Auckland Transport Blog » Integrated Ticketing

Gerry gets involved in Integrated Ticketing

Matt L — Fri, 11 May 2012 01:30:30 +0000

Some more new developments in the Snapper/Integrated ticketing saga emerged yesterday. The Herald reports:

Auckland’s main bus operator could lose at least $70 million in annual operating subsidies if it fails by November to install machines capable of reading new electronic transport tickets.

Transport Minister Gerry Brownlee said last night that although there was no suggestion yet that NZ Bus would miss that deadline, the firm and its sister company, Snapper Services, would know the consequences of being in breach of contract by failing to meet it.

Asked what those consequences would be, he told the Herald: “They’re off the run.”

And from later in the article:

Mr Brownlee said he was “quite happy” there was a process in place to achieve integrated ticketing “and all the contracted parties just need to understand that we’re not backing away from that”.

Asked what would happen if NZ Bus refused to replace its existing machine readers with equipment compatible with the final system, he said: “They will be in breach of their contract and we will look at getting someone else to pick those contracts up.”

While this blog is often very critical of the government and it’s policies we are also prepared to give credit when it is due and in this case it is good to see Gerry publicly affirming the consequences if the latest deadlines aren’t met. Hopefully it is something that he will keep and eye on to ensure that everything happens as promised. There were also a few comments from Phil Twyford and Mike Lee about the issue:

Mr Brownlee said he could not confirm a claim by Labour transport spokesman Phil Twyford that National put Auckland in a difficult situation by pushing for Snapper’s card to be introduced to the NZ Bus fleet, as he was not minister at the time.

But Auckland Council transport chairman Mike Lee said Infratil lobbied the Government to change specifications to allow the card to be introduced ahead of the wider scheme.

He said that made it the Government’s responsibility to “hold the line” and ensure a successful roll-out of an integrated transport ticket.

I actually think there may be an element of trying to score political points here. As I mentioned in a comment on the post the other day, we do know that Snapper lobbied the government after they lost the tender but the outcome of it was that the issue was handed over to the NZTA to reinvestigate the options. The outcome of that investigation was that the NZTA not only agreed that Thales had the best offer but that they would modify the contract and set up the system so that it could be used nationally. I am also aware that the ticketing system that NZ Bus had before Snapper was falling apart very quickly as it was very old and getting harder and harder to maintain. It needed to be replaced and while I won’t rule out political interference, I kind of wonder if Phil and Mike are blurring some of the events to their own advantage.

There is of course now going to be a 6 month wait before we find out if Snapper has met their targets. Perhaps during that time AT could start working on getting integrated fares sorted out so we don’t have to wait so long for that to happen, it is after all critical for our new bus network.

A note to all readers, this post is not to become a place to continue on the arguments from the other day around about the merits or otherwise of Snapper. Please keep the discussion limited to the content of this post.

Snapper ruining integrated ticketing – surprise, surprise

Peter M — Mon, 07 May 2012 19:44:46 +0000

Wow another surprise, surprise this morning – Snapper are ruining integrated ticketing by being too useless to get their machines up to spec. Here’s the NZ Herald story:

A $98 million integrated ticketing system for Auckland is ready to go, but is being held up by Snapper and NZ Bus not installing the technology on more than 650 buses.

This has left Aucklanders – who have paid $42 million towards the system – waiting until November at the earliest to use a single card on buses, trains and ferries.

French technology giant Thales has completed a contract to install the new ticketing system and its New Zealand country director, Peter Beggs, has taken a swipe at Snapper, a sister company to NZ Bus, for delays.

On May 3, Mr Beggs told staff in an email – obtained by the Herald – that the “failure of Snapper to deliver a functional bus system that meets the ratified standard has caused delays to project go-live”.

The Thales contract was signed in late 2009 while the HOP card was officially launched more than a year ago now. If Snapper haven’t been able to get their act together in that time I have little hope that they’re doing anything more than running interference on the whole process and it seems unlikely they’ll be able to sort themselves out by November.

Auckland Transport are also running out of patience:

Within Auckland Transport, patience is running out with Snapper, NZ Bus and its investment company owners, Infratil, who together have been delaying Auckland’s integrated ticketing project from day one.

In March last year, the Snapper card was launched under the guise of being Auckland Transport’s Hop integrated ticket, but Snapper has failed to integrate its system to the Thales system on its 650 buses – and already missed one deadline to prove its system could link into the Thales system.

