As I mentioned in a post a few days ago, I’m reading the excellent book “Car Sick: solutions for our car addicted culture“. One thing that the book points out quite clearly is that we don’t need to spend more money to improve our transport situation, rather we need to spend the money we have in smarter ways. The book describes three main causes of the ‘transport problem’ (ever-growing congestion and ever-increasing adverse effects from traffic):
- The affliction of ‘grand-projectitis‘. This is the classic situation of politicians liking to seem as though they’re doing something big to solve the big problem of traffic congestion. Politicians – whether local or national – want to be associated with grand projects: building bypasses, bridges, train line or whatever. The ‘behind the scenes’ small-scale stuff like simplifying bus routes, encouraging cycleways, focusing on workplace travel-plans and so forth just aren’t perceived as winning votes. Both sides of the political spectrum are probably guilty of this: Puhoi-Wellsford is a classic example of ‘grand-projectitis’, but then again probably so is North Shore rail.
- Inflexible funding rules. In the UK, as well as in New Zealand, the funding rules make it easier to get money for large and expensive roading projects. When NZTA is distributing money it can only weigh up the cycleways against other cycleways to see whether they serve money from the cycling budget, while state highway projects only need to be compared against other state highway projects to see whether they can be funded. Nobody’s able to analyse whether the Puhoi-Wellsford road or the CBD Rail Tunnel would be a better use of let’s say $1 billion of NZTA funding – because stupidly the funding comes from two separate pools.
- A lack of strategic co-ordination. This is the one I’m particularly going to focus on in this post – the ability to have a co-ordinating transport agency with the power to actually make things works.
The book defines strategic co-ordination further:
Strategic co-ordination sounds boring, but it is essential. It means making sure that train and buses are run as one synchronised system, so that they connect smoothly with each other. It enables bus lanes to be built from one side of a large city to the other, so that the whole bus network becomes reliable. It means being able to plan where new housing and office development happens, as in Copenhagen, so that it can be well served by public transport.
The advent of Auckland Transport provides a good opportunity for Auckland to enjoy greater strategic co-ordination – in that now the same agency which funds and manages the bus system is also the agency responsible for operating the roads – so if they want to put a bus lane in to assist in making their buses go faster, they can. This is a huge step in the right direction when it comes to improving strategic co-ordination.
The UK is a great case study for analysing the effect of strategic co-ordination – because in London such co-ordination has been possible whereas outside London it hasn’t, through the deregulation of public transport and the lack of over-arching regional agencies. The situation in London is described below:
…the Mayor, through Transport for London which he chairs, can decide what bus services should be provided, and how often they should run, across all 33 London boroughs. The Mayor decides what level bus and tube fares will be set at, and Transport for London operates a single ticketing system across all buses (run by about 15 different companies) and the tube. Transport for London also has the power to plan and improve the bus network, for example by installing bus priority lanes wherever they are needed along an entire bus route passing through several boroughs. Transport for London officers must consult with the boroughs, but they have a great deal of clout to make sure that strategically important projects, like a bus lane at a key pinchpoint, get done. Without these strategic powers, it would be impossible to boost public transport travel in London. With them, bus travel went up 40 per cent in just five years, so that Londoners made half a billion more bus trips in 2004 than they did in 1999.
In Paul Mees’s book, Transport for Suburbia, he analysed bus patronage in London against patronage in the rest of the UK over the past 20 and a bit years. This is shown in the table below (scanned from his book, so not the best quality I’m sorry):
The top row shows bus patronage in 1985/1986, with the fourth row down showing patronage in 2007/2008. You can see in the bottom row the incredible difference between what happened to bus patronage in London over this 20 year period – which has almost doubled, and bus patronage elsewhere in the UK, which pretty much halved.
What holds Auckland back from being more like London and less like the rest of the UK when it comes to our bus system is the lack of influence Auckland Transport has over the running over the buses. London proves that it’s not necessarily critical for the public agency to own the buses, but it’s critical for them to have the ability to strategically co-ordinate how the system works. It’s critical for the transport agency to be able to design bus routes to operate as a system so they complement, rather than compete with the train network, so that they’re put together in an efficient manner but one that can still respond to the variety of what we need in a public transport system.
