One of the most interesting piece of information in the Draft Regional Public Transport Plan – along with the fabulous new bus network – is a first look at the possible zone boundaries for Auckland’s new integrated fares system. This is shown in the map below:
Setting zone boundaries and coming up with the preferred number of zones must be one heck of a difficult task as there are so many things to balance:
- The fewer zones you have, the easier the system is to understand
- The more zones you have, the less likely fares will change much from their current level and the lower chances there are of massive arbitrary jumps in fares
- The lower the fare is for each zone, the less farebox recovery there will be
- The higher the fare is, the more people who will be put off catching PT by the cost
Auckland does have the advantage of a natural geography which splits the city relatively neatly into different parts. The west, south and east of the isthmus all touch pretty close to a 10 kilometre radius from the city centre – forming a natural boundary between a second a third fare zone.
Probably the thing which stands out the most in the draft zone map is how the upper North Shore falls within an area two zones from the city, even though it’s well beyond the 10 km radius from downtown. While that’s a great deal for those people, that seems as though it would be likely to come at the cost of higher fares for everyone else. A similar argument could be made for the southern part of the south zone – although there’s potentially a more valid socio-economic argument for trying to keep that area within a three-zone ride of the city. We get a few weird outcomes from what’s proposed:
- Should Orewa really be the same number of zones from the city as Mangere?
- Should Albany really be the same number of zones from the city as Pt Chevalier or Orakei?
- Should the south zone really be quite so massive – Bucklands Beach to Papakura all within one zone seems potentially a little bit generous?
As I said, getting the zones right is an almost impossible task and there will always be winners and losers. I think most of the proposed zone map makes excellent sense (a city zone, an isthmus zone, a west zone etc.) just there are a few little changes that could probably make it a bit fairer.
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Pretty tough if you’re living just on the isthmus side of the isthmus/city boundary as well, like parts on Ponsonby and Grey Lynn, which are currently only one stage to the city, but where you’ll now need to pay the full isthmus fare to get into the city.
Yeah you would think the city zone should align with the current 1 stage boundaries.
Looking closely at the city zone boundaries, and comparing with google maps, I think it will include Ponsonby and parts of Grey Lynn, the boundary seems to cut from Cox’s Bay to Bond St, across Mt Eden at around View Rd, then through Newmarket where the zone overlap is. I daresay AT have relased the map at this scale so they have some wiggle room on the details.
The merged Auckland local body arrangements were meant to reduce parochialism, yet those zones look awfully like the previous city council boundaries. It would be interesting to overlay those designated future population ‘growth areas’.
That’ll always happen to some extent due to logical geographic boundaries.
That’s only because those previous council boundaries were aligned to the natural geographic boundaries of the region.
Looks very good for those living on North Shore Beaches.
I am sure the Zone 3 people out west and south wont be happy.
Having said that, relying just on a radius isn’t fair as the Northern motor way is very straight towards the CBD (as is the south) compared to the west.
In my view, the ‘Isthmus Zone’ should poke down into the southern zone around the train line/motorway – say 2km around it.
As I said, relying on the radius isn’t fair. What we need is a tool that works based on time travalled. And low and behold, the next post suggests this:
http://www.mapnificent.net/auckland/#/?lat0=-36.84765&lng0=174.76599999999996&t0=15
I dont know how they would go about uploading the proposed new routes onto it but it makes sense to drop the pin on the old CPO (ie Britomart) and then set the zones based loosely on travel distances.
CDB is roughly the 10 minute mark currently. Zone 2 should be at about that 45-50m mark (shows how bad our current transport is).
Clearly their needs to be an upper north zone as well based on this.
Why have zones at all? The HOP card should make it easy to calculate fares on the number of km’s travelled. If you include a “tag on fare” as a minimum fare and a maximum fare for travel within the city boundaries you should be done. Can’t be that difficult to let the HOP card calculate the distance travelled between the stop you tagged on and the stop you tagged off…
Yes the HOP card can do distance based fares however there are issues with them, the main one being the uncertainty around how much a trip will actually cost, its particularly important if it is a trip you have never taken before. There are other issues as well like that there are greater external benefits from longer distance trips so it is actually best to encourage more of them and having a flat per km charge can work against that. Have a look at this presentation to the councils transport committee that covered the issue. http://www.aucklandcouncil.govt.nz/SiteCollectionDocuments/aboutcouncil/committees/transportcommittee/meetings/transportcomminattitem1120120905.pdf
Aside from that there are other minor issues that would need to be resolved, like do you charge it based on the distance travelled by the bus/train you are on or based on a straight line distance between your first and last stop? If you use the former then as an example you would penalise all people who use the western line simply because in the absense of the CRL, the train takes the long way around to get to Britomart, you also penalise people if their bus route happens to take a detour from the most direct route. If you use the straight line distance then you get a few other anomalies like a straight line from Henderson train station to the CBD is actually shorter than a line from Sunnyvale train station to the CBD even though Sunnyvale is a closer stop and a shorter trip.
