While the roll-out of HOP seems to be taking forever with hiccups at every stage, it seems that Auckland Transport at least getting on with the next stage of looking at how they might do the next and arguably the most important stage, integrated fares. You may remember that when the draft Regional Public Transport Plan came out, it proposed moving to a zonal based system however the feedback on the plan showed that people weren’t happy with the specifics of it and so AT ended up removing the proposed map and agreeing to look at the issue in more detail.
It appears that we are starting to see some of the thinking that has gone on with a survey many readers may have received asking about potential options. Note: you haven’t signed up to be a part of AT’s survey group then you can do so here.
The survey started by asking questions on the importance of a number of aspects or value judgements important in setting fares i.e. is it more important to have fares that are equal for everyone, that are more affordable for longer journeys or more affordable for shorter journeys. It then went on to show the proposal that was in the RPTP and asked respondents to rank a few specific areas as well as get their views on what the advantages and disadvantages of this option were. We covered those here.
The second map obviously represents some of the work done since the RPTP consultation was completed. The big difference is instead of using the geographical boundaries of the old councils as the basis for the fare zones, the zones are based on concentric ring zones out from the city centre. One thing you really notice with this map is how many of the natural features in the city are 10km-20km from the city centre. The same rankings and questions were then asked before respondents needed to give my preferred option out of the two.
I think this zone structure gives greater and much needed granularity and balance for trips to the city centre which is good. The additional zones should also help to keep the fares for travelling in each zone down which helps to encourage trips within them. That doesn’t mean I don’t have my concerns with it though. My first and key one is just the sheer size of the Northwest zone. I personally think there is an opportunity for the zone to be split in two with a west zone and a north zone created. This would have no impact on people travelling to the city centre but would mean trips from the West to the Shore aren’t insanely cheap by being a single zone fare.
My other major concern is the size of the areas where two different zones overlap. Both maps show potentially very small and localised areas where a passenger could board a bus or train and travel through either of the neighbouring zones for a single fare. This is good and helps address one of the major problems with having fixed boundaries. To me the issue though is that the overlaps are too small and there aren’t enough of them and so there are still odd inconsistencies in fares. For example a worker on the Te Atatu Peninsula would have to pay a two zone fare just to travel a few kilometres by a bus. As such I would like to see more and much larger overlap zones to avoid this issue. Another way around it might be to introduce a short trip fare. In that situation every journey less than a set distance (say 3km) gets a single zone fare even if they cross a zone boundary.
Moving on the survey asked about ferries and in particular whether they should be included in the integrated fares structure of if they should be kept separate like they are now. I thought it odd that they asked a question suggesting that keeping ferries out would help make things simple. Simpler for staff perhaps but I suspect that most people would expect all modes to be treated the same when it came to zonal fares.
Lastly the questions asked related to monthly passes and different pricing options like off peak travel.
It’s good to see some progress happening on this although I would also like to see the options for distance based fares being considered. I suspect that we will still be a long way off actually having a fare policy confirmed and even longer before it is implemented.
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Having done a similar exercise a couple of years ago for another city, I am wondering why they are not considering (a) time based tickets (e.g. multiple transfers within an hour), (b) don’t address short trips (we figured out that 4 stops are seen as ideal short trip even if you cross the zone boundary, (c) daily caps. But at least some movement, the old fare structure is just a joke.
They are planning time based tickets, if you read the detail on those maps it suggests that a two hour unlimited transfer ticket is the basic fare.
How does time based work – does anyone travelling for less than an hour pay the same fare regardless of whether they travel 2km or 40km? Might work in smaller cities, but I doubt it can work in Auckland.
Zones are not always ideal, but is any system? I guess the devil is in the detail – how much more expensive is a zone 2&3 ticket compared to just zone 2? Is most of the price loading going to be in the city zone as London does?
No that’s what the zones are for. If you buy a single zone fare you get unlimited travel in that zone for two hours (or a day if you get the day pass, etc). Buy a more expensive two zone ticket and you get unlimited travel in two zones, etc.
Basically people buy their first trip and get any more trips in same area for free for a couple hours afterwards. That free bonus is really there to allow you to connect between various bus and train routes to complete a trip, and the price is the same whether you do a journey on one bus or if it takes a connection or two.
There are a couple of other benefits for the user. If you’re only making a short return trip to run an errand or something, you can go out and back within two hours and only pay once. Likewise you can hop off a bus somewhere to duck into the shops, then carry on to your final destination without having to pay again.
