The end of ARTA

As well as Auckland’s councils being replaced by the Super City as of today, we also see the end of the Auckland Regional Transport Authority and the beginning of the new Auckland Transport. ARTA have put together a useful report showing their major achievements over the past six years, and also information on where things are likely to go next.

Back in 2004/2005 I had a much more passing interest in Auckland’s transport matters, so it is interesting to hear once again about the process that led to the formation of ARTA – and also achievements (or otherwise) that happened in its first few years of being. This is briefly summarised in the paragraph below: It’s scary to think that before 2004, transport arrangements were even more complex in Auckland than they have been in recent years!

It would seem as though the most useful thing ARTA did in its early days was to put a bit of structured thought into analysing how Auckland’s public transport system could be improved – looking internationally at what successful cities were doing, examining the short-comings with Auckland’s system at the time and pulling together a plan to push things forward. This all happened in 2005 and 2006, leading to the Passenger Transport Network Plan and the Rail Development Plan. Most of the improvements to our public transport system that have occurred over the past few years, and will continue to happen over the next few years  are guided by these two plans. An awful lot was achieved in a relatively short time period in 2005 and 2006 in the formulation, which meant that pressure was then able to go on central government to come to the party and support the plans: which the last government (eventually) did by funding Project DART and electrification – and which this government has also supported by not cancelling the funding for those projects.

The work done by ARTA, providing the ‘grunt work’ to guide improvements to the public transport system, is summarised in the sections from their report below: The economic analysis largely done “behind the scenes” to justify many of the public transport upgrades provided some very interesting insights into the benefits of investing in public transport. In the not too distant past, public transport was highly disadvantaged in the way that its cost-effectiveness was measured, but thanks (in part) to the work undertaken by ARTA to justify Project DART and electrification we are now seeing the true economic benefits of public transport investment being highlighted. In large-scale future projects such as the CBD Rail Tunnel, the economic analysis process is likely to be our friend and no longer our enemy.

Some of the economic benefits of public transport are outlined in the graph below: Interestingly, it was shown that the primary beneficiaries of public transport investment are actually road-users, through decongestion benefits (as more people using public transport the roads are less clogged). The government’s current policies haven’t quite yet woken up to this fact, but I’m sure eventually this will be recognised – and is justification for why petrol tax revenue should be spent on public transport projects.

Over the past few years a lot of this early work has started to pay dividends. We have seen huge improvements to the rail network, through Project DART and with electrification not too far around the corner. Improvements to the bus network, aside from the extremely successful Northern Busway, have been fewer though – although hopefully integrated ticketing, the further rollout of b.line services and a shift towards a ‘tiered’ system of routes will change that. ARTA has also been hamstrung in its efforts to improve bus services by unhelpful councils and obstructive bus companies. I guess the ultimate test of ARTA’s success is in patronage statistics, which – after an odd dip in the middle of last decade – have risen sharply over the past few years: I guess overall I think the “ARTA experiment” was a qualified success. ARTA was able to focus completely on improving Auckland’s public transport system – and having an agency do just that provided some useful benefits in the thought, planning and strategising that has been undertaken over the past six years. However, in a way this has also been ARTA’s weakness: that it hasn’t been able to push for bus lanes enough, that it hasn’t been able to get bus companies to change their routes or accept integrated ticketing without an enormous amount of kicking and screaming and that it never had any money of its own to spend, always reliant on the priorities and handouts of other organisations.

While ARTA has done a pretty good job, I must say I won’t be too sad to see it go. The opportunities that having an integrated Transport agency provide will hopefully overcome many of the problems previously faced by ARTA. Of course Auckland Transport’s size and power (and its separation from Auckland Council) present many potential problems of their own.

Finally, as I noted a few days back, I also hope that Auckland Transport is more open and transparent about what it does compared to how ARTA has been.

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