Zones also remove the transfer penalty perfectly. Distance based pricing only reduces it as you will still end up going somewhat out of your way to get to transfer points. Matt I think it would have to calculate based on each tag on tag off pair, rather than trying to estimate what portion of your travel consitutes a discrete ‘journey’. Otherwise you could make a quick return trip and pay nothing because you ended up where you started without any appreciable delay between services. If you do account for an appreciable delay, then you penalise people connection between less frequent services.
Positive externalities are the big one for me. With time based, big zone pricing you effectively charge people for their first trip and give them unlimited travel afterwards for free (inside the zone/time of course). That will encourage people to use it more often, outside the peak especially, and encourage more people to lose the car and use PT exclusively. With distance based every additional trip is the same price, no matter how many you’ve made already that day. I’d expect you’d have a lot more people who just use PT at peak times or just to get to town, but they jump back in the car for anything else because it is cheaper/easier.
That’s not exactly true Nic – distance-based pricing could easily incorporate caps on daily/monthly travel.
Sure, but any pricing scheme could have a cap. That’s not an integral quality of the distance based pricing thing although it does go some way to achieving the ‘free’ marginal travel thing I’m fond of. However, as far as I can tell you’d have a somewhat different outcome.
With the “time and zone” you buy in on just your specified zone(s) and timeframe, and get that free marginal travel within those constraints of area and time.
With a cap, it would have to be a ‘global’ cap. So it’s the case between a cap within a fixed area, and a cap across the whole region. The difference being that a zone daily would be set relative to the cost of the zones ticket, while a daily cap would have to be set to account for the cost of the most expensive trip in the region.
For example, I assume that a one zone daily would be set at around the cost of the longest return trip in the zone, lets say about $4. A two zone daily might be $6 , an three zone $8, a four zone $10 and a fiver $12, or whatever. With a general cap on distance based fares, you would have to set the cap for everyone up around the longest return trip possible, in this case let’s say $12, if you set it appreciably lower you’d lose a heap of revenue on the longer trips. So a general cap wouldn’t mean anything to someone who only travels in one or two zones, there would be no free marginal travel until you’ve already made six or eight local trips that day, whereas a zone based pass system is pre-capped for the zone.
It’s a bit like the current discovery pass which costs $16. The discovery pass is irrelevant unless you’re making the equivalent of six or seven stage return trips, or a hell of a lot of shorter stage trips.
Also, you can’t make a return trip and pay nothing because:
1. Distance based fares include a flag fall component when you swipe on; and
2. The readers are placed on the vehicles, so you’d tag onto one vehicle and off the other.
Have to say that while I respect your preference for zones systems, you have some misconceptions about how a distance based fares system works in practise. Because it does work, and suffers very few of the pitfalls that you observe.
Stu, I think you are reading too much into my comment.
The comment was based on Matts suggestion of charging for *linked journeys* based on a straight line between initial origin and final destination, which would naturally involve tagging on and off more than one vehicle. If you do a quick linked return journey that then your first and last stop are only metres away from each other, with a very small distance apart (so sure, you would only pay the flag fall plus a tiny per-km fare). That simply suggests that the distance needs to be a straight line between tagging on and tagging off for each leg of a journey, which if I understand correctly is how all the existing distance based systems operate. So you get charged based on trip legs right? Are there any that calculate the distance based on total linked journeys, if so what metric do they use for distinguishing between a linked trip and a return trip?
I’m just pointing out that distance based pricing still causes as slight transfer penalty for linked trips versus direct services (admittedly very much reduced compared to the status quo), because your transfer points are very seldom going to happen to be in a nice straight line between your initial origin and final destination.
