent – one of the main reasons why so few people use public transport, and so many people feel ‘forced to drive’, is because our buses are so damn slow. So how can we speed up our buses? Well I would say there are a number of things that we really need to do to our bus system to make them faster and more able to compete against the speed benefits that driving one’s car currently has:
More bus lanes. This is perhaps the most important thing that needs to be done to improve the speed of our buses. Bus lanes allow buses to avoid car congestion, and offer a logical alternative for people to being stuck in vehicle congestion. The kind of important alternative that I talked about in this recent post. Over the next few years we really need to expand our network of bus lanes – it is probably the one thing that could be done that would increase public transport patronage the most for the least investment.
Faster boarding times. There is nothing more frustrating than waiting for 2-3 minutes while a bunch of people queue up to get on the bus, and each person has to go through the painful process of putting their card into the machine, have the bus driver push three or so buttons, split the card out and eventually shift on. Even if that process only take 10 seconds per person, if you have twenty people queued up at a stop, that can be a three and a half minute delay. Smart-card ticketing should hopefully speed that up, but I think that at busier stops we really need to look at providing the opportunity for people to enter “fare paid” zones at their stop, so they can board quickly from both doors when the bus turns up.
Wider spaced stops. The fact that buses often need to stop every 200-300 metres slows them down hugely, even if we were to disregard boarding times (wider spaced stops would have more people boarding at each stop if we are to assume the same number of passengers). It’s often difficult for buses to pull out from their stops into traffic, while the slowing down and speeding up also is ‘lost time’ compared to if the bus was to travel further between stops. Obviously there’s a tradeoff in having wider spaced stops, in that people will on average have to walk further to their stops, but I think that faster travelling times will make walking a hundred metres or so further worthwhile.
Implementing these three main strategies on major bus routes could potentially but down their travel time by 25-50% I reckon. If that difference made catching the bus faster than driving (which does exist along some routes like Onewa Road and Dominion Road) then I think passengers would rush to public transport in droves. Even though it’s not a fancy rail system that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build (not that I have anything against fancy rail systems), but because it makes sense.
We can’t ignore making Auckland’s bus system better if we’re serious about improving public transport. After all, as I stated at the beginning of this post, around 80% of public transport trips in Auckland are on the bus.
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