The Public Transport Management Act (PTMA) was supposed to bring this strategic co-ordination, but ARTA never had the guts to actually implement the powers that the PTMA provided, plus now it seems as though a new operating model is being established that will perhaps completely take away the public agency’s role of strategic co-ordination – a very bad outcome for our bus network if we go by the example of the UK outside London.
The details of the new operating model for Auckland’s bus network is nowhere near as exciting for politicians as advancing big railway projects, but I would think that getting strategic co-ordination right for Auckland’s public transport system might actually be the single most important element in getting anywhere near achieving the 150 million public transport trips that Len Brown wants by 2021.
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we seem to have a big issue in NZ with many of those in positions of influence and power continually spouting that the market knows best, often without any knowledge of the specific issues of a sector.
The market only knows best how to create the most short term profit for any particular company, and generally not for the society as a a whole.
I wish Infratil could see that if the govt wants to grow PT there will be more bus services to run, and they will be able to make more money, as long as they are a good operator.
“and bus patronage elsewhere in the UK, which pretty much halved”
The term “English metropolitan counties” doesn’t mean “the rest of the UK” but is a specific one that refers to Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, West and South Yorkshire, and greater Birmingham. Over the period in the table many of these areas have built light rail systems including Tyne and Wear Metro, Sheffield Supertram, and Manchester Metrolink. I think any attempt to compare bus journeys in cities that have developed extensive light rail systems with associated mode shift is pointless. I’m also suspicious why the author picked just a subset of UK or English counties to use in the comparison rather than all non-London authorities. Is it possible that the others don’t back up his hypothesis?
Wouldn’t it be a little unreasonable to list every single town in the UK and compare that?
I note that London has the DLR and of course its own metro system.
My rough, non-professional comparison of Perth and Adelaide (two roughly similar cities with similar populations) seem to suggest that the bus use / capita is more or less the same, while
the train patronage is totally different. We know Perth underwent a huge turnaround with rail, while Adelaide did not.
Perth rail has something like an amazing 5 times the patronage of Adelaide, despite Adelaide having far more stations and a more
extensive system AND higher city-wide density!
So, by extension, I’m guessing the mode share on bus doesn’t seem to change much even with LRT around.
It would be interesting to see comparisons before and after for Auckland. For Brisbane I can report that when TransLink came around in 2004, we had an immediate boost to bus
patronage, and it has been growing ever since. This was about three-four years after we had opened our SE Busway. Integrated ticketing and free transfers really changed things.
You used to have to buy a ‘transfer ticket’, timetable were random and a pure mess and so on.
If you can find exceptions and then propose a theory that explains both the exceptions and Dr Mees’ results, that would be interesting.
A big part of why bus demand in the metropolitan counties fell over this period can be explained through much higher levels of car ownership by the end of that time; though still less than where New Zealand is today.
Even today, though, there is a fair amount of variation in public transport use:
* The big urban areas (eg. Manchester, Glasgow) are good for 120-140 trips per person per year. Both these areas have extensive commuter rail systems.
* As for medium sized areas: Nottingham, which has a light rail line, is about 110 trips per year, in a population of 660 thousand. Edinburgh has well over two hundred bus trips per person per year, in a population of 480 thousand.
Finally, Southampton, with a population of 230 thousand, manages about 90 bus trips per person per year. This is less than Wellington City proper, which Infratil have quoted at about a hundred trips per person per year.
I know that comparing like-with-like in this business is very difficult, but it’s still insightful.
And Auckland is at just over 40 trips per year across all of the PT modes combined.
Hi Matt
With this qualifier: my theory is that the rate of public transport use per capita is somewhat higher within the Isthmus (=old Auckland city) than outside. Allowing for rail journeys which both start and end in the isthmus, my estimate would be about sixty trips per capita for isthmus residents.
But any better data would be gratefully received.
