Regional Public Transport Plan

ARTA has today released their Regional Public Transport Plan. Yes, that’s right, another plan or strategy that relates to transport. This plan does get a bit more down to the “nitty gritty” than most of the other plans and strategies that have been come up with this year, although at the very same time it generally avoids the topic of “funding”, so comes across as a bit vague too.

Basically, the plan outlines the ways in which we can improve the performance and the efficiency of the public transport system in Auckland. One of the big aspects of this is the shift towards a four-tier structure to the public transport system, with the tiers being the following: Overall, I think it is excellent to have a co-ordinated planned approach to Auckland’s public transport system. A lot of money is wasted in creating the current ‘ad-hoc’ system where we see much service duplication. There’s no point that we have a bus that travels from Swanson into downtown when we also have a railway line that does the same trip, there’s no point that we have many Papakura to Britomart buses when the train does the same thing, or that along parts of Great North Road we have some services being run by Urban Express and other services run by NZ Bus, but with no integration between their timetables. Eliminating this service duplication, and the pointlessness of operating long-haul bus services, will certainly be beneficial.

Here’s what the RPTP says about the overall approach of the Plan: There are certainly many good things here, although once again I must say there’s not much that I haven’t heard before in the Auckland Transport Plan, the Auckland Regional Land Transport Strategy and so on… It’s also good to hear that there’s some commitment to the CBD Rail Link.

I’m also very supportive of the ‘layered approach’ to public transport routes, of RTN, QTN, LCN etc. It is the RTN that can best compete with the convenience offered by private vehicles, so it is essential that steps are taken to ensure the RTN can operate effectively as it is more likely to attract new users (from cars) than any other part of the network. However, for this system to work it is utterly essential that way make transfers easier – requires integrated ticketing, high frequencies (or well co-ordinated timing of services) and easy transfers (cross platform etc.). At the moment Auckland does this pretty badly, and until we make transfering far far easier I think that a tiering of the system might actually make matters worse. This is because the changes will probably mean that people have to walk further to their bus stop, and they will probably mean that people will have to transfer between bus and rail, or between one local bus and an express bus. These “negatives” will have to be outweighed by the positives that become possible through the tiered system (better frequencies, faster journey times, more understandable system etc.) otherwise there is really little point to changing – other than to save money, which will probably result in lower patronage and a return to the bad old days.

One thing that slightly confuses me is the continued reference in the RPTP to a distinction between commercial services and contracted services. My understanding of the Public Transport Management Act was that ARTA have the ability to stop the “cherry picking” of best routes as commercial services, as a result of lobbying so strongly while the PTMA was being legislated last year. It seems strange that ARTA would simply give up this hard-fought gain.

I will be making a submission on this, and will put something together like I did for the Regional Land Transport Strategy a few days back once I have a clearer idea of what I’m going to say.

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