ARTA’s Regional Public Transport Plan

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 plan itself doesn’t seem to have changed particularly much from the draft plan, which I made a submission on back in December last year.

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:

1. The transfer doesn’t cost you anything – integrated ticketing is crucial for achieving this.
2. The transfer mustn’t delay your trip for very long – this means you either need very high frequencies or very well timed transfers.
3. 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.

Here’s all that is said about commercial services (from the background RPTP document):

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.

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