It’s like buying a two hour unlimited pass to travel in a zone or group of zones. Naturally a four zone pass would cost quite a bit more than a one zone pass.
I don’t understand the point of the city zone either. As a city zone resident, it seems like it will have the unintended consequence of encouraging people driving to the city zone to park and ride, which will then result in St Mary’s Bay style parking zones.
Greater Vancouver only has three zones, why does smaller Auckland need so many.
So a single zone isn’t too expensive.
I disagree with the concentric circles approach. Auckland’s population centres don’t map so easily — Whangaparaoa and anywhere south of Manukau have huge populations in comparison to Kumeu and shouldn’t necessarily be in the same zone just because drawing a circle with a compass is easy. It’s too simplistic, can’t we do better than that?
Borrowed, why should Manukau and Kumeu not be in the same zone? (remembering that you have to travel through a second zone to get between them).
And where you say too simplistic, I say easy to understand at a glance.
Manukau to Kumeu would be a four zone fare. Start in the southeast zone, pass through the inner zone, then the northwest zone and finally the outer northwest zone.
Actually if you went through the city zone on the way it would be a five zone fare required.
Pathetic. It’s 2013, not 1973. Nearly every person on the bus caries a pocket computer capable of calculating a per Km fare down to the meter. Why can;t AT o that? Fare should be ticketing + boarding fee + per Km charge
per kilometre charges sound great in theory (I’m about a big fan as you can get). But there’s a couple of fish-hooks that need to be understood practice. Most notably, what do you do with paper tickets?
In Amsterdam they apply a distance-based fare along the lines you describe, while also selling time-based paper tickets (2/4/8/24 hours etc). That’s OK in Amsterdam, but the city is quite small.
In Auckland, a 2 hour ticket could get you from Pukekohe to the City, which currently costs circa $15. So with a distance-based system you basically have to price your paper tickets at the maximum fare you would otherwise charge for travel in that time period. Otherwise you will see revenue leakage from smart card to paper, i.e. people travelling from Pukekohe will not pay $15 but instead pay $5 for the two hour paper ticket. So in practice, a distance-based fare system in a city like Auckland means that paper tickets would need to be priced so high they would lose all purpose.
Now, in the long run that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Melbourne has after all recently gone paperless and there are other examples.
But in Auckland we’re starting with a higher % of paper tickets, so my gut feeling is that it’s not yet possible to jump to a distance-based system. The first (big) challenge is to get HOP implemented and working right, get the % of paper tickets down to a small rump (possibly by offering other electronic payment mechanisms, such as mobile phone) and only then should we consider the next step, which would possibly a move to the distance-based system you describe.
I guess I’m saying that I would not be too worried, as this fare structure thing is likely to go through several iterations over the next 5-10 years and may evolve towards something like you describe.
P.s. Distance-charging may not be the best: Zones are a form of price-discrimination that can help you maximise patronage for a given budget.
Per Kilometre seems to me to make the most sense.
It could be very simple – you pay a boarding fee a maximum of once every two hours, and are then charged per km between your original tag-on point and your tag off destination (cumulative for transfers), possibly with a discounted rate once you travel more than 10km.
As for paper tickets, we would need to assume these people don’t have HOP cards, which ultimately will need to be discouraged by providing significant fare advantages to card holders. In Amsterdam, if you pay to catch the tram by giving cash to the driver, from memory this is around 4x the cost of a pre-purchased ticket. You simply can’t spend all that time handling cash and dishing out paper tickets. So I don’t really see it as a problem that single cash-fare users would have to pay close to the theoratical maximum (in value of kms travelled) for a 2 hour pass. That would just be the price you pay.
Otherwise, people could purchase a day pass from a retailer before boarding, and this should be set at a fare cap which exists for cardholders, too ($15?).
Pete, your ticketing plus boarding fee will run contrary to the new network’s transfer based system – once again penalizing transfers.
not necessarily. You can credit passengers who have to transfer.
Is a km travelled in the city worth the same as a km travelled on the motorway in Manukau? A km travelled in the city might take 10 minutes compared to a km on the motorway taking 1 minute – is it fair for them to cost the same? Or would you have zones of per km fares?
Why does that remind me worryingly of this: http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=1200&lat=-36.8484597&lng=174.7633315&ff=50&zm=11
I also can’t see why distance based wouldn’t work when (I should probably say IF) they ever get HOP working properly although it then assumes everyone has a HOP card (how would you work cash fares).