Last night, Auckland Transport chief executive David Warburton said that after sitting down with Snapper and making changes to the transition, he had no reason to doubt the Wellington company would be ready to go live with the integrated ticketing system on November 30.

“We have no intention of having multiple systems. There will be one system that will be the NZTA New Zealand standard,” Mr Warburton said.

So what happens if Snapper can’t meet the deadline? It would be pretty amusing – although annoying in a sense as it would delay the project – if all the Snapper machines had to be ripped out of NZ Bus buses and replaced with machines that can actually do the job properly.

Fairer and Smarter Fares

Matt L — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 11:27:00 +0000

In public transport circles there is always going to be a lot of debate over the levels of fares. Should they be higher to reduce the amount of subsidy required? Should they be lower to encourage greater ridership and/or for social equity reasons? Should it be free to eliminate the costs of collection and to truly incentivise PT use? Through the PT benchmark study undertaken last year, we learned that Auckland’s public transport fares are relatively high – while NZTA’s farebox recovery policy seems likely to raise fares even higher in the longer term as it seeks to reach a 50% farebox recovery ratio (the proportion of operating costs paid for through fares).

The table below is from the benchmark study and highlights Auckland’s high fares on a per passenger kilometre basis:

The extent to which we generally raise fares in the future is largely a political decision around how much we wish to subsidise public transport because of its external benefits like congestion reduction, environmental gains and support for desirable land-use outcomes. Lower fares may also raise patronage so much that the revenue loss from each individual ride is made up for through an increase in the number of riders overall – although that will largely depend on when and where those riders are added to the system and whether they require expensive additional services and/or infrastructure.

What I’m more interested in is exploring ways in which we might fiddle around with the level of our fares on a cost-neutral basis so that its structure contributes more to where we want public transport heading to. There are a few relevant matters here:

The extent to which longer trips should be more expensive than shorter trips
The level of discount we give to unlimited trip passes (daily, weekly & monthly)
Whether (and to what extent) we discount travel that takes place outside peak times

Charging more for longer trips

Starting first with comparing fares for long trips with those for shorter trips, it certainly seems as though Auckland’s fare structure starts very low and increases quite dramatically when compared to other fare structures around the world. Going by the cash fares for buses, we have a single stage costing $1.80 heading right up to 8 stages costing $10.30. In contrast, Vancouver’s base fare is $2.50 for travel with Zone 1 (including free transfers) and increases to a maximum fare of $5.00 for travel within all three zones (with a single intermediary step of $3.75 for travel within 2 zones).

In some respects, charging more for longer trips in a proportionate ways makes sense – as longer trips require more service kilometres, which comes at a cost. The rider is also gaining a greater benefit from the longer trip themselves, so there’s also likely to be a willingness to pay a higher fare. But on the other hand, there are actually some compelling reasons why we might want to reward longer trips by not charging such a high fare – after all, longer trips generate greater congestion reduction benefits while buses and trains have to complete the whole run anyway, so the extra passenger riding further doesn’t add a marginal cost (although obviously longer routes are much more expensive to run, but that might be a network design issue more than anything else).

My feeling is that, out of the three issues with our current fare structure, this is the one least likely to need significant change – but in the long run as we shift to a zone based fare system, reducing the number of zones and flattening the cost difference between shorter and longer trips, might be a smart thing to do – to help encourage those longer trips onto public transport and get them off the road.

Discounts

The second matter I think our fares need to be smarter around relates to the level of discount we give to unlimited trip passes, be they daily, weekly or monthly passes. When looking at this issue I tend to think that a fundamental decision should be made around trying to attract as many of our public transport customers as is possible to be using weekly or monthly tickets. People with such tickets will obviously try to get the best value from them, so will be regular and frequent users of PT – and they should be rewarded for doing so. Not only do they pay for their travel ‘up front’, but they are also likely to become regular users of off-peak, evening and weekend services – as those trips will effectively be ‘free’ to them (as generally people budget for a monthly pass on their weekday travel requirements).

In some parts of the city monthly unlimited passes work well but in other parts they aren’t effective at all. If we take the price of monthly rail passes in Auckland, there are two available.

