An interesting question time today in parliament discussing the implication of farebox recovery ratios, the emissions trading scheme and so forth.
The transcript is available to read here. Did Joyce really say that forcing people from public transport into their cars will decrease transport emissions?
Gareth Hughes: If fewer people take trains and buses and instead drive their cars, will this increase or decrease our greenhouse gas emissions from transport?
Hon STEVEN JOYCE: Obviously it would decrease them, but I think the member is arguing against the emissions trading scheme with that question. Presumably as a member of the Green Party he seeks to see the emissions trading scheme introduced to raise the cost of fuel to encourage people to use more public transport. To suggest that that will somehow reverse the situation is, I think, unfortunate logic.
Crikey I didn’t mishear it. I think Gareth Hughes wondered if it was a clip of the tongue from Joyce, but seemingly not:
Gareth Hughes: Did I hear the Minister correctly just then? Does he believe that if fewer people take trains and buses and instead drive their cars, it will decrease our greenhouse gas emissions from transport?
Hon STEVEN JOYCE: It all depends on the fuel efficiency of their cars, I would have thought. The emissions trading scheme is designed to encourage fuel efficiency. We have continuing improvement in fuel efficiency in this country. If the member believes that he will solve the world’s problems by shifting people away from their private forms of transport permanently on to public forms of transport, I say that I genuinely think he would be better to focus on improving fuel technologies and improving the fuel efficiency of private vehicles, as this Government is doing.
Oh goodness not the good old “electric cars will save us” argument.
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Good god, what planet is this guy living on? It’s pretty clear Joyce is in no way qualified to be doing the job he does. Would Apple be making any money if they hired some to run the company based on the premise that they had used a computer (car in Joyce’s case) at some point in their lives…..I think not.
Surely this sort of response to a question is something that if we had a decent newspaper scene (rather than one just as anti-PT as Joyce) in New Zealand would be reported on?
I hope he pointed out that it was National that just recently canned the fuel efficency standards for imported cars?…
Haha what an idiot. As RTC said we really need a news organisation to pick this up and show him for the fool he is, also who is the stupid blonde behind him that is eating up his BS
Nikki Kaye – MP for Auckland Central who usually does / should know better.
Wait, isn’t that Amy Adams?
http://nationalmps.co.nz/NationalCaucus/NationalMPs/AmyAdams/tabid/152/Default.aspx
Yes it is. Nikki Kaye is a bit … well… nicer.
Joyce isn’t foolish by any means – he’s been very successful in his business career and is so far being described as one of the Government’s more successful ministers. I think his line of reasoning isn’t that uncommon amongst many upper-middle class managerial types in NZ, who simply never use public transport in their day-to-day lives and don’t see why anyone would. Public transport is an alien concept to them. The cost of fuel doesn’t bother them, because they can afford it. They’re not particularly concerned about the environmental problems caused by private cars, aside from traffic congestion, which is always someone else’s fault, and should be (in their view) just ‘solved’ by building more motorways.
We shouldn’t forget that views like these are held by a large section of the population, however much we might disagree with them.
Well put Ethan. Its depressing, but true.
What puzzles me is *how* the Government can mandate a 50 percent cost-recovery ratio. Service contracts are organised between local or regional councils and the operators, not between NZTA and the operators. My only thought, and this is based on past practice (pre-1991), is that the NZTA would tell the regional councils that it would not provide any subsidy for cost-recovery south of the 50 percent, leaving the councils to pick up the tab for that themselves … in full.
Worked example – imagine a service has gross costs of $1,000 per day, of which fares cover half. The remaining $500 of public funds is picked up 40 percent by NZTA ($200) and the balance of $300 by the council.
Now, suppose that the council promotes a lower fare regime in order to encourage demand, so that fare revenues fall to $400. Under the current regime NZTA would pick up 40 percent of this ($40); under Joyce’s proposed regime, the council would have to wear all of the extra cost. Knowing how councils work, this would be a major disincentive!
@Ross Clark – it is my understanding that the policy specifically says that the council can’t make up the difference, the route has to pay for 50% of its costs from the farebox or it has to be shut down. It’s as simple as that.
I think ARTA just has to use this to their advantage by using it as a way to shut down routes during a re-jig of the whole bus system, when people complain they need to just point out that it’s Joyce’s doing not theirs. This way ARTA could hopefully reconsolidate routes in a similar way that jarbury has described many times on his blog.
“I have a cunning plan m’lord!”
Ha good thinking RTC. ARTA can just dump the blame on NZTA.
The thing that annoys me is that NZTA’s contribution to the subsidy of an average public transport trip is around $2 I think in Auckland. And the benefits to road users of each additional PT user are far greater than that.
OMG. I can’t believe the garbage that is spewing out of Steven Joyce’s mouth.
@Ethan: Unfortunately, you’re right on the money.
I’ve chosen not to view that clip…
The quoted transcript was enough to realise that if I did, things would be thrown…
Where can I find drugs to make me that delusional..!
I actually think Joyce meant to say “increase”, but was then too arrogant to admit his slip-of-the-tongue and tried to argue his way out of it.
