What should Auckland Transport do for passengers when the bus doesn't come? Photo / Sylvie Whinray
OPINION:
Why doesn’t Auckland Transport promise to pay for an Uber if your bus doesn’t come?
I know, it sounds like a recipe for chaos. Especially as cancelled trains in March caused AT to spend nearly $20,000 on taxis, just to get fans to the Harry Styles concert.
What a financial and logistical nightmare that would be, day after day, writ large across the city. But hear me out.
A promise to pay for Ubers will force AT to do whatever it takes to fix the bus services. And we’d know, because of the promise, that the agency really was committed to it. Because it couldn’t afford not to be.
The new boss at AT, Dean Kimpton, says he wants to make the public transport services so reliable, so convenient and so appealing in every other way, heaps more people will use them. After interviewing him last week, I have the Uber idea and four more suggestions for him today.
All of them will be cheap to implement, relative to a new harbour crossing, say, and are offered free of charge. No truckloads of consultancy fees here. They just need a bit of boldness.
Kimpton intends to achieve a 25 per cent increase in public transport passengers this year, from 80 million to 100 million a year. That’s a big target, but there’s an even bigger one to come. For climate reasons, the city has a target of 550 million passengers a year by the end of the decade.
“Whatever it takes” is what both these targets will need, in order to manage congestion as well as to reduce carbon emissions.
Besides, “whatever it takes” is how AT should be conducting itself anyway. Restoring public confidence in the agency is critical to the future of the city.
Kimpton has some problems. One is that nearly all the existing plans to fix transport in Auckland rely on enormous construction projects. Most won’t be ready for years; some may not happen at all. And besides, AT isn’t even in charge of them. They’re Government projects.
A city whose hopes and prayers for something better rely on us being prepared to wait and wait is a city whose political decision-makers and their senior officials are in deep denial. The CRL etc will be great, but we need change now.
Another problem: there’s no money. AT needs extra funds to boost bus driver numbers and the number of buses on the roads. But while council clearly wants those things too, it intends to cut AT’s budget.
That’s an absurd disconnect.
And a third problem: the lack of public trust. Every time a bus is late or cancelled altogether, more people decide not to risk it again. When bus trips take twice as long as car trips, same thing.
For AT, “whatever it takes” means supercharging the employment, training, rates and conditions of drivers. That will allow the agency to restore the cancelled services and expand the network.
It means improving the passenger experience, including at bus stops. And lower fares, and fast, free-flowing bus lanes.
“The bus didn’t come” and “bus journeys take too long” have to become things that no longer happen.
Kimpton will need political support, but he probably has it already: Mayor Wayne Brown has often said he wants to fix Auckland quickly, cheaply and efficiently. He believes there are ways to do this with buses and bus lanes right now.
Brown argues that compared to building new projects, squeezing all the potential out of what’s already there has been badly neglected. He is right.
“We’ll pay for an Uber if your bus doesn’t come” makes us pay attention. It’s memorable, it tells us the services have been fixed and it offers proof of concept to back it up. It’s like a money-back guarantee, only better.
It’s a promise that could change everything. Because they’ll be so frightened of having to honour it, they will be forced to create a great service.
They should kick it off in spring. Kimpton is on an 18-month contract so he won’t want to muck around: four months will be plenty long enough to get ready.
If he and his board decide whoa, this is far too risky, then let’s hear it: What’s their better plan for lifting transport out of its slump and making us want to catch the bus?
Those other suggestions …
Start this with some pop-up busways. There are many obvious candidates among the arterial roads all over this city. Divide off a lane with a bit of concrete. Set up pop-up bus stations along the routes and feed those pop-up lanes onto the shoulders of the motorways.
Promote it all with the slogan “No bus stuck in traffic”. Bribe people with $50 of free travel on a HOP card. Make that $100.
Explain and explain again: when enough commuters take the bus, those who can’t do that will find the going easier too.
Learn from Wayne Brown: get those GPS transponders working and sync the traffic lights to the buses. And for heaven’s sake, clear the arterial routes of parked cars everywhere they block the buses.
There will be objections. Manage every one of them out of existence.
Why do we tolerate having so many Ubers and taxis doing short hops around the central city?
Service, delivery, accessibility and emergency vehicles have legit claims to being there and it should be a great place to walk and to cycle and ride a scooter.
For everyone else, everywhere from Newmarket to Westhaven, Ponsonby to the waterfront, AT should mount a campaign to make red and green Link buses the preferred way to travel.
More buses, including mini-buses, fun stuff on the buses, more short routes in the inner ring of suburbs and less access for non-essential vehicles.
Lots of people need a staff car park. That’s fine, they should keep them. But in most companies, it’s not need that determines who gets them. It’s seniority and other irrelevant criteria.
And yet, for many people, the only reason to drive to work is that there’s a “free” park when you get there.
It’s not free. It’s almost certainly built into your salary package instead of cash and the congestion you’re contributing to costs the city well over a billion dollars a year.
AT can’t ban company car parks, but it can encourage, aka bribe, by offering sweetener deals on HOP cards.
Schools are clamouring for the streets around them to be made safer for kids to walk and cycle to and from home.
As a model of engagement that Wayne “listen to communities” Brown will be thrilled to see, AT should actively support this with slower speeds, car-free zones, low-traffic neighbourhoods, safe cycleways, learn-to-ride programmes and more.
There’s so much more. AT could increase the appeal of public transport with cheaper fares and more expensive parking, more cheap and easy cycleways, more bus routes and more minibuses. And with great bus services in place, the Government could authorise a congestion charge.
Not all these things are currently very popular, but think of it this way. The climate crisis is already making us change the way we live. Public transport will get cheaper, more plentiful and, with the fabulous promise of an Uber backup, more reliable.
Using the car less should become one of the easier changes to make.
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