A ‘City Monthly’ which is unlimited travel on the network between New Lynn, Onehunga and Otahuhu. This is equivalent to a 3 stage journey.
An ‘All Zones Monthly’ which extends that travel out to Waitakere and Papakura. This is equivalent to a 6 stage journey

The table bellows shows what the costs for each of the passes cost and the number of trips you would need to take break even for the passes vs the cash or 10 trip fare. As you can see the number of trips you would need to take if you were within a 1 stage area just wouldn’t make a monthly pass viable. By comparison if you live in a 5 stage zone like I do you need to take just 28 trips (or 14 workdays) to have been better off.

Part of the problem though is these passes are only useful for people going through town, people going from say Morningside to Henderson on a regular basis would only really be able to use cash or 10 trip fares so miss out on the benefits of monthly passes. This suggests that we need to rethink the cost and conditions of our monthly passes so that they are more useful for a greater proportion of the population. Switching to a zone-based system could mean a wider variety of monthly passes being available (a pass for 1 zone, 2 zones etc.) while generally if we are to look at anywhere in our fare system where we want to decrease the cost of fares, I think monthly passes would be the place to start. Let’s reward our best customers with a good deal.

Peak vs Off peak Pricing

Finally, we get to that vexed question of whether there should be a price differential between peak and off-peak travel. On the negative side first, it obviously adds some complexity to our fare system – at the very time we’re trying to simplify it and make public transport easier to understand. There’s also the issue of matching up this shift with a greater focus on monthly passes – as it seems unlikely most people would want their monthly pass restricted to off-peak travel only. The ability to just jump on anything, anytime, is a great attribute of having an unlimited travel pass. The other possible downside of peak pricing is that it is our peak time PT users who create the greatest congestion relief benefits for road-users, so it could come across as a bit counter-productive to charge highest fares for those people who are easing congestion the most.

But on the plus side, there is a lot of sense in having a price difference between peak and off-peak travel for a number of reasons. The most obvious is so that we can use our system more efficiently, flattening out the ‘peaks’ of demand and therefore being able to carry a lot more passengers without the need for extra buses, trains or PT infrastructure (or, more realistically, the need for proportionately less additional buses, trains or PT infrastructure). Getting an extra bus on the road at peak times, for example, is always going to be pretty expensive – because you need to be buying more buses, hiring more drivers and probably running more empty service kilometres (repositioning after that peak run).

Auckland’s PT situation, where we want to grow patronage significantly in the near future, but we don’t have the money to spend a huge amount on PT services and infrastructure (largely because of Central Government’s squeeze on funding) means that ‘flattening’ demand and getting a lot more out of our existing system is likely to be necessary. There are other ways we can do that to just ‘peak pricing’, such as providing a better quality of service throughout the day, but I think that creating a price discount for off-peak travel to reflect the lower cost of providing extra off-peak service, is something that Auckland will need to look long and hard at.

So I think we could be much smarter about public transport fares. Hopefully these issues will be looked at as Auckland Transport focuses on implementing integrated fares to go with the integrated ticketing we’ll have finished by the end of this year. Also one positive is that we haven’t actually had a fare increase for about 2 years, hopefully the huge increases in patronage in the last few years are helping to reduce the need for them.

No Integrated Fares with Hop

Matt L — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 09:40:18 +0000

At the councils transport committee the other day there was a presentation about Integrated Ticketing. Much of the presentation was fairly standard with information that most people who have been following the progress of integrated ticketing will already have known i.e. what is Hop, what its advantages are, how it has been rolled out so far etc. (it doesn’t cover the Snapper issue raised a few weeks ago though).

The interesting, and concerning, part comes when it discusses the next steps.

The first three are nothing new but it is the last point that I am most concerned about. Effectively after rolling out the integrated ticketing system we will still maintain one of the key issues with the current set up, that you will still have to pay for another fare if you transfer services. Sure you will get a rebate of 50c off that next fare but you are still having to pay for it. Now in saying this I can accept this as a very short term interim step before rolling out a better fare system and this is what is said about the future stages for Hop.

Combined monthly passes are good but I just really hope it isn’t combined at the bus pass cost which I feel is already too excessive. Personally I use the all zones monthly train pass as I travel 5 stages to get to town however the same kind of pass for bus travel is an extra $20 and if I they matched the discovery pass which allows travel on almost all forms of public transport in the region it would cost a further $40. The most interesting thing from this slide though is the point about moving to a zonal based system. I had heard a while ago that one of the main reasons we hadn’t moved to one is that both the both ARTA/AT and the bus companies are afraid losing money from fares. The problem though is they seem to have modelled it based on what happens currently, not what would happen in the future if both the PT network and fares were designed to make transfers quick and easy.

