An article in the NZ Herald yesterday picks up on the comparator city study that I blogged about previously here and here.
Auckland Transport is under pressure from its political masters to work harder to improve bus, rail and ferry services after a damning international comparison.
Consultants have ranked Auckland last out of 14 cities – in New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the United States – included in a benchmark study for the average number of public transport trips taken annually by its residents.
A full table of the per capita patronage results are here: 
Looking at that table I am always amazed at how the Canadian cities stand out.
Perhaps as an important contributing factor to the patronage statistics, the NZ Herald article also highlights that Auckland has some of the highest per-kilometre fares of any city looked at:
Aucklanders also pay the highest fares of any of the cities, amounting to 24c for every kilometre travelled on the average 44 public transport trips they take each year, compared with 17c in Wellington.
Rail passengers pay just 14c a kilometre towards an average travel cost of 52c, but that is higher than anywhere else including Wellington, where passengers contribute 12c to a far lower 20c.
The average Auckland bus fare of 25c a km is also higher than anywhere else, although the 40c paid for lightly subsidised ferry travel is less than Wellington’s average of 57c and Sydney’s 53c.
Auckland buses cost even more than the trains to run, at 65c for every kilometre travelled by each passenger, compared with 52c in Wellington.
This does put Steven Joyce’s push for a 50% farebox recovery ratio into some context I think.
Council Transport Committee Chair Mike Lee has proposed an ‘integrated taskforce’ approach to working out ways to improve Auckland’s performance – which I think is a good idea:
The study has prompted Auckland Council’s transport committee to propose “an integrated task force approach” between the council and its Auckland Transport subsidiary to lift service quality and lure more people out of their cars.
At the same time, the committee is urging the transport organisation to exercise restraint in dealing with future fare rise pressures, given the comparatively high travel costs already faced by Aucklanders.
Committee chairman Mike Lee has written to the organisation calling for it to develop a programme designed to enable Auckland public transport “to match or surpass comparator cities as quickly as possible”.
“The study report makes sobering reading,” he said in his letter to Auckland Transport chief executive David Warburton. “It makes clear that despite the major improvements in public transport that have been achieved in Auckland over recent years, Auckland’s relative performance … remains poor.”
Ultimately the fundamental reason for Auckland’s poor performance is the decades of neglect our public transport system has suffered since the 1955 Transport Master Plan sent us down an exclusive roads only transport policy. We have started to turn that around in the past 10 years, but only at the local government level. Unfortunately, central government’s transport policy is still stuck in the 1950s and we will really need both central and local government to pull together if we’re going to do anything major about the statistics in this report.
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Auckland is definitely paying to mach for it’s buses. The operators should be paid and a time and distance travelled basis. Mainfreight and Toll pay their longdistance operators in the region of $2.10/km for a 44 tonne rig. The running costs on one of these would be greater than that for a bus. Due to the lower kilometers travelled by a metro bus and lower average speed the time element of the payment compensates for that. I would guess that if the average passenger loading was over 5 passengers per kilometre the operators would be creaming it.
By paying on a time and distance basis Auckland Transport gets the benefit of increased patronage by having increased revenue for minimal increased costs and makes fare integration much more simpler.
Labour passed a bill to allow that (The first PTMA), but National decided that was uncompetitive or some other baloney so rescinded the bill and kept much of the old model while cutting funding for service and planning and demanding greater efficiencies instead (how they are supposed to get greater efficiencies without be allowed to change the service model or engage in more planning I don’t know!)
I’ve lived in Auckland (29 years), Wellington (3 years) and now in Calgary (15 months), my thoughts are that until recently Auckland PT only works if you want to go into the CBD or out from the CBD. The outer Link seems to have improved this a fair bit. Service frequency and feeder lines to main corridors seem to me to be the way that Auckland needs to work. I find it funny that in Calgary there is a push to improve PT because it is not good enough!
Putting some coals under their feet. Though sadly not quite under the feet of the person who really needs them (Joyce).
Still, I wonder where the report would have placed us 5 years ago? Probably there would have been a note on the tables saying: “Auckland had to be excluded, because it made all the other underperformers look too good”.
And what is happening with integrated fares?! Please, can we sort out transfers or have zone based ticketing or fare caps with the Hop card? Only then will we have an integrated network of PT services.
Sharon Hunter said they’ll be coming sometime beyond 2012, once HOP has been rolled out across all operators and modes. I think that’s too far in the future, but it’s not my train to drive.
One thing I think needs to happen with the introduction of HOP to rail is remove the cost penalty associated with changing trains. If I travel two stages on one train then switch to another train and travel another three stages I should get charged for a five-stage trip rather than for the two plus the three. That’s the first step to moving away from the “Britomart uber alles” mindset that dominates current rail services design.
I can’t understand why there isn’t more activity on this issue. After all the North Shore already has an excellent time based integrated ticket in paper form, proving that it is simple to implement and works fine. Too much focus on smart cards and technology when it is the fare structure that needs attention. Why can’t we have the Northern Pass rolled out to east, south and west within a few months time? Real cart before the horse stuff IMHO.
Accurate reporting on usage of paper-based is a lot harder, and there’s still the issue of getting operators to accept it. HOP’s big hurdle is that the Minister of Trucks won’t entertain AT waving a big stick at H&E and the other operators to force immediate compliance and implementation of HOP if they wish to continue to contract to provide public transport services within Auckland.
The thing I found most interesting about the article is that train services now cost less per passenger km in total than buses do and that while the % of subsidy is higher it is also less per km than buses.
My understanding is that post electrification the operating costs will still be just as high, if not slightly higher than they are now (due to increased track access fees and the loan repayments etc) however AT are predicting a 70% growth in rail travel over the next 5 years which should hopefully bring the per passenger costs down to a much lower level (although I suspect it will still be higher than other cities measured).
Our per-capita usage is less than half the mean (98.3 boardings) of the sample. That’s pathetic.