I’m a bit skeptical about car ownership “explaining” anything to be honest. I think it might be a reaction towards and action which is bad Public Transport. After all, people are rational. If the service is bad, they will dump it. And that’s true of any service industry.
Perth is one of the most car-dependent cities on Earth. What their rail line has shown is that people are more than willing to leave their car at home or in the park and ride at the train station. So simply having high car ownership doesn’t really say anything much- if anything it might be an indictment of the bad state of the Public Transport system in that area.
I also feel that for many people a car is a must have. I feel its a bit like saying we can’t have good public transport because the sky is blue or because most houses have roofs.
Coincidentally I’m half way through Car Sick myself (the book, not a windy road with a kid).
I’ve read the active transport and cycling policies (at least for the Wellington Region). They get written and then they get ignored. I’ve also seen an NZTA chart about when to put bike lanes on roads (ie never when the road is above 50km/hr), and yet not only have they (in Paraparaumu near Lindale in an 80 km/hr zone, very rarely used) but they are proposing to put bike lanes on a 100km/hr section of the current SH1, which will be the service road of Peka Peka to Otaki. There is no coordination, and it seems cycling policies and active transport plans are just lip service and amount to didly squat. Every transport project should have to address 2 questions – “How are pedestrians catered for?” and “How would a 12 year old cyclist safely traverse it?”. If they don’t it’s negligence.
That’s interesting, because one of the most popular cycling routes in Auckland (the airport loop) has cycle lanes on a 100km/h road. And I feel safer in those lanes than I do on many suburban streets, for not least of which reasons is that the road is wide and the lanes keep me out of the traffic.
Isn’t a cycle lane along a 100 km/hr road almost required for safety? It would certainly make all of NZ’s state highways a lot safe for cyclists who cycle long distances around the country.
The thing in my mind was the diagram on page 37 of the report at http://www.nzta.govt.nz/resources/cycle-network-and-route-planning/
It would be hard to argue that the Lindale in Kapiti SH1 cycle lanes are compliant with that diagram. 80km/hr, way more than 12,000 vehicles a day.
Mees is remarkably shallow, economically suspect and draws wild conclusions to suit his own agenda from evidence that is fairly skindeep.
There is not a lack of overarching regional agencies outside London. All major conurbations have passenger transport executives or authorities.
Let’s bear in mind what happened in London vs the other sample conurbations he lists. He puts it all down to a bus regulatory environment, there is more to it than that. For starters, London has pretty much unhindered economic growth over that entire period, include significant population and employment growth, and has by far the lowest proportion of car ownership (at around 50%). As a city filled with migrants and economically active people, its bus patronage has been mirrored by rail and underground patronage as well. The other cities have had more erratic growth, some were going through ongoing prolonged recession. In addition, employment in those conurbations was diversifying to locations outside city centres, meaning buses were nearly useless to meet their needs. With higher car ownership (and growing car ownership), significantly less congested roads, little restrictions on parking, cars were available and cheap in ways that never make sense in London.
A point made before was how multiple cities introduced light rail systems on the highest density corridors during that time, which did significantly erode bus patronage in Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield and Nottingham.
However, the biggest point about London involves actually looking at when patronage shot up. It was after 2001-2002. Why? Because Ken Livingstone undertook three measures in fairly quick succession.
1. Poured an fortune in bus subsidies into the system, lifting them around 10-15x higher than they were before. The increase in frequency of services, routes etc simply found a far bigger catchment of users. This proved unsustainable, as Boris Johnson has had to increase fares and cut services to trim the subsidy back by a third because the average bus patronage in London is 9 people – neither good value nor good for the environment.
2. Dropped fares and maintained them at ridiculously low levels because of the inflexibility of the Oyster card. At one point it was 90p to go anywhere in London, which is a fraction of the commercially viable fares seen elsewhere. This saw significant numbers of people shift from tube and rail to bus, and also undertake bus trips which they otherwise would not have bothered with. Parallel to this was the granting of extremely generous fare concessions, so everyone over 60 and everyone under 18 got free bus travel, ultimately 40% of bus passengers were paying nothing once they got their passes. This meant people caught buses instead of walking, and it can still be seen today, young people in particular riding buses for a couple of stops because it costs nothing.