The last section of the presentation also gives some information about some other activities coming up.

Integrated ticketing facilitates more convenient payment of public transport fares for customers, removing a barrier to use – this will grow patronage.

Integrated ticketing also removes a barrier for convenient service trip transfers between modes or operators.

Integrated ticketing is therefore one of two strategic enablers to redesigning the PT network and bus network to form a time connected and integrated service network.

This is currently being designed (target May/ June 2012) for local bus network redesigns & implementation over 2012-2014.

Will provide connected & integrated services & timetables; permit removal of service duplication; create resource efficiencies & allowing more service for the same dollars.

Other key enabler is a fully contracted bus network, rather than a hybrid commercial contracted model, PTOM from 2012.

May/June could be a very interesting time. Changing the bus network will be a big piece of work but one that is sorely needed and long overdue and as mentioned above, lets hope that we get free transfers sorted out before we start rolling out services that force customers to transfer.

Edit: and here is a video of the presentation

AT/Veolia missing out on Thousands

Matt L — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 05:22:50 +0000

Last year the Rugby World Cup was excellent and with the exception of a bit of a hiccup at the start things generally went pretty well. I think that as a result we also we learnt a lot about how to better operate public transport when big events are on and I have seen signs of this recently with a few events at Eden park that I have been too but while we obviously need to remember these lessons there now seems to be new ones that we need learn.

Story 1 – Faults

So first story isn’t actually an organised event but a regular occurrence on the rail network and the outcome fits in with the rest so I will include it. Leaving work one day I made my way down to Britomart with the intent on catching the 5:36 train out west and upon arriving I learned that the previous train, the 5:24 had been cancelled. The 5:24 is probably one of the busiest pm peak trains as it is really the first train to leave town heading west after 5pm so gets a lot of workers on it. As I’m sure anyone can imagine loading up two services onto one is never going to be a pretty thing and the train was packed and standing room only right from town. Adding in a heap more passengers from Newmarket and people at Grafton and Mt Eden were being left on the platforms as the train was simply too full. Of course in this situation there is simply no way that train staff can get through the carriage to collect tickets. By the time the train had cleared out enough for staff to start moving through the carriages we were already past New Lynn but by that time hundreds had already hopped off the train.

Story 2 – Blues vs Crusaders game

This game was on a Friday evening just over a week ago. I was catching the 5:52 so things are normally a bit quieter than the earlier peak trains but leaving town the train was pretty full with a lot of supporters. Once again it was too much for staff to be able to collect tickets (but not quite as bad as the first story). We continued to pick up more people at the stations along the way until arriving at Kingsland a while later. At that point the a large number of people on the train disembarked to make their way to Eden Park leaving the train empty enough for staff to do their job. It’s also worth noting that travel for this game wasn’t free with a ticket.

Story 3 – Warriors opening game

This just happened today (and a shame about the result). Heading to the game things were pretty straight forward with the exception of the train being a few minutes late. There weren’t overcrowding issues like the previous stories but almost all non regular users thought they had free transport included and many didn’t have any cash and ended up getting free rides anyway. I will say it was good to see a lot of security maintenance staff on hand at various places to make sure everything went to plan. The RWC solution of splitting passengers between Kingsland and Morningside was again used and seemed to work smoothly. The issue was again heading home, with large numbers of people leaving at the same time the services get very full and there were only two of onboard staff to collect tickets. I didn’t get my ticket checked till just before we pulled up at Glen Eden and once again hundreds who disembarked before then got free rides.

I think that by now most people still reading would have picked up on the main issue I have had. That is that far to often when events happen people are getting free rides. Now I don’t blame the people getting the free rides as in most cases it simply isn’t their fault someone couldn’t get to them. What I do have an issue with is that because there haven’t been better systems put in place to solve this then the system is missing out on hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars. This might not be a great deal in the overall scheme of things but for a service that relies on extensive operating subsidies it wasteful. I also wonder if part of the problem is that people who only use trains for events like #2 and #3 are used to having trips as part of their travel from things like the RWC.

Integrated ticketing would definitely have helped in the first case but for the other two, when there are a high proportion of people who probably don’t regularly catch PT then something else is needed. One possible solution to all of this would be to have a few of the staff ticketing people either on the platform (or before getting to it) so that the onboard staff can just focus on getting people to their destination as soon as possible. Another solution would be to require the organisers of any event that is expected to increase demand for PT to fully pay for the services with free travel included as part of the ticket cost.