The northwest zone isn’t nearly as big as that map suggests because there are huge areas colored in that don’t have PT service at all. Take a look at where Albany and Westgate actually sit on the map.
If you think about where there is actually city then the Northwest zone is a smaller area than the southeast zone.
If you split the northwest zone you would be left with two very small suburban zones in practice.
When I did that survey a few days ago one of my suggestions was to drop the city zone entirely and just absorb that into the inner zone. From what I understand, the main reason for the current city zone is to give people a cheap option for travelling within the city after they have arrived into the city. With 2-hour paper tickets and integrated electonic fares I see no need for the city zone anymore.
the city zone serves another purpose: To increase the price of peak radial travel.
Not only is this demand expensive to service (infrastructure, rolling stock etc) but it’s also relatively price insensitive (mainly due to higher incomes, congestion, and parking costs in city centre etc).
So if you’re trying to maximise patronage for a given budget (and I think that’s what AT should be trying to do) then having an additional inner-city zone is not a bad way to go as it means that radial trips costs more and, due to our problem definition, all other (more price sensitive) trips cost less.
My guess is the city zone will be the expensive one – trips that do not go into the city should be a lot cheaper than others.
Although a much simpler layout it does seem to penalise the folk who live near the end of a zone who tend to only need to make a shirt hope over.
For example young Timmy who lives in greenhithe may work at the hobsonville point fresh food market in which case you needs to pay for a 2 zone trip on the bus or walk. However Jill his workmate who lives 15km away in Devonport and uses 3 different buses to make the trip ends up paying the same amount.
Of course in the vast majority of cases people will be traveling to or from the CBD and so it’s unlikely to be a major issue for commuters, more for recreational travelers.
One of the good points of a concentric ring layout is that it charges people multiple zones for those main radial trips (where they get lots of value and are reasonably happy to pay), but only charges a single zone for long crosstown trips where people don’t get so much value (less traffic and parking drivers, typically) and aren’t very willing to pay so much.
Greenhithe to Hobsonville point would be within a zone. Greenhithe to Devonport would be 2. I agree though, big trade offs here.
I was referring to the neighborhood layout rather than the radial one.
I actually prefer the neighborhood version as it seems rather strange to go all the way from bontany to Albany for less than going from botany to glen innes
Surely Botany to Albany would be 6 zones?
I thought in the radial version if you get on and off in the same coloured zone it only costs you a single zone fare.
If this is not the case I fail to see a material difference between the neighborhood version other than a few tweeks on the boundary.
SF, I assume you’ll be charged for a zone if you pass through it even if you theoretically end up in the zone you started from. Of course from the North Shore you’re forced through the City zone whether you like it or not, so a short trip from, say, Northcote to Point Chev will probably be 3 zones which is obviously excessive. Heck, you could do Papakura to Point Chev in 3 zones with a bit of creative transferring. Not sure how that can be sorted out in the current proposal
If it’s anything like London you can happily go back and forth between zones without getting charged provided you don’t get off the bus.
When I was last there I was able to take a 45min bus ride from the airport to my brother’s house for just 50p due to getting on and off in the same zone.
My intepretation was that as long as you ended up in the same ZONE you only got charged one. But you would be going From the NW to the SE zone, so that would be 2 different zones.
Hopefully you’re right and it’s not just an AT oversight, have to wait for more detail I guess
But is the southeast zone actually different from the northwest zone. The fact they are the same colour gives me the impression the are the same.
I agree with Bryce however that a maximum daily fare in the range of $15 to $20 is needed.
If you read the notes it says you are charged based on how many zones you cross to complete your journey. That means if you cross through a zone but carry on back to the same zone i.e. North Shore to Mt Albert you pay for 3 zones.
Definitely.
That sounds logical to me, the only potential issues there would be feeder buses that straddle the zone edge, not likely however, or ferries that don’t go to the CBD.
The map is a bit confusing in that regard, the colours seem to show the distance from the centre, but if you look closely they are different zones. One is called northwest, the other southeast etc.
A maximum daily fare of $15-$20 is horrendous. I would suggest $10 at the absolute outside, otherwise most people will never even get close to the daily cap and there will be continued, accurate, unfavourable comparisons between the cost of PT in Auckland against the cost of PT in Christchurch (where the daily cap is, IIRC, $4). Hell, the cash price for the Discovery Day Pass is $16, and AT should be doing everything possible to discourage cash in favour of HOP. Which means significant discounting for HOP, because fares right now are already on the upper edge of very expensive.
