The Auckland Transport Agency

I commented a few weeks back  on the Auckland Transport Agency, when it was first announced – and I further explored the issue last week. This agency is effectively the answer to the question of ‘how is transport going to be dealt with under the super-city?’ My understanding is that it will run pretty much like how ARTA has operated over the past few years since it was first established – but have its horizons expanded to do the jobs that the transport departments of the variety of current councils do. There will still be oversight from the main Auckland Council, in terms of the Council appointing the board of directors on the new “ATA”, while the Council will also set the strategic framework and planning environment under which the agency will operate.

I was pretty sweet with this idea at the time, which has somewhat bizarrely put me on the other side of the fence to a lot of public transport advocates – like ARC chairman Mike Lee – who I usually agree with on matters. I guess that I kind of understood where he was coming from in a partisan sense, that his inability to directly control ARTA over the past few years must be pretty annoying. However, from what I have seen, ARTA seems to have done a pretty good job since it was formed, and it seems to me as though the structural separation between the ARC and ARTA has worked OK. While there are still silly things that ARTA does, generally most of the problems we have with public transport in Auckland come down a severe lack of funding – which is the one thing that ARTA really don’t have a say in. So far, to me, the main problem with the proposed Auckland Transport Agency as not been its structural separation from the future Auckland Council, but rather that it won’t have a say in railway and state highway matters. I have said it before, and I have to say it again – Auckland’s biggest transport policy problem is that lack of one funding pool and one funding agency for projects of all types. The Auckland Transport Agency could have become the agency the city desperately needs, and I still think that’s something that should be pushed for.

However, there are a couple of matters that have made me reassess this position in the last week, and I am certainly yet to be fully convinced either way on this critical matter. Before I get onto these matters, I think it’s worth again noting how utterly critical it is that we get this future transport agency right. Obviously from my perspective, but also a perspective that is accepted quite widely – transport is in many respects Auckland’s biggest issue. $1.6 billion a year gets spent on transport in the Auckland region (2007/2008) figures, although the fragmentation of different transport agencies has made it difficult to know that the money is going to where it is most needed. Now while the current plan is to not give the future ATA much power over state highways and the rail network, it will still be a very very powerful agency – effectively combining the roles of ARTA and all the transport departments of the councils, as well as the more strategic transport department of the ARC. It’s obvious we need to get this agency right.

So, getting back to issues of the last week, the first one was seeing the region’s politicians doing something good for transport for once, and rejecting the draft Regional Land Transport Strategy because the timeframes for major projects such as the CBD Rail Tunnel and rail to the airport were not visionary enough. So having the politicians there to say “this is not what Auckland wants” was pretty valuable in this regard. The same regional transport committee (which comprises of member of all councils, plus the ARC, plus noted stakeholders) also within the last week released a “wish-list” of projects for Auckland that was strongly public-transport focused – causing all sorts of grumpiness amongst the roading lobby (and the NZ Herald).

The other matter that has come up was raised in a couple of excellent articles in the Weekend Herald last weekend that delved into the debate over whether the Auckland Transport Agency should be an “arms-length” council-controlled-organisation (like ARTA is now), or whether it should simply be a department of council. I must say, some pretty good arguments for simply making the ATA a department of council are emerging. Here’s a good quote from the article in the Review section of the Weekend Herald:

‘In a rare display of unity, civic leaders say transport – one of the major drivers of the reform – is not appropriate for governance by remote control. Mike Lee cites the relationship between the ARC and its public transport offshoot, the Auckland Regional Transport Authority. He says the agency has experienced a blowout in administration costs and sharp increase in employees.

“There’s a lack of accountability, yet when a train breaks down I’m the guy that people run up or [ARC transport chairwoman] Christine Rose. You have to go through this laborious arm’s length mechanism to get some accountability to get the problem fixed.”

It is all very confusing in some respects, dealing with the question of how linked the transport agency should be with the future Auckland Council. If we look at the main advantages of what the ATA will provide, then integration of transport matters is clearly a huge gain. But that will occur via either option here. I suppose at the moment the general political leaning (at a local level) is public transport friendly – so we do actually see the regional council and the regional transport committee (once again, for the benefit of the Herald and others, these are not one and the same thing) being very pro public transport. Perhaps that makes me lean towards allowing for greater political interference, because at the moment I see that political interference having a good effect. I would be likely to feel quite differently if we had a strongly anti public transport council I imagine. So that pushes me back towards potentially supporting the structural separation.

1. To hopefully find a few concluding points within this rather big mess, I think the following points are important:
   The future transport organization should have a say over as much of the transport system as possible – including state highways and railway lines.
2. There should be quite strong political oversight of what the agency does, to ensure accountability. This could happen in either a CCO situation or transport being incorporated within the council.
3. There should be checks and balances both ways – both to ensure a crazy council can’t make things go insane but also to ensure that there is an ability for politicians to rein in the agency.

So… maybe somewhere halfway between the two options?

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