I do realise distance based systems work in practice in many cities, I’m not arguing that they don’t. But our existing stage based system works in practice too, as do flat fare systems, single area time based systems, radial systems with multiple small zones, and even fare free systems. There are a whole lot of options that work. The real question is which would be the easiest to implement in Auckland, and more important in my option, what would lead to the greatest patronage? Given the current political context I think the overarching goal should boil down to bums on seats, at least until public transport is well out of it’s deathbed and it has solid bipartisan support.
I agree Lennart – the simplest system would have distance based fares combined with daily/weekly/monthly discounts (I would avoid “caps”) that are automatically applied once you reach certain levels of expenditure. Not only would this remove the need for zones, but also periodical passes: Everyone then moves to stored value and the respective discounts are applied automatically when they qualify.
BUT while I believe that fare zones are old hat; the fare zones proposed in the RPTP are considerably better than the system we have now. So the pragmatic side of me is prepared to lose this battle in the name of general progress.
Although I can’t help but suspect that in 5-10 years time we’ll be adopting a new distance based fare system :).
Could you not have the option of both in the future and have your card set up accordingly? i.e. if you were doing a trip from say Glen Eden to Mt Albert every day a distance based fare might be a better option for you.
With apologies for the crudeness of the overaly (I’ve got work to get on with), here’s the zones overlayed with population density: http://www.southosullivan.com/uoa/zones_pop_overlay.png
At lease it doesn’t draw a line right through any major concentration… but I agree, seems generous to the Shore compared with West and South – maybe the ‘Isthmus’ zone could extend across the bridge and include Takapuna/Devonport, but zone 3 needs to appears somewhere on the Shore?
Hmm,
Not sure how they are going to manage the overlaps at Onehunga and Panmure with respect to rail from the south,
Posit this, a trip from Papakura to Panmure is all within the same zone, but a journey from Papakura to Sylvia park is not, despite being a shorter distance. Will this shorter trip cost more than going all the way to Panmure?
Will people wanting to go to Sylvia park from the south just buy a ticket to Panmure and get off early to save money,
Or will these overlaps only apply in certain situations?
Will this disadvantage those who want to go from say Manakau to Howick and it is faster to travel by train and transfer at Panmure, rather than waiting for a bus connections through Botany Downs ( which remains within the zone and will presumably be cheaper)
as they say the devil will be in the detail
Yes, why have zones at all?
Adelaide has a simpler system than Auckland as of now or as proposed above. It has multiple operators, but they all share the same state government controlled ticketing system. It has transferable tickets that can be used to board any tram, train or bus within 2 hours of boarding the first. There are no zones. (There is also a “2 section ticket” for very short rides with a section being either side of a kilometre) They have used a magnetic strip ticket for the last 25 years and an adult ten ride multitrip (with the 2 hour transfers) is currently $31.90 (and between 9am and 3pm an off-peak multitrip is $17.50). From Gawler in the north to Noarlunga in the south is over 80km, and you can ride it for $3.19, which is a bit of a bargain and probably get on a connecting bus at Noarlunga within the 2 hours.
They’ve been trialling a smart card and the reaction has been positive. It has the advantage that you only have to tag on at the start of each ride, which to me beats the hell out of any Snapper like system with tag on and tag off.
Tag on/tag off is great for providing fantastic data about where people want to go… should mean much more responsive network design is possible. I am really looking froward to not having to put up with people’s hunches and personal bias about demand, won’t it be great to have actual numbers for all trips, including each connection. I’m certainly happy to have the ‘hassle’ of tagging off for this advantage.
tagging off often isn’t necessary with the ‘hop’ on NZ buses now, examples are:
-city link
-any city-bound bus after it enters the cbd zone
-in fact any service once it enters its final stage
Once daily/monthly caps arrive, tagging on isn’t really necessary either after a user’s first long trip of the day the ‘ticket’ becomes valid, as long as the service (train/bus/ferry) won’t be going any further than you’ve already been why bother if not forced to. For people starting the day/month by travelling from between Swanson-New Lynn / Papakura-Otahuhu to Britomart, if they avoid the other line/pukekohe trains everything is already paid for, including the trip home, so long as you tag off at the end of the day.
With a HOP card surely the need for simplicity diminishes, and simplicity seems to be the only argument in favour of fewer zones. I think more zones is the answer.