3. Congestion charge. The main effect was not people shifting mode from car to bus, as that was insignificant, but rather the bus lanes and the significant freeing of traffic flows made buses more attractive and reliable.
So in short, it was a lot of money and freeing traffic flows.
Yes but in Auckland we’ve already dramatically increased the amount we spent on subsidising buses in the last 10 year with almost no increase in patronage. I’d rather be in the London situation than the Auckland one.
Plus the choice to make bus travel more attractive and actually get passengers off the trains and onto buses was deliberate – because the rail system was (and is) at capacity in places and it was considered much cheaper to subsidise those buses than to build the extra rail capacity.
I can report from Brisbane we saw an immediate spike in patronage when TransLink came in and co-ordinated things over here. They changed the ticketing system and allowed free transfer.
People often get riled up because what Mees says goes against prevailing ideology and appears to offer an example where government co-ordination actually improves things (something that should be impossible!). There is a role for the private sector here of course- most of TransLink’s buses are actually run on contracts to private operators.
Even inside private sector firms there is strategic co-ordination, firms that fail to do this often don’t hang around long.
Auckland it seems has examples of the games private bus operators play (i.e. fares for starters, smartcards etc) when not regulated.
“This saw significant numbers of people shift from tube and rail to bus, and also undertake bus trips which they otherwise would not have bothered with.”
A couple of other points:
The Tube is pretty much running at full capacity for most of the day these days… Buses provide increased capacity without needing tens of billions of pounds to dig new tunnels.
London is the only UK city where I’d be tempted to take a bus from point to point in the center, just because of the size of the place. Every other metropolitan city I’d just walk.
Conclusion: London just isn’t comparable to other UK cities. It is in a class of its own in terms of population, physical size, immigration, the globalisation of its economy, the amount of tourism it attracts, and other factors. Attempting such a comparison is about as useful as comparing Auckland and Dunedin.
obi: Yes exactly, London is comparable only with the likes of Paris, Tokyo and other mega cities with high densities and high density metro public transport. New world cities are so different as to be almost irrelevant in comparison.
Admin: Bear in mind three quarters of a billion pounds to shift 81% more people than were shifted with a subsidy of around a tenth of that is not good value. I use London buses frequently, I almost never fail to get a seat at peak times. There is a need to change the pricing substantially, and having large numbers of people moving from walking to bus was never very clever (which is what has happened).
In re London, to Libertyscott and Obi:
Also, a subsidy of £750m per year works out as a subsidy of over £90 per person per year, if London’s population is correctly advised as being around 8m people.
This is nearly double the per capita bus subsidy paid in Scotland (£60m in direct bus operator grants, £180m in the concessions scheme, which across 5m people is about £48 per person per year. The volume of directly contracted services is quite small. You get what you pay for.
Cheapest public transport is no public transport!
We don’t have any figures in this thread to compare public transport in Scotland with that in London, so we can’t say whether Scotland’s spending is effective or not. But again, comparing a city of around 8million people to a large mostly-empty mountainous area with islands isn’t useful. If I recall correctly, there was only one bus a week doing the rounds of Lewis’s peat bogs to take people in to Stornoway. You could obviously pay enough subsidy to replace this with an hourly service, but the government would like to keep some money to pay for other services like health and education.
Instead they come up with their own solutions. I remember encountering a mobile bank on Mull. It’s a van with a built in ATM and a counter for a teller and it does the round of the island once a week. Taking services to people rather than people to services. I also spent ten minutes waiting for a ferry to cross a loch, wondering what the hold up was, only to find it was waiting for the local fire engine to arrive. Once it crossed the loch it tore off with its lights and siren going. On the other hand, London was experimenting with motorcycle paramedics in order to avoid traffic holdups.
I’m pretty sure Auckland also has motorcycle paramedics, they’re quite handy in urban areas during rush hour.