Auditor General looks at the reliability of public transport in Auckland

Reliability of public transport is one of the most important factors in how much trust people have in the system. When PT works as expected, with services, including transfers, turning up on time and whisking you to your destination quickly free from congestion, it is amazing and changes how you feel about the city and your day. But when things go wrong – like a bus service gets caught in congestion making you miss your connection, or maybe your service doesn’t even show up, or perhaps a train breaks down on the other side of the city and disruption cascades across the network – they can go really wrong and be absolutely infuriating.

A recent report from the Office of the Auditor General (OAG) takes a look at the reliability of public transport in Auckland and provides a useful take on how Auckland Transport are performing on this and makes five recommendations for improvements. Memo’s attached to the council’s Transport, Resilience and Infrastructure Committee papers also include some of AT’s responses to them.

First up, here’s a summary of from the OAG on what they found.

We saw many examples of Auckland Transport co-ordinating well with Auckland Council, KiwiRail Holdings Limited, operators, and others on significant work to improve the reliability and safety of the region’s public transport, such as training new ferry crew and installing information displays.

However, Auckland Transport could do more to understand passengers’ experiences and expectations. Although it has increased its data capability, its performance reporting could be more detailed and accessible and better reflect the way people use services. For example, its measure of bus punctuality considers timeliness at only the first and last stops of a route, but passengers might not ride a bus from the first stop to the last. Auckland Transport could also improve its data collection and analysis to gain more insights into personal safety.

Auckland Transport is aware from surveys and research that it needs to improve how it communicates disruptions, and has a work programme under way to address this. Although Auckland Transport informs the public about planned disruptions well, its complex processes and systems – which are largely manual – make it challenging to manage unplanned disruptions. Auckland Transport has a limited ability to communicate disruptions out of hours, relies on information passed on from other parties, and in some cases, major disruptions have not been communicated to the public at all.

Auckland Transport has set goals for public transport reliability and safety, and has many improvement initiatives planned and under way. In our view, improvements are needed to planning to clearly show how these goals will be achieved. Auckland Transport will need to regularly monitor progress to ensure that these initiatives are making a difference.

The OAG made five recommendations. They are below along with AT’s initial response to them.

1. More clearly describe the difference planned actions will make to goals for public transport reliability and safety, how it will monitor progress of those actions, and mitigate risks to achieving these goals.
   • We’ll improve how we document our plans and monitor progress, starting with our annual business planning. In our planning for FY26 we are more clearly aligning initiatives with organisational goals, and we’re building a tool to track the progress and effectiveness of initiatives.

This means that we will:

1. • Get better at problem definition, articulating benefits and how these contribute to and align with our goals. Our refreshed business planning process will assist with this alignment.
   • Track initiatives through monthly reporting and refresh our project delivery and progress reporting approach to enable this.
   • Identify any risks to our ability to deliver on goals by highlighting any potential bottlenecks in resources required to deliver actions. We will also establish clearer ownership and escalation paths (through project sponsorship and governance processes) to ensure risks are managed appropriately.
   • We will standardise our project documentation and make sure that documentation for current projects is up to date. We note that the authors of the report commented that they see work is being done, but it is not always well documented.
2. Develop criteria to determine when it will review disruptions, and define how it will use what it learns from those reviews to inform ongoing improvements.
   • We’ve already set up a formal review process for major disruptions of the network where we capture learnings that we use to improve our approach. The last review was on our management of the March peak. We reviewed what worked and what didn’t with operations teams, support teams and PT operators. Those insights are being used to develop a playbook for planning, preparing and managing the peak in March 2026.
   • We agree that we need better action planning and tracking. We will develop and embed both criteria to formally review a disruption, and a process to implement and document the lessons learned.
3. Improve processes for managing unplanned disruptions to services, including for school bus services, and consider ways to better inform the public about unplanned disruptions.
   • We have set up a dedicated disruptions programme, jointly led by the PT and roading teams, with representatives from across AT. This programme is charged with improving how we manage unplanned disruptions and how we communicate them. The group have already made improvements to our processes and technology.
4. Review the information it holds about passenger experience to help direct service improvements and improve performance reporting (to allow the public, Auckland Council, and others to better understand how reliable public transport is in Auckland).
   • We’ve already committed to council that we will provide more detail about how our SOI performance targets are calculated and tracked. These conversations are happening as part of the SOI target-setting process.
   • We’ll review our reliability and punctuality metrics to check that they are still appropriate and describe the experience that customers expect, balanced with what we are able to deliver. As part of this, we will be able to propose requirements and consequences to achieve different experiences, for example we explained to the report authors that to achieve punctuality at every stop we would need significant investment in bus lanes to make run-times more consistent, and we risk holding early running buses at stops to reset to timetable, which would inconvenience those on board. To further improve reliability, we would need investment in additional vehicles and drivers to be able to cover cancelled trips.
   • We’ll assess and report on how PT performance is measured and reported in similar cities around the world, and make recommendations on how this may change our measures.
5. Increase accessibility of information available to the public about how Auckland’s public transport services are performing.
   • We’ve been working on the first phase of improvements to our website reporting, where we publish performance data to the public. This first phase makes the page easier to find, presents simple charts of performance, and includes datasets that people can download to do their own analysis. The information made available in this phase is based on common requests that we receive. We showcased an early version of this improvement to the report authors, and explained our aim to have this as the main channel for performance reporting to the public.
   • The next phase will add any additional data that is regularly requested and we will investigate embedding responsive dashboards so that the public can do basic analysis on our website.

Doing better when it comes to both safety and reliability is important to us as we seek to continually improve how our customers experience public transport, and with all of this work underway, we’re confident in delivering greater service improvements for Aucklanders.

There are a few things that spring to mind about these recommendations and AT’s responses. The points below related to the numbers above.

1. I’m not sure AT get this properly. A good example of the issues relates to the Kiwirail rail network rebuild work. A lot of the work is premised on improving rail reliability and speed. Yet they’ve never said just how much more reliable or faster services will be as a result e.g. how many disruptions are there are across the network right now and how many will this reduce to as a result of all of this work, and how is that tracking so AT and Kiwirail can be held to account for it.
2. It will be interesting to see what criteria AT come up with here. While the focus might be on major disruptions, will that include specific routes like what was happening with the new route 12 (previously 120)? Or what about lessons, will they potentially include physical interventions or network changes, such as bus lanes?
3. There are lot of simple steps AT could take to improve how they respond to disruption, one example might just be having information available at bus stops and train stations with alternative options for the most common types of trips from that location. The harder part is understanding when to encourage people to make use of those alternatives.
4. AT should be using information such as bus tracking data to highlight exactly where and when along each route buses have the most reliability issues. They should publish this to help build the case for more improvements rather than waiting till they have a project lined up and ready to consult.
5. AT do currently provide some great info compared to many other places and it’s great that they’re looking to make that better. There is so much data they could be using to help tell the wider story about PT and where improvements are needed. I’m really looking forward to seeing what they come up with.

There’s a few more interesting papers in the TRIC agenda today, especially on CRL, if anything sticks out to anyone.

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