Also, what if someone wants to travel from way up north to way down south. Under the proposed system that would be 4 zones. If done in peak time then half of this journey is competing with regular commuters, but the other half is not. What about capping the number of zones paid for, or you could rename zones from centre (e.g. 1 for city, 2 for isthmus, 3 for others, just like London, Melbourne… and lots of other cities).
What is proposed looks simple to understand but not all that fair. I live in Te Atatu 10k to the city. 10 minutes off peak and we are in zone 3. Try get to city in 10 minutes from New Lynn (zone 2), impossible. Albany and beyond is laughable in zone 2. Think they relied too much on the old boundaries.
I can’t see how the difference in fare charging between South Auckland and the North Shore is equitable. Surely people in the South (and the West for that matter) are a greater transport disadvantage given the socio-economic conditions in those locations.
Surely the North Shore should be split into two so that the payment of travel from e.g. Central Manukau or Albany is equal…..
It’s swings and roundabouts. Sure travelling to and from the CBD is better for those living on the North Shore but for, say, a family taking the kids to the zoo from Northcote it’s 3 zones but can be done in 1 from St Heliers (hardly a deprived area) and only 2 from Papakura which is way out. Similarly a worker in Takapuna or Albany living on the Isthmus will pay for 3 zones. Splitting the North Shore into north and south zones would increase those inequities and penalise and discourage travel within the North Shore itself. There’s no easy answer. Maybe get rid of the City zone altogether and merge it with the Isthmus? Possibly have short journey fares as well (3-4 bus stops) so as those travelling a couple of stops to the shops don’t pay the full zone fare.
Looks like the current situation is being reversed with the North Shore zone being so large.
On the city side the proposed Isthumus zone ends at the current 3 stage boundary (New Lynn, Otahuhu, Panmure) yet the shore zone is all the way to Long Bay / Albany which is 4 (or maybe even 5) stages. Far better would be to have the North Shore zone being the equivalent on current stages, so ending at the current 3 stage boundary, much like the Upper vs Lower zone distinction for the Northern Pass.
Mind you as someone that had to put up with 3 stages requiring an All Zone monthly because of it being on the Shore when 3 stages to town from anywhere else could use the cheaper Inner Zone monthly, it is about time that those on the Shore got one back rather than being shafted because of the the natural boundary that the bridge is..
From the map it appears that the inner Hauraki Gulf is in the same radius as the Outer North Zone Outer West Zone and the South Zone. What is the proposed fare structure for this area. I note the islands are shown as grey.
I think both the north and south zones are too big and should be split in half. You could also split the isthmus into a west zone and an east zone.
The smaller and more numerous the zones, the less likely there’ll need to be a big jump in prices for travel within one zone – the type of trip often taken by relatively poor folk to get to their local shops.
The fares are too damn high.
If the goal is to get people out of their cars especially when travelling to the CBD, why not make the City Zone a special zone that is free if you have either the Isthmus Zone or North Zone, that way you wont have Ponsonby people complaining it’s two zones to get to Grey Lynn, and will encourage North Shore people coming in to transfer to catch the bus to their place of work.
That is actually a great idea, balances any mismatches in the zone structure to the city, while not losing revenue by making the inner city completely free and thereby losing too much revenue.
I’d like to add my support for distance-based fares too.
While I do like the proposed zones as better than what we have now, it has traded fairness for simplicity and IMHO maybe gone a little too far.
I’m not sure why people here think that its such a big deal not knowing how much a trip will cost before you start (distance-based). This is normal behaviour in society in general, and for people moving from automobiles nothing new.
All it would take is a simple table of the most popular stations/transfer points for a line along with the stations on the ends of the route, which may be only on order of 5 stations for a line, and people know immediately what the maximum fare is for traveling the full extent of the line, and for shorter routers easily approximated.
In addition, and possible a major advantage for AT, is it would encourage people to keep higher prepay balances on their HOP cards.
Yep – Knowing the cost of distance-based fares before you travel is easy..From simple charts at stations & bus stops, to even simpler Smartphone Apps…
I agree that this scheme is unfair. More zones would be better, and HOP should make that easy.
It’s till 2 stages between Remuera and Britomart (>5kms), which stings me a bit. If the fare goes up much more, I’ll consider taxis.
Perhaps the North Zone fare could be more expensive than the City Zone fare?