150m public transport trips by 2021?

Some interesting public transport announcements today by Len Brown – probably best encapsulated in this article from Stuff:

Aucklanders could soon be taking ferries to many different areas of the city, catching a train on the CBD rail loop or cycling to work under a plan by mayor Len Brown to more than double the patronage on public transport within 10 years.

Brown caught a train from Papatoetoe, in Auckland’s south, to Britomart, in the city centre, this morning in order to highlight the importance of public transport for his council.

He said he was determined for the patronage on public transport to double over the next 10 years.

”We want to see transit movements go from 63 million a year, as it stands this year, to 150 million a year in 10 years time.”

In 2006 ARTA set themselves a goal of having 100 million public transport trips by 2016. This was reliant on the earlier adoption of integrated ticketing and rail electrification than has happened subsequently – and therefore on current trends it seems unlikely that we will reach that level unless something pretty significant happens. Here’s what ARTA’s 2010 Annual Report had to say about PT patronage:

Under the available funding, ARTA’s target prior to them becoming Auckland Transport was around 80 million trips by 2016 – very much achievable and potentially a very conservative estimate: as both integrated ticketing and rail electrification will be completed by then.

But can we make 100 million trips by then? Can we reach Len Brown’s very ambitious target of 150 million trips by 2021? The article from Stuff quotes how Mayor Brown plans to get to this ambitious figure:

He said the doubling in public transport patronage would be achieved through integrated ticketing for the services, electrification of the rail network, the inner city rail loop – within five to seven years – and a ”major lift” in bus use, walking and cycling.

Brown said staff from his office and from Auckland Transport had started work on a study into how to encourage alternative means of transport. The study is expected to be completed in the next couple of months.

Doing a few sums, it seems to me that by 2021 – with a CBD Rail Tunnel completed – at best we might hope for 25 million rail trips a year. There are grand plans for ferries, so they might increase from around 4 million trips a year to at best 10 million trips a year. That means if we are to get anywhere near 150 million trips – the bulk of our increase will need to be on the buses. In my recent analysis of patronage trends in Auckland over the past decade, it was particularly noticeable how little bus patronage had increased: from 45 million in 2002 to 49 million in 2010 – not even keeping up with the rate of population growth.

So how are we going to more than double our current bus patronage in the space of a decade? In many ways, this is a more interesting question to answer than “how are we going to get patronage to 150 million by 2021?” It certainly won’t happen by keeping on doing “business as usual” with the bus system. So here are a few ideas:

1. We must complete the Quality Transit Network. That means extensive bus lanes along all routes identified to form part of the QTN, frequencies that are no worse than a bus every 10 minutes, top quality bus shelters and fast boarding options.
2. We must consider routes where upgrading to modern light-rail is appropriate (I include this in bus figures as it will be bus routes that are upgraded to light-rail rather than heavy-rail downgraded). Dominion Road and possibly Tamaki Drive seem like potentially useful areas to extend the Wynyard Quarter tram circuit that’s starting to emerge.
3. We must simplify the overly complicated network of bus routes and provide a clear and legible system of routes that work in support of each other and the rail network – rather than competing against each other and the rail network. This needs to be based around making transfers as easy as possible, and on implementing a grid-style “network effect” on the isthmus. The possible core of this network is shown below:
4. We must do something about getting better value for money out of our investment in subsidising public transport. It just seems bizarre that throughout the middle years of last decade the level of bus subsidy increased dramatically while patronage didn’t increase at all – and in fact decreased for a few years. There’s no quick solution to this problem – though I do think one potential solution could be the council buying out either a smaller bus company or one of NZ Bus’s brands. That way some of the more profitable routes could be used to subsidise some of the less profitable routes.
5. We must sort out buses in the CBD. More bus trips should be to the local train station instead of long-haul services into town. More bus routes should pass through the CBD instead of terminating there. More bus routes should have sensible stop locations in the CBD – one area for North Shore buses, one area for those going west, one area for all those serving the isthmus and another area for south and east buses.

I do actually think 150m trips by 2021 is possible. Rail electrification will lead to a big jump in rail patronage (it always has overseas), but perhaps more importantly, integrated ticketing will make transfers between services far easier than they’ve ever been before (as long as Auckland Transport does it properly and has free transfers). It will hopefully become normal to catch a local bus to your train station, then jump on the train to work – doing the reverse on the way home. Or it will become normal to jump on a high-frequency cross-town QTN then switch to a separate radial route to end up where you need to go.

But perhaps most importantly, but 2021 I suspect petrol will be very very expensive. It pretty much hit $2 a litre today for 91 octane – in a time of great economic uncertainty and dampened demand. If/when the global economy really does fully recover, it’s hard not to see petrol becoming extremely expensive in the future. That’s going to price a lot of people out of there cars and onto the public transport system. The real question is, will the system be up to scratch when that happens?

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