David Warburton, CEO of Auckland Transport, made a presentation at the Tuesday meeting of the Auckland Council Transport Committee. The presentation was a general overview of how Auckland Transport has done in the past few months, while also identifying a few issues moving forwards into the future.
In terms of Auckland Transport’s broad overall performance, there were a number of key performance indicators that seem to have generally been met:
It’s somewhat bizarre that the only performance indicator that wasn’t met (remember that this was only up to December) is rail patronage. One imagines that the stellar performance of rail patronage over the past few months will mean that this target will be easily met by the end of the financial year.
One of the most interesting slides in the presentation related to Auckland Transport’s capital expenditure over the 2011/2012 financial year. There are a lot of numbers so it takes a bit of analysis to make sense out of it all:
Auckland Transport’s capital spend is funded by both Auckland Council and NZTA. The costs are approxiately split 50/50 between the two funders. The first thing I note above the numbers above is how much of the work initially proposed to be undertaken throughout 2011 will probably be pushed into later this year and next year – at the meeting Dr Warburton explained that they don’t want to start a number of projects just before the Rugby World Cup to avoid having a lot of ‘half-finished projects’ while the tournament is on.
The second interesting thing to note is the gap between the $783 million in total 2011/2012 capital expenditure that might be expected (made up of the $621 million in the Long Term Plan plus the money carried over from previous years) and the actual $503 million which is likely to be available, due to significantly lower funding available from NZTA. If Auckland Council is to only fund at the traditional funding split with NZTA (which would mean they reduce their transport spending when NZTA also reduce their contributions) then we would see almost $300 million less capital spend on transport infrastructure than had been previously expected. It would be really interesting to see what projects that would affect, but unfortunately it seems whenever it comes to transport budgets we never get to see the details. What it does mean is that some tough decisions will need to be made about which local transport projects do and don’t proceed next year and onwards from then, particularly as it doesn’t seem NZTA will have much money for local funding for a number of years into the future.
The presentation went on to discuss the public transport patronage boom over the past few months, the impact of that boom and some of the responses that Auckland Transport has put in place:
It’s particularly interesting to see that some bus routes are experiencing 20% year on year growth rates. One would assume that these are the routes where Auckland Transport focused its efforts on boosting capacity (like Dominion Road, Onewa Road, Botany and some other North Shore routes). Let’s just hope that next year Auckland Transport anticipates the normal “March madness” boom in public transport patronage and ensure it boosts capacity before the busiest month of the year, not just after it.
Looking forward, when it comes to public transport patronage, it’s good to see that Auckland Transport is starting to think about what it might need to do in order to achieve the Mayor’s target of doubling patronage in the next 10 years. This graph illustrates what would need to happen, as well as showing the level of subsidy (the black line) that Auckland Transport think would be required in order to meet the Mayor’s aspirations:
A worrying trend that is highlighted in the graph above seems to be that the net subsidy has risen faster than the patronage over the past few years. One would think that as patronage increases the need for subsidy should decrease, but for some reason that does not seem to have been happening. While I don’t necessarily have too much of a problem with Auckland spending $250 million a year on public transport subsidies in 2021 – if those subsidies help shift around 120 million passengers a year (remembering that on average each PT trip creates around $4 in road user benefits) – I think that there’s so much potential to operate the public transport system more efficiently so we won’t need anywhere near as high a subsidy level. Once we have electric trains, then surely the operating costs of the current rail system will decrease, once we have integrated ticketing surely we won’t need as many on-board rail staff, and surely we can then start to eliminate duplicative bus routes.
Overall the Transport Committee received the report quite well, and congratulated Auckland Transport at effectively managing the transition from ARTA and the previous councils into one new, pretty massive, organisation. I would probably generally echo those thoughts, as while things could definitely be better (particularly in terms of Auckland Transport having a greater willingness to conduct important issues in public), overall they could have been a heck of a lot worse. The next 12 months will be particularly interesting though, as the NZTA funding shortages start to bite and Auckland Transport needs to work with the council to make a series of tough decisions over which projects get funded and which projects get cut.
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Here in the US, the biggest problem with efficiency we have is the transit unions – even when technology allows it, we can’t drop people. And it’s not so much the salaries or the benefits (although they are probably a bit too high), but rather the work rules – silly rules that mean workers are not productive (whether it’s having too many people on trains, or mandating shift scheduling in ways that involve a lot of downtime), but which increase overall employment and are fought tooth and nail by the unions. So basically, even though management probably isn’t totally competent, they couldn’t make the changes necessary even if they wanted to without it becoming a bigger political issue…essentially a referendum on labor unions in America, which, given the Democratic Party’s dominance of our urban areas, is one that those advocating greater transit efficiency and worker productivity will not win.
Do you guys have any of that in New Zealand, or does management actually have the power and authority (if not always the will or knowledge) to wring efficiency changes out of the system?
We will probably find out the answer to that question to some extent in the next year or so as integrated ticketing is rolled out onto the trains and the number of necessary staff on the trains declines. One would hope that as the public transport pie grows generally there is room for them to be re-employed elsewhere in the system.
The only labour issue we tend to have here is the occasional bus lockout, which generally happens once every 4-5 years. NZ Bus/Stagecoach make a habit of handling the situation abysmally.
I think we generally have the opposite problem here. When the buses were privatised our employment law at the time was designed to stop problems like described above, and that was really the only benefit that privatisation bought.
However the reforms went way too far so we end up with a workforce that is very low paid, and treated poorly by the employer. Hence issues with training, morale, customer service that leads to a poor customer experience for many bus passengers.
