The “PT effectiveness project”

As I noted in yesterday’s post, NZTA has been undertaking a significant amount of work into finding out ways to get “better value” out of public transport investment. As I also noted yesterday, NZTA currently gets around $4.40 worth of road user benefits for each dollar they spend on subsidising public transport in Auckland, so they’re actually doing pretty well at the moment. But if there are other ways to efficiently improve the delivery of public transport, obviously they should be looked at – and it’s interesting to see what ideas have come out of this project.

They’re summarised in the diagram below:

There’s some good stuff being said here, like the need for simplified fares and ticketing, and the need for a zone based fare system (as an aside, ARTA had better be wording on a zone based fare system that will be rolled out with integrated ticketing). References to the need to focus on a more integrated approach to public transport network planning is also good, while the idea of a “demonstration project” in each city sounds quite exciting. Other things, like improved customer service, probably have some value (I have noticed that bus drivers seem a lot friendlier these days) but in the future we’re likely to be interacting with drivers less frequently, so that might not be as important as other things.

Let’s have a look at some of the details of what’s in these boxes. Starting with improved customer experience, some of the statistics in the section below are quite fascinating – particularly the potential economic benefits of increasing public transport use: So 10% more people using public transport in Auckland would next to an (annual?) benefit to Auckland of over $80 million. That’s a useful number to store in the memory bank. It’s also further confirmation of the significant economic benefits that are brought about by getting people out of their cars and onto public transport. I’d be curious to know what percentage of that $85 million would be benefits to road users.

What is said about integrated networks is perhaps the most interesting thing of the lot, and links in a lot with what I have said previously about “The Network Effect“, which was also the subject of a fairly recent NZTA research report – which public transport academic Paul Mees contributed significantly to. It also has some very interesting statistics regarding the effectiveness of the Northern Busway:

If NZTA are really thinking about how the network effect could be applied in New Zealand, and most particularly in Auckland, then that’s very very good news. While the cost-effectiveness of subsidising public transport in general remains excellent (as outlined in yesterday’s post), over the past 10 years there has been a lot of “adding services” without necessary too much thought going in to the structure of our services – with the result being the incredibly messy route structures that we have. The “network effect” seeks to clean all that up, create a grid public transport network and to base the system around transfers rather than around avoiding transfers. International evidence shows that this works spectacularly well.

Another interesting key issue identified by this effectiveness project is what NZTA has termed the need to strengthen leadership, but what I would probably call the need for everyone to bloody work together for once. The last sentence here is the key one, that what we really need is for the different operators to start focusing on growing the public transport market, rather than just focusing on protecting their little bit of that market. Now this was the point of the public transport management act, to give ARTA a lot more powers to make this happen. I’m not sure whether NZTA has been informed of the Minister’s intentions to ruin that legislation.

There’s quite a lot of further information that I will probably get around to blogging on in the future, but it is quite good to see that some of the thinking going on behind the scenes actually makes sense, and is focused on the very issues that I often talk about on here – the need to simplify and integrate, and also the tremendous economic benefits that can arise from increasing the number of people using public transport.

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