Integrated Ticketing – the saga continues

There have been a couple of articles in the NZ Herald over the past few days that show Infratil, through their subsidiary Snapper, have been busy trying a last ditch effort to win the contract for Auckland’s integrated ticketing system. This is despite ARTA and NZTA having now chosen Thales as their preferred supplier on no fewer than three occasions.

First off, there was an opinion piece in Saturday’s herald by John Roughan:

A lobbyist for Infratil phoned last week to suggest the wrangle over transfer tickets for buses and trains in Auckland was worth a closer look. I’d suspected it might be. When sinister corporate forces are said to be confounding a public project there is usually an interesting issue unexplained.

My interest in Auckland’s public transport probably seems keener than it is. I have an abiding fascination with the determination of regional planners to make a city fit their conception of what it should be, rather than what it plainly is and probably ever will be. Beyond that, the subject is mechanics.

Obviously an “integrated ticket”, as the Auckland Regional Transport Agency calls it, would be helpful if fixed-route services are ever to serve a population of diverse daily travel patterns.

Every trip would involve a transfer or two and nothing is more off-putting than multiple fares and fumbling for change.

And it would not seem rocket science these days to record every trip electronically and reconcile the fares and subsidies owed to the various companies at the end of the day. So I have wondered over the years why the Arta was making such heavy weather of it.

For a long time its parent body, the Regional Council, blamed the privatisation of bus services, but that didn’t make sense. Why would independent operators resist a ticket that would make all their services more attractive and save them the costs of collecting fares and giving change?

In any event, the previous government legislated a little more power for the council and last year the Arta invited ticketing tenders. This year it settled on a bid from a French electronic company, Thales, preferring it to two others, one of them from an Infratil subsidiary, Snapper Services.

Infratil also owns the company that runs most of the Auckland buses and has been shutting out the drivers during their wage dispute. On the integrated ticket it has been reported as a sore loser, lobbying for an over-rule in Wellington where final decisions on Auckland projects are always made because national taxpayers bear the bulk of the costs.

This week the Government’s Transport Agency announced its decision. It would fund the Arta’s ticketing scheme but only if it was capable of being extended nationwide, which Snapper’s could be. The Arta would have to talk to Thales again.

National public transport officials share their Auckland counterparts’ dislike of the Snapper proposal. This I’d read before the Snapper man came to see me but I didn’t know why.

Nor, he claimed, did he know. But as he outlined the mechanics of his fare-paying system I had an “ah ha” moment, to borrow a mediator’s phrase.

He said his was the only bid offering more than a public transport ticket. Snapper’s card could be loaded to a value of $300 and used for small transactions of any kind in any place that had a card-reader.

It could be used on buses, at train station barriers, coffee kiosks, in taxis, at parking buildings … Ah ha.

Public transport planners do not want their ticket transferable to taxis and, heaven forbid, carparks. Their mission in life is to discourage private travel by any means they can and promote their fixed-route services.

Those suspicions were reinforced this week at the press conference to announce the terms on which the Auckland ticket can proceed. When the Transport Agency’s chief executive, Geoff Dangerfield, was open to the possibility that a transfer card could be used for other transactions, his officials were quick to step in.

“I think it’s really important that we keep to our business,” said one. “Our business is operating public transport and transit applications [by which he meant park-and-rides and cycle lockers].

“We want to think about our business first and the spin-off retail opportunities second. Fares are what it is all about. We’ve taken a particular interest in how a system will perform in the public transport real environment, not necessarily spin-off applications.”

Blah. Public transport is their business, public service is too wide a brief. For them a transfer ticket is a marketing device, giving their network a distinct image in shops, which would be fine if taxes didn’t have to pay for it.

The Snapper man said something else that accorded with my limited comprehension of computer programming. The more open a card’s applications can be the less expensive the system becomes. The cost lies, he explained, in setting up the exclusions.

It sounds expensive enough to programme a card for the buses, trains and ferries of Auckland; to make it applicable also to the routes, fare stages, discounts and subsidies of all municipalities nationwide sounds impossibly fraught unless the card has some of the convenience of cash.

I haven’t any shares in Infratil but I’m beginning to wish I did.