One other thing that annoyed me but wasn’t related to free trips was the attitude of some people on the the platform at Mt Albert on the way to the Warriors game. When the train pulled up a group of 5-10 saw that the carriage they were next to didn’t have many seats left. Rather than get on and stand (and it wasn’t crowded) for the 5 mins or so it takes to get to Morningside they decided to slowly walk down the platform looking for a carriage with more space and from what I could tell staff did nothing to try and hurry them up. If this happened at every station trains would almost always be late due to long dwell times. Perhaps we need to automate the doors more, once they are opened they only stay open for a set length of time, say 20-30 seconds at which time they close. Countdown timers like we see on some pedestrian crossings could be used to let passengers know how much time they have left and help to hurry them up.

Snapper snaps Integrated Ticketing once again

Matt L — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 09:02:24 +0000

Another Rudman piece today and more worrying news, this time in the form of integrated ticketing and the problems the projects is having due to in relation to Snapper. Snapper is what powers the current Hop system and is based on different technology to what will be rolled out when the real system goes live. They were hoping to be able to modify it enough to allow it to read the real Hop cards but it seems like things haven’t quite worked as they expected. Here is what Rudman says:

At a crunch meeting today, Snapper Services, the provider of these “validator” machines, face some tough questioning about its future in the integrated ticketing scheme.

One thing seems certain, Snapper will be very lucky to get off with a “please try again” message from their partners, Auckland Transport and New Zealand Transport Agency, the clients of the new ticketing system, and the designers, Thales, the French technology giant.

Snapper has already missed one deadline to prove its system could link into the Thales system and meet the technological performance standards outlined in NZTA specifications. Sources say the problem is not just the interface between the Snapper and Thales systems. Also of concern is that current Snapper card readers are not up to specifications, critics pointing to their being “slow and prone to error”

This is actually something I had heard a rumour about recently as well and its something I’m really concerned about. If Snapper can’t get their readers to work properly they might all need to be replaced with new ones that are compatible with the real Hop system. If this happens I fear that in the worst case scenario we might end up with a situation like happened last year where large numbers of buses need to be swapped over all on the same day, probably at the same time as the cards.

The biggest impact though could be with the Hop brand, is it now going to be forever associated with a giant stuff up which could permanently harm it and impact its adoption. If so that is likely to reduce the benefits we are meant to see from the project as people continue to hold up buses using cash.

Of course this isn’t the first time Snapper or its owner Infratil have tried to stuff up Auckland’s integrated ticketing project.

Within Auckland Transport, patience is running out with Snapper and its investment company owners, Infratil, who together have been delaying Auckland’s integrated ticketing project from day one.

Back in 2009, Snapper tendered for the lucrative overall contract and lost out to Thales. Snapper, a sister Infratil company to Auckland’s main bus operator, NZ Bus, queried the decision through the legal system and lost. At the time a furious Snapper chairman, Paul Ridley-Smith, defiantly told the Herald, “We’re not going to plug into Thales. We have a perfectly functional, 100 per cent effective, totally integrated ticketing system, so why would you build another one?”

In a confidential report to Infratil’s August 2009 board meeting, Mr Ridley-Smith admitted, “If Snapper can’t expand into Auckland then its business will be permanently sub-economic and it might have to withdraw from Wellington.”

Refusing to lie down, a year later, Snapper persuaded NZTA and Auckland Regional Transport, despite Thales’ objections, that if allowed to install their Snapper system in Auckland buses, they would ensure they were compatible with the Thales system.

Coming back to the current issue, a huge problem if they can’t get the existing readers to work is going to be quickly sourcing new ones that will work with the system. When the deal with Thales was originally signed off, the bus companies were allowed to select whoever they wanted to provide the equipment providing it would work with the core system. My understanding is that at that time Thales offered to sell all of the bus companies their readers which obviously would have worked out of the box and avoided all of these issues, but NZ Bus who is also owned by Infratil decided to use Snapper readers. As a result Thales withdrew its offer to the rest of the companies as the volume wouldn’t have been enough for them which meant that the other bus companies had to go looking elsewhere to source them.

What ever happens it ends up that we PT users are the ones that suffer and it seems more and more likely that the project will be delayed and therefore remain one of the mythical projects of Auckland transport.