I imagine there is reasonable turnover in the on board train staff so shouldn’t be too hard to lower staff numbers by attrition, and also frequency increases.
Mostly for the worse, our unions got thoroughly gutted by the neo-libs in the 90s and have never recovered. They largely couldn’t organise a stop-work at an abandoned factory (not true, but you get the point), and one big plus with that is that they don’t have the strangle-hold power to grind the nation to a halt that unions in the US and Australia do. You’re at one end of the see-saw, we’re at the other.
The bigger problem is that the contracts for service are written such that the subsidies keep on increasing even though passenger numbers have mostly been pretty static. So there’s precious little control that the contracting local authorities can exert over the service providers in mandating deployment of smart ticketing services, but that problem applies more to buses than to rail.
On the up side, our rail services don’t have enormous levels of staffing anyway, mostly because we don’t have all that many services, and our buses only have a single driver now which won’t be changing for a long time. So the number of staff impacted by smart tickets is in the dozens, not the hundreds, and that greatly limits any scope for huge industrial fallout.
Re KPI 1.1
If we split the Bridge flow into “Central city” and “Isthmus”, and make some informed guesses about the distribution of traffic flows, then we may assume:
* Fifty percent of car traffic is into the central city, the balance to the isthmus
* Only ten percent of the bus traffic is into the isthmus (final destination).
If we did it like this, that would allocate 10,700 bus passengers and 8,700 car passengers to the central city. This results in a market share of 55 percent for public transport, which is pretty good – and there is room for improvement.
The balance is 8,700 car passengers (inc drivers) and 1,200 bus passengers to the Isthmus, which is a bus market share around 12 percent – low, but about what I would expect. OTOH, if the amount of car traffic into the central city is actually 40 percent of bridge flows, then this increases PT’s market share to 60 percent for central city traffic (and PT’s market share for isthmus traffic falls to 10 percent).
Anyone who can improve on these numbers, please do! 🙂
The back of your envelope looks reasonable to me Ross.
FYI I think rail patronage was tracking around 10-12% below expectations until December. As you note it has since turned around so I guess AT will be close to hitting their rail KPI in the next few months.
One of the key patronage drivers (that you alluded to in another post) is parking. Perhaps no other factor has more influence on PT efficiency that the price/availability of parking.
Has AT said anything about their plans for parking policies? They should remove minimums (and use prices to manage demand) at least in the metropolitan urban area, but I’m not sure they have the fortitude right now.
Ross, if you consider that all the North Shore buses go to the CBD (aside from the 962 and 966 which skirts around the southern edge of it), and only a very select few go on to Newmarket (like the 881) I would say that around 95% of the bus traffic is to the CBD – or even higher. I guess some people may transfer onto another service (like the train) to continue their journey.
Point being that for North Shore to CBD trips, I think that the PT modeshare might well be significantly above 50%.
They have to reduce their operating costs. Mike Lee has in the past talked about starting a regional bus company as a complement to the private providers, i.e. to keep them honest, much like Kiwibank tries to do in the banking sector. Anyone have ideas on the costs/benefits of doing that? And whether it has political support?
With NZ Bus splitting up their operations the ability of Auckland Council to get a useful stake and use it to keep the others honest would not necessarily be too difficult. For example, they could buy out GoWest and reorient it to run a whole pile of really good feeder services to various train stations throughout West Auckland and to provide good trunk services along many of the arterials – but not the wastefulness of running them all the way into and out of town (except perhaps at peak times).
But is GoWest a separate company? Or is it just a different brand?
Technically just a separate brand. But there’s nothing stopping NZ Bus from selling it off separately if they wanted to.
I’m kinda intrigued by the reference to limitations on rail capacity at 6 cars. Does anyone know what service times during the day are actually using this capacity fully? I’ve just switched to rail after moving house, and virtually every train I catch is run a partial capacity by Veolia, by locking car doors and only manning part of the train with conductors. admittedly I’m normally in early, but even trains around 5-30 on the western line are run this way. Is Veolia wasting capacity compared to the real demand profiles? What gives?
Interesting point Tim. I think that often Veolia are locking carriages due to staff shortages rather than any particular strategic reason.
Another reason to look forward to integrated ticketing. All trains should be able to operate with all carriage open.
The train I catch in the mornings is a 6 car train and gets full with heaps of standees. Coming home there are a few trains that get pretty full (especially the 5:24) but the afternoon peak isn’t as strong as the morning as the school kids are generally home by then.
I think part of the issue they are referring to above might be that the timetable and rolling stock allocation (the plan that determines what trains will do which runs) we have are from September last year when Baldwin Ave wasn’t able to handle 6 car units. As a result they had to spread the 6 car sets out to allow for a token service to the station, this means that at the height of peak there is a 4 car set while on the shoulder of the peak there is a 6 car set. That 4 car set was already significantly overcrowded in October last year so swapping it with the 6 car set would be a smart move but that may throw other things out later in the day which need to be accounted for. There are also meant to be two more 6 car sets (made by adding two cars each to two existing sets) however I think they are now thinking of turning them into four 5 car sets.
@Stu re parking policies.We have a project underay looking at the equity of parking charges across the region- some places, like West Auckland for example have very few paid-parking areas (and around $4 for all day parking) while others such as the Shore have many more and much higher charges. The project will also address specific parking plans for individual town centres and re-look at residents’ parking schemes in inner City suburbs. Th work will be completed by the end of the year.