While I do somewhat see where Roughan is coming from here, that it would make sense for any public transport card to be able to be used for small purchases, there’s nothing stopping Thales from doing that with their system. The point that Roughan perhaps misses is that this project is being funded by the Auckland Regional Transport Agency and the New Zealand Transport Agency, and so therefore it’s no surprise that their primary goal is to ensure that we get the best system possible for our transport system. Thales have a comprehensive international record in delivering smart-card based integrated ticketing systems, whereas Snapper can’t even get their tickets accepted on Wellington’s train system. I’m guessing that track record had a large role to play in ARTA and NZTA choosing them over Snapper, three times now.

And then again in today’s Herald editorial we see something similar:

The key to successful public transport is a transferable ticket. Particularly in a city such as Auckland where commuting destinations are diverse, people need to be able to change buses without paying a new fare each time. Particularly, too, if the city is committed to a railway that requires feeder services by road if it is ever to attract more than the small proportion of the population living near a station. In these circumstances Auckland should have had a transferable ticket years ago.

But it is taking an achingly long time. It is more than a year since the Government’s Transport Agency approved a project expected to cost $70 million to set up and $6.5 million annually. In February, the Auckland Regional Council approved its transport authority’s choice of a French operator, Thales, over competing bids from Australia and New Zealand.

The disappointed local bidder, Snapper Services, a subsidiary of Infratil, has strenuously lobbied the Government and others against the decision, claiming the scheme was flawed and the public transport agencies biased. It has taken until this week for the Government’s agency to approve the region’s decision, though with a potentially crippling new condition attached.

The national agency wants a ticketing system for the whole country and has approved the Auckland project only as a first step to that end. This has sent the regional transport agency back into negotiations with Thales to design a system that could be extended to all public transport nationwide. The cost of this is anyone’s guess.

How hard can it be to organise a transferable ticket? According to Infratil’s subsidiary, it is not difficult if it is a cash card that can be read by a machine in the vehicle. Passengers present their card to the electronic reader as they board and again as they leave. The system debits their card for the fare zones they have travelled and records a credit for the vehicle’s owner.

The trouble with this proposal, from the public transport agencies’ point of view, is probably that the card can be used for much more than travel fares. It would be a cash-equivalent, able to be used for any transaction with a shop or business that installs a card reader, including taxis and parking buildings. For agencies whose first aim is to promote public transport over private, this could be a problem.

The Auckland agency has preferred a bid that offers a system purely for buses, trains and ferries, the only modes recognised in Auckland’s integrated public transport plan. The regional council might also be reluctant to put its system into the hands of one of its bigger bus operators, or it may simply dislike Infratil. Its chairman’s intemperate comments about the company during its dispute with drivers suggests an antipathy that might not bear fair examination.

If so, the council might need to open its mind for it may not be simple to devise a purely public transport ticket that can be redeemed anywhere in the country. The more goods and services that are excluded from the card, the more complicated the design of its applications becomes. The negotiations with the council’s preferred supplier may lead back to an open cash card much like Infratil’s subsidiary is already offering in Wellington and soon, perhaps, in Christchurch.

Indeed, the company is so well along the road to a national ticketing system that it would be strange to prefer a distant supplier. If Infratil’s subsidiary can deliver a Korean cash-card system for less money than the agencies have budgeted, and in time for the 2011 Rugby World Cup, it would be sensible to take it. The national agency seems to be open to that possibility. Since it will meet most of the cost, Auckland’s regional bodies may have to bury their antagonism and get on board.

For a start, I am glad that the editorial recognises how important integrated ticketing is to Auckland’s public transport fortunes. It’s difficult to imagine a project that can achieve so much for our public transport system, at comparatively such a little cost.

However, I wonder whether the Herald has fallen for Infratil’s tricks. We are right to question Infratil’s motives, and be suspicious that Snapper is not really in Auckland’s best interests. When it comes to Infratil, we must remember that this is the same company that held Auckland ‘s public transport customers in such disdain that is suspended all bus driver for simply working to rule. This is the same company that fought (and continues to fight) so hard against the Public Transport Management Act, the very piece of legislation that makes integrated ticketing possible.

Share this