I think Joyce has a point. It all depends. If you look at this report from the American Bus Association (specifically the average energy use per passenger mile graph on page 5 and the CO2 emissions per passenger mile on page 6), car pool 2 person and car average trip use less energy and generate less CO2 than transit bus. Rail is obviously more efficient and less polluting than buses or cars, altho the figures do not take account of inefficiencies in production or transmission of electricity. But ferries, which are also a part of the Auckland public transport scene, are significantly less efficient and more polluting than any other form of transport.
These guys want to promote bus use… I’m presuming their methodology and figures are fair, at least in a US context.
http://www.buses.org/files/ComparativeEnergy.pdf
Obi, except the question was not whether buses and always more efficient than driving, it was whether fewer people using PT and more people driving would increase or decrease emissions. I think the key point to make is that “the bus would have probably run anyway”, particularly the most inefficient services that are run for social reasons (like the 10pm on a Sunday night service).
So by pushing people off PT and onto driving we end up with more inefficient PT and more people driving. A lose-lose.
According to Surface Transport Costs and Charges, a bus needs to take at least 8 drivers off the road to make a difference environmentally. Most bus passengers would have caught the bus anyway, so it is important to be careful about subsidising empty services.
Of course the biggest improvement in emissions in recent years has been through two measures:
– Abolished import tariffs on vehicles (reduced the average fleet age substantially); and
– Changing fuel specs to drop sulphur in diesel from 1500 to 500 ppm and now 50ppm, dramatically reducing particulates from diesel vehicles.
Mode shift can’t achieve these sorts of gains.
I do notice that S Joyce can also be a bit of a smart ar$e. Has he ever admitted he’s wrong on anything?
Libertyscott, obi – fuel / emissions eficiency improvements work as well for buses as they do for cars. To argue that only cars, including big utes and old fuel guzzlers will improve, while buses will somehow stay fuel-wasting stinkers is ignoring half the truth – the half that is not in favour of one’s own position. Not exactly unknown for Joyce.
As for efficient (fuel or otherwise) services to ensure that buses DO have enough passengers, why is Joyce sabotaging most measures in that regard then? As we know, private cars are subsidised heavily via parking and road construction. If one put similar money into PT to create a level playing field, buses would be full and likely easily get enough passengers even during off-peak to be competitive directly.
What Joyce is doing is rigging the playing field, and then punishing PT for losing!
Ingolfson… To summarise, I think we’ve agreed that a lightly loaded bus is more polluting than the same passengers driving their cars. The way to reduce the pollution is to either cancel the service and let people drive, or encourage enough drivers to take the bus so that the total pollution is reduced. BUT running the bus with less passengers just increases the total pollution. So Joyce is correct, but only if he cancels services. Which means we have an environmental argument to reduce off peak bus frequencies. Do we assume that most people who take the bus would still take the bus if the frequency were lower, with increased numbers of passengers on each bus and lower total pollution? Or would that cause a loss of patronage? I’d be interested to know if anyone has modeled this.
In terms of bus efficiency, then I’m quite happy to note that modern buses are cleaner than old ones. But I’m astonished just how many kilometers you can get out of a bus. I chatted to a Greyhound driver in Australia once and found that they generally get around 15 years or more out of their buses. They’re running overnight, so doing maybe 2000km a day. That is 650,000km a year, or around 10million km over the life of the bus. That is incredible, and I’m surprised their exhausts are as clean as they are at the end of life. I had a car once that died with 320k km on the clock and that was basically rooted.
The thing is that hourly frequencies are so rubbish most people wouldn’t bother using the bus unless they have absolutely no choice, half-hourly frequencies are still crap, but because they’re not total rubbish you may end up more than doubling patronage through a doubling in services (especially if you’re going off a low base). Further frequency increases may have the same effect, so I doubt the answer is lower off-peak frequencies.
One must also consider the type of urban development that different transport policies help generate. Roads-centric development is usually far less sustainable on a great number of measures.
Idiot
I guess the point is to look at the systemic effects of each and people travel habits in general. Certainly a bus with only three people on it is a waste, but we have to look at the wider aspect. Perhaps that bus might just be in a quiet section between to busy parts of it’s route? Maybe it is quiet through the day but very busy in the peaks, would cancelling the service during the day affect the numbers during the peaks?
It could be that the one bus route that only has six people on it each day happens to be the only thing stopping those six people from driving for all of their travel. So in this case what is worse for the environment, one bus run that is slightly below ‘break even’ or having those six people stop taking buses altogether?
Personally I take PT for almost all of my travel, but if I couldn’t get the train to work I would have to buy a car, and with a car bought and sitting in the garage I would no doubt use it a lot more than just replacing my trip to work.
Another thing to consider is the environmental affects of driving beyond fuel and tailpipe emissions, I’m thinking about things like parking, gas stations, new roads, widening motorways etc. Perhaps those underutilised buses are actually saving a lot of emissions by reducing demand to expand infrastructure for private vehicles.
The answer of course is to improve the utilisation of buses, either through growing patronage overall or streamlining the network to rationalise routes into an actual network. If that means getting rid of a few useless routes then so be it.