Every month I comb through the reports to the AT board looking at what the organisation is up to (that they’ll say in public). I’ve already covered the separate reports on additional bus priority and the New Network for the Hibiscus Coast so this post covers the rest of the reports for the meeting held yesterday. As such this post is a combination of a lot of little items
Once again all of the most interesting papers appear to be in the closed session which means we only have the agenda items to go off. The items being discussed are:
Items for Approval/Decision
- Budget Realignment
- Development Proposals
- CRL Update
- Parnell Station Update
- Wynyard Quarter Roading
- PT Security & Fare Evasion
- Ferry Downtown Access
- Ferry Services Strategy
- Off Street Parking
Items for Noting
- Deep Dive – Wharves
- Heavy Rail Strategy Update
- Customer First Strategy
Most seem fairly self-explanatory however two items draw a bit more attention for me. They are the vaguely titled Development Proposals – what are AT thinking of developing? – and the Heavy Rail Strategy update. The latter is interesting as it’s the first time I’ve seen AT refer to heavy rail as opposed to just rail and comes just after the herald suggested AT were looking at light rail to the airport.
On to the board report and there are number of brief updates on a range of projects. Many we’ve talked about separately or there hasn’t been much change in the report from last month but the ones that stand out are:
Onewa Rd – AT say they are going to be creating an additional westbound general traffic lane after the intersection with Lake Rd. It’s not clear why they are creating a general traffic lane and not a bus or transit lane seeing as westbound bus priority has been needed (and promised) on the road for a long time.
Electric Trains – As of the time of writing the report there were 31 of the 57 on order now in the country with 28 given provisional acceptance. From December four trains a month start arriving which means they should all be in the country by the middle of the year. They also say they have successfully tested modified software to control traction on the EMUs fixing issues from the overhead feed which was presumably the issue behind the problems earlier in the year. The report also talks about six car EMUs being in operation from mid-November however I suspect that’s been held off till the new timetable.
City Rail Link – There are a number of comments related to the recent briefings to the incoming minister about the CRL however perhaps most significantly they say:
The City Rail Link has recently been subject to an intense period of public scrutiny due to the Council’s deliberations on the Long Term Plan (LTP). Extensive media coverage on the project led to a significant amount of feedback, including positive endorsement of the CRL by a variety of proponents. This was a timely reminder of the need to continue to “tell the story” of the CRL and its benefits, especially across the entire region. For example rail-users (and potential new rail users) will see their journey times substantially reduced as well as a much more frequent service. More effort will go into promoting these and other benefits of the CRL story from now on, particularly in the lead-up to the beginning of the enabling works in the second half of 2015
AT telling the story of the projects benefits across the region has been something we’ve talked about numerous times. It will be interesting to see what they come up with this time.
Northcote Cycle Route – AT say that as a result of the consultation they are making changes to what they initially proposed, particularly in Queen St. I suspect this will mean AT are watering down the proposal to retain more car parking
Newmarket Crossing (aka Sarawia St) – was approved last month after an in dependant review looked at the options again. I’m sure some of the Cowie St residents will continue to fight the proposal though.
Pukekohe Bus Rail Interchange – AT say they have $1.5m in funding for this financial year to upgrade the station which I’m sure is something that will get the locals will be pleased about. AT will also be moving the facilities to refill diesel trains from Papakura to Pukekohe
Puhinui Station – The station will be getting an upgrade to the standard Auckland design to improve customer experience. It is expected to be finished by June 2015.
Grafton Bridge – From early next year AT will be allowing taxi’s to use Grafton Bridge as part of a one year trial. While they say they will review the impacts in 3 months. Overall this seems like it could be quite a bad outcome for those on bikes but we’ll have to wait and see.
Integrated Fares – The AT board signed off the business case for integrated fares last month although we’re still waiting to hear just what that will entail. What we do know from the report to the board is that integrated fares won’t go live till the end of next year. This is due to AT needing to re-program much of the system to handle proper integrated fares. As for HOP as it is now, once again the board report¹ says that the percentage of trips on the PT network using HOP has remained the same as last month, AT say they think the ” Get onboard with Jerome” campaign will improve results over the coming months.
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Taxi’s on Grafton Bridge will mean easier trip for Nikki to get to the airport.
And as we all know, Nikki supports public transport like taxis and planes.
Funny I never once heard her support the CRL.
She’s not allowed to!
Then she shouldn’t be allowed to claim she’s pro-PT in her leaflets. Made the mistake of voting for her once. Fool me.
That’s not what she claims here :- http://www.nikkikaye.co.nz/files/Nikki-Kaye-2012-Update.pdf
“Transport – City Rail Link – worked within the National Government to advocate strongly for the CRL.”