The Mythical Projects of Auckland Transport

Matt L — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 10:38:53 +0000

This post isn’t about the Taniwha in the way of the City Rail Link but those projects and services that have been talked about or promised by various agencies for years but never seem to come to fruition. Some may even be able to be crossed off the list shortly but until they officially happen I will leave them on there.

Seeing as I already mentioned it I will start with the CRL which is probably the most prominent of all of them having been suggested and investigated at various times since at least the 1920’s but there are plenty of others on the list. Things seem to have gotten fairly quiet on this from both the council and Auckland Transport in the last few months

Manukau Station with Campus

Manukau Rail Link – This was originally meant to open in late 2010 but has yet to see a paying passenger after it quietly slipped to 2011 and was then put off till 2012 to avoid clashing with the RWC. It was then meant to open this month and was again quietly pushed back until March but there are rumours it has slipped yet again.

Those following the project will probably know that the Manukau Instutite of Technology is building a campus above the station, the eye on Auckland blog has some pictures of what this is meant to look like but here is one of the building that will eventually rise above the station

Integrated Ticketing – This has been wanted for possibly decades yet we are still waiting for it. It has had so many false starts that it would have been disqualified had it been a sport in the Olympics and still it plods on with only vague dates as to when it might eventually see the light of day for real

This was from during the Christmas closure

Real time Displays for trains – Another long time coming project and something that has continually been promised but has yet to be delivered. It is made even stranger by the fact we have had the technology (sort of) for buses for ages yet trains which one would think was easier to implement still can’t be done. Electronic displays have now be installed at a quite a few stations and the format of the messages have now been updated to make them easier to read but still no sign of real time information which AT promised would be live by the RWC.

Recently extended Henderson Stabling Yard

Strand Stabling Facility – This might not sound that glamorous but could be quite important in helping to reduce our operating costs. The intention is to build a stabling facility on the rail land near the strand where trains not being used could be stored during the day and night. The advantage of this is it saves them having to travel all the way back empty to Westfield and in a few years Wiri. It means less fuel used, less driver time needed and better use of our assets. I have found references to designs for this from the earliest ARTA reports I can find (around July 2007)

Extenstion of the NW Cycleway – In early 2010 the latest extension of the NW cycleway was opened which extended over 1km which provides an almost continuous path all the way from Bond St to Te Atatu. At the time of opening this the NZTA proclaimed:

With the Kingsland section nearing completion, the NZTA is now focussing on extending the Northwestern Cycleway further into central Auckland.

An investigation is underway to find a suitable route through Upper Queen Street, the Central Motorway Junction and along Grafton Gully to the Auckland University of Technology and Auckland University. The NZTA plans to have the 3 kilometre long-extension completed in 2011.

Well 2011 has been and gone and there has not been a squeak out of the NZTA about any plans to extend it further.

Extension of B Line services / high frequency services– B Line services are meant to be high frequency corridors with a guaranteed level of service and while this it was just a trial and not something that was never actually promised to be rolled out further I still think it should be on here. It was trialled on Dominion Rd and Mt Eden Rd and from some of evidence that came out it had quite a positive impact on patronage numbers but since then we haven’t heard anything.

There are probably heaps of other projects out there that have either disappeared into the either never to be heard from again or have seen their timeframe continually slip so what are they. Also I think it we should give a name for these projects so in the comments please suggest some names of mythical creatures to associate with these mythical projects.

Guest Post: Integrated ticketing – part 2

Guest Post — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 03:30:43 +0000

This is a Guest Post by Louis Mayo and follows on from this previous post.

My previous post proposed a system which streamlined all the different fare products into a 2 hour and Daily pass with options over three zones. In addition to the cash fare system that I described in my previous post, there would also be a smart card system as well. The smart card option would be best for regular users of the public transport network. Cards would be available as follows:

Adult
Senior Citizen (concession fare during peak, free off peak)
Child (under 18)
Tertiary student
As proposed in the previous post there would also be a card for people on benefits, etc.

For concession smart cards, each card would require a photograph and the cards would be named and would purchase concession fares by default. As per the current Snapper- HOP system you could buy additional fares e.g a family on an adult card,etc and still get the discount but you would need to tell the bus driver (or use a ticket machine if your using a train) before tagging on.

Each card would hold a value that could be topped up at stores, train stations and by internet. I would also like to see automatic topping up from a credit card or bank account to allow even more convenience, i.e if your card approaches $0 than $20 would be automatically topped up onto your card, which saves the stress of worrying whether or not you will be able to pay for your trip.