Who says there has to be a single daily fare? could be a daily max for each zone i.e. if you stay within a single zone all day then the daily max is $8 but if you are travelling across multiple zones the max is $15.
That’s the while point of zones, you have passes and caps within the zones. Otherwise you have people demanding a cap of $10 for their local trips, which is less than the one way fare between the ends of the southern line.
Personally I would set the the daily ‘cap’ at two singles, relative to whatever number of zones you use. Effectively that means if you travel again after your first two hour you are upgraded to a day pass and can travel the rest of the day at no extra charge. If you go into a new zone then you only pay the difference.
A multi-zone daily cap of $15 is still quite steep, though. With AT presently doing away with nearly every type of schedular pass it’s hard to tell what will and won’t happen, but $15/day is $75/week or over $300/month – not far short of the $250 all-zones AT HOP pass price. Since it’s accepted by most commentators on this blog that public transport in Auckland is excessively pricey, I don’t see how such a price structure would be any kind of improvement on the present situation.
Matt, a single cash fare from Pukekohe to Britomart (i.e. five zones as proposed above) is $10.30. So a five zone cap would have to be about double the five zone fare, at about $20. A single zone base fare however would be about $2.50, presumably sitting between a one and two stage fare. The cap on that could be about double at $5.00.
A multi zone daily cap of $15 is incredibly cheap, someone making that Pukekohe length trip would hit the cap before even making a single return trip. That is precisely why the caps need to be zone based, you can’t have one regional cap that’s fair to everyone.
The daily cap should be the same as the daily pass in any given zone or number of zones. If you are using it five days a week then you would be on the weekly pass anyway.
AT HOP has no weekly pass, Nick. There’s a monthly pass (of uncertain future, if I’ve read things correctly here), and that’s it. The monthly passes are so expensive that they’re not justified for anyone who’s travelling less than three stages as a commuter. If the benchmark for any kind of capping is the highest possible cash fare, we will continue to have limited attraction in AT HOP because the discounts are so woeful.
Erm Matt, this blog post is about the consultation on the new passes, it says right above the map: “Single-trip (valid for 2 hours), daily and monthly passes will be available.”
Indeed if the benchark for capping is the highest possible fare it will be more or less useless, which is exactly why they are looking at a zone system.
Agreed
The point of the city zone is to increase the fidelity of zones and basically clip the ticket on peak time commuters to the CBD (people who get a lot of value out of PT and have a high willingness to pay for it). What that means is by adding an extra zone to radial CBD trips you can make the cost of a single zone cheaper and get the same level of revenue. Effectively the city zone is there to keep the single zone fares affordable. Without it, a trip like Henderson to the city would become a two zone fare and you’d have to make the cost of a two zone fare higher to compensate. If its a three zone fare then a two zone fare would be cheaper.
In any case, because of the time base system anyone arriving in the city would be able to move around the city for no extra charge until the time ran out. That’s the same whether the city zone is just the CBD or if it covers the whole isthmus.
That makes sense in terms of capturing as much revenue as possible while keeping ticket prices low for non-CBD trips. It would be interesting to see if it discourages transfers in the CBD. I often travel from Kohimarama to Balmoral. I can see two options (a) bus to Glen Innes and transfer to the 007 paying only for 1 zone as the entire trip would be in Zone 2 (b) bus to the CBD, bus within CBD and bus to Balmoral for 2 (or 3 if the charges are based on number of zones crossed) zones. I’m in two minds on whether the CBD zone is a good thing or not now as I can see good things about it but quite a lot of downsides too.
To me, that should be 1 zone regadless of transfers made.
Surely a trip from A to B should be priced the same no matter which zones you happen to have to go through.
People shouldn’t be penalised for taking cross-town trips that happen to force you through the CBD which may have a more frequent but indirect service. In saying that cross-town bus services will be much better under the new network. Plus guess would be strange if you ended up paying much less than someone who got off in the CBD and didn’t transfer.
I do agree with a CBD zone though. With cost and difficulty of parking these trips should be comparatively more expensive than cross-town trips that often involve free parking.
It’s zone boundaries crossed, not zones travelled through (you’re likening it too much to the stage system). An isthmus-to-isthmus-via-CBD journey would be 2 zones, as you pass through 2 zones (it doesn’t matter how many times).
I got that backwards. Meant to say: It’s zones travelled through, not zone boundaries crossed! (the rest of the post is correct)
Isn’t that the opposite of what Matt said earlier?