Does her government limo count as a taxi? 😉
Well yeah, I don’t believe her. If she’s so afraid to go public with editorials, public speeches (or even mentions of CRL in speeches), then why should I believe she’s done a hoot in secret?
She’s going to try and claim it as her favorite project once the weather changes. Bit like her actions on cycling – she’s there when something opens, but never beforehand.
Taxis can use bus lanes on the Sydney Harbour bridge
Grafton Bridge is a unique problem because it has just a single lane at the intersection stop line, meaning it backs up very easily, and that stop line is actually many metres back from where it would normally be so that buses turning into the bridge can make it around the tight corner.
If you look at this bridge on weekends every other bus gets stuck because some driver doesn’t notice where the stop line is and the buses can’t get round. I have zero faith that our taxi drivers will do anything different, despite their intensive knowledge of Auckland roads and their many years of experience and commitment to efficient transport services (note: sarcasm).
It also means even less space between vehicles for cyclists. It’s a key cycle crossing and one where there is almost no alternative. At least currently you can usually get a clear gap between buses.
This is a very, very bad idea. The kind of bad idea that gets stuck permanently once you trial it.
The traffic signal needs moving back to where the stop line is, regardless of taxis due to current evening/weekend traffic.
Amazing how AT are willing to trial something that favours private cars but anything that stops vehicle access has to have many different studies and then has to be done to gold plated standard.
For example, why can’t we have a trial of sealing off the exits from Fort Street shared space to Shortland Street and Queen Street? Also the Shortland end of O’Connell Street.
Len Brown and Ludo were all ready to jump up and applaud Sadikh-Khan and her trails in New York. But when the rubber hits the road, it is all business as usual. The shared space is in exactly the same position as Time Square in Auckland. Just put up three bollards to seal those exit off and see what happens.
If in three months time carmaggedon has happened (it won’t of course) then you can just remove those bollards overnight.
Why not?
Closing Fort/Queen and O’Connell/Shortland would be amazing. Cars (especially taxis) drive like complete idiots around those shared spaces, and there’s no real reason for them to be able to be driven through.
I asked the question of Ludo regarding Queen Street at the Brent Toderian talk last year (two weeks after these ideas were first exposed to us by Paul Steely-White). The thought had not crossed his mind and he promised to take it back and think on it (after suggesting that the retailers on queen street had had enough building work, missing the ‘quick n dirty’ aspect of these ideas)
I suspect that Auckland Conversations are less about inspiration and ideas for Auckland going forward than Auckland Council/Transit presenting itself as forward thinking and inspirational/aspirational. I know people inside the organisation that will agree with what is is being said, of course, but they are not the ones in decision making positions (as should be clear by now)
Anyone up for some guerrilla cone placing early on a sunday morning? Some nice potted plants?
Taxis on Grafton bridge. Whoever came up with this idea obviously has never ridden a bike on the bridge.
Thanks for making my journey more dangerous and risking my health.
At least the ED is close
That flat rump of non-HOP users for rail at 20% and growing and buses at 40% and flat, need to be addressed or integrated fares won’t work very well.
It may be that the current campaign does work, and so they have 1 year to turn those numbers around, and maybe once those hold outs against HOP have a reason to use HOP e.g. integrated fares, some will use it. But you have to wonder why are these people not using HOP and suspect that maybe a block of those are doing it to evade fares?
70-80% is actually pretty awesome uptake. I wonder how much of the remaining 30% on bus are supergold card users.
Should be more incentive given to gold card holders, perhaps integrate AT HOP into the gold cards so they don’t have to waste $5 and then replace all old gold cards with the AT HOP enabled ones. Then discontinue paper tickets as instead of presenting the card to the driver being a requirement, presenting it to the HOP reader replaces that, easy!
Although unfortunately with some I would still see an issue of them not being able to tag on (insufficient funds) due to forgetting to tag off (-$5.04) or travelling before 9 AM. Perhaps clearly outlining these details in a document alongside the card being sent out would help with that.
Why can’t the tag off (and tag on?) just be automatic when you walk through the doors (by proximity to the door threshold, like at libraries? (And the bus/train/ferry door threshold sensors will also know which stop they’re at by their proximity to the bus stop/train station platform/ferry gate, and/or GPS, etc.)
When I was living in Melbourne (about 13 years ago), I recall that after just buying a ticket for a tram from a vending machine at a tram stop, the ticket then had to be “validated” onboard the tram. I often forgot to do this (it wasn’t necessary to “validate” a train ticket for their trains, which is what I mainly used), and I’m much older now, so if I had a HOP card (which I don’t, because the staff at the AT HOP kiosk at Albany Bus Station advised me that it really wasn’t worth it for my irregular use), I just know I’d often forget to tag off.