The same zone system would be used (the zones system is the same as in the previous post although some have suggested adding additional zones. Paying with HOP would offer a fixed 20% discount on cash fares. As you would be paying electronically there would be no need for fares to be in 50 cent multiples. The discount is higher than the 10% or so that is currently offered for paying with HOP (only 5% on the Ritchies Fast Pass).

The system would rely “tagging on” and “tagging off.” While I understand the concerns that have been raised by tagging off, I think people will learn to tag off quicker and I don’t really see how this issue can be worked around. Failing to tag off would result in a default fare being charged (I prefer the term ‘default fare’ rather than ‘penalty fare’).

Having said that if we use the three zone that I have suggested in the previous post, and we rationalise most of our buses so that they operate within one zone only and leave the RTN (Rail) system to carry most of the longer distance trips. Then there would be no need to tag off on many routes as they would only be going one zone anyway.

To make this system even better value there would also be weekly and monthly ‘caps’ offered. Once these caps have been reached travel for the rest of the week or month would be free of charge, so you wouldn’t have to commit to paying a large amount of money for a weekly or monthly pass at the beginning of the week / month and then realise that they have wasted money because they didn’t use it as often as they were expecting to.

The system would work something like this (I am not a software programmer!)

Card tags on at station or onboard bus
System works out what zone the tag on was recorded
Cards tag off, system works out what zone tag off was recorded in
The amount that a 2 hour pass for the required amount of zones is then deducted from the account
Travel over these zones is then free until 2 hours after the initial tag on was recorded
If travel is made to a new zone then the difference between the amount paid and the amount of higher fare will be charged and the pass will be ‘upgraded’ to include the extra zone/s
If more travel is made after the 2 hour time period has finished then another fare is deducted from the card and travel is free for the rest of the day
Once the quota for the weekly cap (which would be daily pass x 4.5) then travel for the remainder of the calendar week is free (i.e until Midnight Sunday of that week)
When the monthly cap is reached (weekly x 3)

These tables show proposed fare prices.
2 hour and Daily fares are calculated from cash fare x 0.8.
Weekly fare = Daily x 4.5
Monthly fare = Weekly x 3
As the fares are deducted electronically there is no need for a 50 cent rounding system.

The savings rack up quite significantly, for example a three zone monthly would cost $172.80 compared to paying 40 (based a trip to and from work every week day for 4 weeks) return 2 hour cash fares would cost $320. That’s a saving of around 46%, which would amount to over $1500 in a year, this should be a fairly compelling reason to switch to smart card.

Chris R will also be paying less (see comments of part I post) – only $129.60 for his trip compared to the $180 that he pays for a rail monthly currently. On top of that he’ll now get to use buses and ferries in addition to just trains.

“Swap your HOP” confirmed

admin — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 04:40:52 +0000

An article in today’s NZ Herald confirms that HOP cards will need to be changed over later this year to the new Thales system, enabling them to work on all buses, trains and ferries.

Auckland’s “integrated” public transport cards, introduced in May with a $1 million marketing budget from the public purse, will have to be replaced because they are not compatible with a new system for trains, ferries and some bus companies.

More than 93,000 electronic Hop cards, supplied by Snapper, are in use – but they work only on NZ Bus services.

NZ Bus and Snapper – which was beaten in 2009 by French electronics and military technology giant Thales to an $87 million supply and operating contract for an Auckland region-wide integrated ticketing scheme – are owned by Wellington-based investment company Infratil.

From the middle of this year, the Hop cards will have to be replaced at an undisclosed cost to Auckland Transport by upgraded versions suitable for all forms of public transport using the Thales system.

These include trains, ferries and bus services such as Northern Express operator Ritchies Transport, Howick and Eastern, Birkenhead Transport, Urban Express and Bayes Coachlines.

This issue has been brewing for almost a year now, since HOP was first launched, and is the result of a pretty complex number of factors – stretching back a number of additional years and related to Snapper’s role in the whole integrated ticketing project. Effectively, when Thales won the contract to provide the integrated ticketing system for Auckland, Snapper were pretty grumpy about the whole thing and as their owner (Infratil) also owned NZ Bus, a deal between the two was stitched up that would introduce the Snapper Card onto NZ Bus services in advance of Thales’s system being rolled out.