No zones. Just peak and off-peak to spread demand out. Do we want an easy mainstream option or not? We are all paying for the network. If further out from main centres obviously frerquency is less for pickup. The network is all integral and we are all paying for all capital parts and the operating expenses. If we can get numbers up at 50% the difference in zones is minimal and academic. It is more about patronage and making a network that gives freedom to compete with the current incumbent major part of the pie.
I guess my geography is skewed, but I’d definitely put Manurewa in Zone Three. It seems unfair to have Henderson, Swanson, and Westgate in Zone Three, but exclude Manurewa, which is only marginally further as the crow flies and on a rail line (so simple to include in a rapid transit system.
I also wonder where the new suburbs of of Karaka-Drury and Massey-Whenuapai fit in the scheme of things, and how these would fit with the Congestion-Free Network (which obviously stands on its own, but will have to work with whatever system is implemented).
I think many are over-thinking the exact locations of boundaries. If we have realistic daily fare caps ($15?) and off-peak fares, these issues mostly go away.
Bryce, the only fair (fare) way is no zones no argueing we are all paying for this network and it is about maximising it’s usefulness to compete with cars. Even ferrys the whole thing let’s keep it simple. Should people be worrying which side of the street to catch the service….no this zone stuff is rubbish.
Whatever transpires, AT must be able to describe it to the man in the street in 140 characters or less
Yes.
Check the $140 all times, $90 off-peak only, $70 students (ALL ZONES) against 30% PT MODE SHARE patronage which is doable in 2 month with a network remark. If it covers cost leave it-then when 50% start pocketing towards a carbon-neutral bus fleet.
That 2 hr thing is useful for when patrons enter the network(before or after peak time). Say 7am to 9am and 4pm to 6pm. If on an off-peak pass only pay the $5 (monthly rate diff when divide by 14 for the day fare). All fares done and explained in 4 lines.
I like the zones – but then I live in Mt Roskill and work in Newmarket which appears to be one zone (I imagine that will cost much less than the current 3 stages first bus + 1 stage next bus)
The zones work really well in London. But then in London the cost difference between a Zone 1-2 and a Zone 1-6 ticket is quite small – I imagine in Auckland the difference would be quite large. London does not have the overlap zones to my knowledge?
Are we expecting day passes like London? If so I hope a day pass is no more than 2 single fares to encourage people to use PT for more than just going to and from work.
If we were to have per km charges should they charge for the actual kms travelled or the kms of a straight line from source to destination? If I wanted to go cross town and the only way was to take a bus into town and then one back out again, would I just pay for the 4 or so kms I travelled across or the 20 or so kms I actually travelled?
London has a flat bus zone and it has underground / national rail stations which are in 2 zones. Earls Court being one, so you could avoid Zone 1 if you were sticking to the west side of town, or keep in zone one if you were heading to the exhibition centre from elsewhere in the city (or Westminster and London)
Oh yeah I forgot the buses don’t have zoning – it saves the tagging off issues! Considering Auckland is moving to a model where buses are feeders to trains, I wonder if we could remove zoning for bus routes too (except the rapid transit ones)
I did the survey, but there was not a lot of information about the pros and cons of the concentric zones versus ‘neighbourhood’ zones. Reading the comments above have made me think about the big picture stuff, and now tending to lean more towards the simpler concentric zones approach.
I did indicate my preference towards neighborhood zones in the survey though, as being a north shore resident, I know kids at my daughters high-school (Carmel College) coming from Greenhithe and Albany would be forced to cross concentric zones despite modest distances, so had a preference for the North Shore to largely be one zone. I can also see that for commuters from north of Constellation or Greenhithe who currently park in the huge Albany bus station car-park (with its all day parking), would have an incentive to try and park around Constellation instead to save a zone.
Personally I would like to see more options like daily, weekly and 10-ride concession tickets as I don’t commute everyday by PT, but enough that 10-ride type tickets work best for me when taking ferries.
On ferries – was disappointed to see that we might end up with integrated ticketing one day, with simple rational zoning.. and find that Ferries are a special case. At least for things like the Devonport ferry, they should be fully integrated as the huge advantage is that I can cycle to Devonport, ferry across then take the train from Britomart.
How does the zone based system operate on the fare structure on Waiheke Island? The buses there are subsidised so should come under AT control but don’t seem to feature at all. (note: I not referring to the ferry fares as I know what the response to that would be)