Why can’t it be as simple as possible, requiring no thought or memory – i.e., refined to the point of being idiot-proof for the likes of me?
If AT really want to encourage PT use, and HOP cards, they could just issue everyone a HOP card (or SuperGold HOP card) in the post with $10 credit pre-loaded on it when they send out their rates (and water rates, which tenants get) notices, and a pamphlet explaining that every time you take a PT trip using your HOP card you go into a daily draw to win cashback and other prizes (e.g., tickets to events that ratepayers are paying for anyway). This way, nobody could say they don’t get anything for their rates.
Honestly though I think the tag off failure should be waived on that concession, with exception of 3AM-9AM
Re: trends in HOP update: As we approach Christmas travel patterns will become progressively “abnormal”. You typically see fewer regular users and more infrequent users. Experience suggests the latter are far more likely to use paper tickets. That’s why most PT systems see a spike in paper ticket usage over the holiday period.
So my hunch is that the flat-lining HOP uptake as we approach the end of the year is attributable to seasonal variation in ticket type, rather than saturation of the market. Come February/March next year you will see the % of HOP journeys increase again as regular users return to the system. And new regular users start at Uni.
Main message: 1) Don’t panic if HOP usage remains about 70% for the next few months and 2) AT may well find that Jerome’s HOP campaign has little to no effect, because it’s swamped by seasonality. Doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile, just means you have to carefully define the counter-factual, i.e. what would have otherwise happened in the absence of the campaign.
HOP usage has been flat or flat then declining since August for both bus and rail – so where do you put the start of the “seasonality” you refer to?
The end of July? Surely not!
That would be a bit of a long bow to draw there I think that far back as being “abnormal” – agreed from end of October onwards, things can get variable as university and secondary schools enter year end phases, so I think running a campaign to encourage HOP uptake then is not the best time, but then, maybe AT marketing dept. knows their target markets better than we think they do? Time will tell.
Either way, that get on board with HOP campaign is needed to be running for most of next year – and from the start of the year not just when universities return, so lets hope AT are doing that.
As for what would happen without the campaign, hard to know really, I’d suggest a flat line would be the best you’d expect given the peak to the upward trend was back in July , the recent HOP percentage on rail decline does indicate more casual usage of rail. Maybe a large chunk of the uptick in Rail usage of late is simply more people are trying trains to see if they work for them before committing to a monthly pass (which needs HOP cards)? I think if AT released those HOP usage stats for rail on a line by line,basis we could make an informed judgement if that was the case as we’d probably see the usage for paper tickets track the rail usage uptick for that line in that case.
With a combined usage figure for all lines, hard to know really whats happening, and this time last year the buses were still getting their HOP act together so we can’t look back to last year for a side by side comparison.
no it hasn’t – overall HOP usage increased until circa September. That’s about the time uni students will start to flake out of classes and instead begin to prepare for exams.
That chart above begs to differ Stu.
Shows rail and bus HOP usage reached it highest in August, its been flat or downhill since then.
May be wrong but September looks higher than August to me. Marginally.
Either way, you’ve got to take a longer term perspective. The month-to-month differences are marginal they could easily be caused by various forms of seasonality. Not just of ticket types, but also business/school/uni days and weather. See how rail HOP went down from March to April and then grew again?
Brisbane has taken 5-10 years of integrated fares/ticketing to get to 85% uptake. Main message: Auckland is doing well, don’t fret over short-term variances that are 1) not statistically significant and 2) subject to seasonality. If we’re still stuck at 70% in March/April next year, then we’ve got an issue.
Taxis on the bridge is a very very dumb idea, at the veyr least if you allow taxis should be only if it has passengers in it, otherwise Grafton bridge will become a taxi drivers shortcut to/from the Hospital area whether with passengers or not.
A Grafton bridge full of buses is one thing, a bridge chock full of (empty) taxis which then crowd out the buses won’t solve the punctuality problems for the buses. Right now the traffic light phases are not long enough to allow the tail backs to clear at the K;rd end every light cycle, so add in a bunch of taxis and it will be like Grafton Bridge was before they banned cars in a very short time.
Even 3 months is too long a trial, should be an initial 1 month trial, then extended to 3 months only if it works ok in the first month, if it doesn’t work. its gone after 1 month.
You have to remember that taxi driving is one of the government’s principal job schemes for immigrant workers so little will be done that interferes with the success of this.
When is the Parnell train atation to be built?
What is the reasoning behind allowing taxis on the bridge during the bus only hours?
Next step they allow all cars at all times
More importantly I wonder if this is a stalking horse for taxis in bus lanes generally (remember that from a few years back?).
Yes. This is a concern.