The charitable side of me notes that NZ Bus’s old ticketing machinery was no longer supported, and the machines were breaking down on a very regular basis. The cynical side of me thinks that the whole process was just Snapper trying to ‘throw a spanner in the works’. In any case, a compromise deal was struck whereby Auckland would see Snapper Cards introduced on NZ Bus services, but rebranded to look like HOP cards. I think all parties hoped that the technology would evolve to enable those HOP/Snapper Cards to be useable on the Thales system once that was up and running – thereby avoiding the need for a card-swap – but that hasn’t happened.

I think it’s a bit mean to beat up Auckland Transport for their role in all of this. When NZ Bus decided to go with Snapper, this put AT in an incredibly challenging situation of having another card launch a few months in advance of something they’d been working on for years, stealing their thunder and really muddying the waters when it came to brand recognition of the card. So I can understand why AT went down the path they did last year, launching the HOP brand as soon as they could, even if technically it was on a Snapper Card rather than a “proper” HOP card. I have spoken to those involved in the technical side of things and there was (and remains to an extent) a belief that the Snapper Card “could” become compatible with the Thales system to the required extent to make it work. But it’s just taking too long and AT have understandably decided they can’t wait any longer and will go with the card swap option instead.

Theoretically, the ‘swap you HOP’ process should be pretty painless. Unlike the switch-over from GO Rider to HOP, it seems likely that there will be a period when the machines on the bus accept both HOP/Snapper and real HOP cards – enabling the simple swapover of cards when your HOP/Snapper card runs out of credit. I think it’d be a good idea for the cards to look different too (and not just through the removal of the Snapper logo) to avoid confusion.

In the end, it seems that the only real loser out of this becomes Snapper. While it remains to be seen whether people get to keep their HOP/Snapper cards and still get a new “proper HOP” card for free, Snapper is getting squeezed out of both things it does: Thales kicking it out of the public transport side of their business (aside from the card readers on the bus) and a new generation of bank/credit cards with contactless operation starting to squeeze them out of the retail side of the business.

Better value for money from rail

admin — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 08:48:13 +0000

While it’s certainly essential for Auckland to have a well functioning rail system, as we’re a growing city with little ability to squeeze more out of our roads particularly easily, the ‘turning around’ of Auckland rail system over the past decade has undoubtedly been an expensive – but necessary – task. I won’t go into the capital costs of the projects in this post, because I don’t have much of an issue with them – all the money we’ve spent so far on upgrading the rail system has been on projects that make pretty good sense. What I’m particularly interested in is the ongoing operating cost of the rail system, and how we might be able to reduce that.

In the 2009/2010 financial year (recent data is probably available but this is easy to find), we spent around $69 million on operating the rail network, and got in around $20 million in fares – meaning a subsidy of just under $50 million was required: I’m not going to do the normal thing of dividing this amount by the number of trips to work out a “per trip” subsidy cost and then go and compare it to buses, because that’s silly as your average rail trip is much longer than your average bus trip – therefore generating much greater congestion relief benefits and also meaning that trains need to be operated much longer distances, adding to the cost.

However, overall I think it’s pretty clear that in the longer term we want the rail system to fund itself to a greater degree than the current 29% farebox recovery level the table above suggests.Fortunately, much of the recent capital expenditure, including ongoing projects like electrification and integrated ticketing, is aimed at improving the efficiency of the network. Integrated ticketing should do away with the need for so many on-board staff (as an aside, there were two people selling tickets on the platform at Henderson station around lunch-time earlier this week when I was catching a train, meaning that on-board staff were able to sit around not having to do much) while electrification should help save significantly on the $10 million a year currently spent on diesel, and the $15 million or so a year spent on maintenance.

In short, it seems logical to me that as these two projects in particular start to roll out, we should be able to run a much leaner rail system, reducing the cost of many aspects of providing rail service. Yes, we will have longer trains once electrification is completed, but we won’t have more peak time trains (thanks to the Britomart bottleneck) so it should be possible to significantly reduce the rail network’s operating cost. In fact, I’m pretty sure that the business cases for both integrated ticketing and electrification relied upon such savings.

I do wonder though whether this will happen. There doesn’t seem to be much competitive tension in getting a good contract price out of Veolia providing rail service, and we have learned from analysing PTOM that the bus market is pretty uncompetitive when it comes to tender prices. I think it’s essential that, over the next few years, Auckland Transport works really hard to show how investments in the rail network are helping it become much more efficient so we can get that farebox recovery rate up and start proving to a sceptical government that rail investment is good value for money.