Take the buses in Dunedin and Queenstown. Councillors over the councils involved are fighting for the privilege to be in the vanguard of virtuous public transport, the most recent example being the decisions to join the campaign for "free" buses.
The campaign does not have inverted commas around the free, probably because some actually think buses can be free.
I have not been able to find what the costs to either taxpayers or ratepayers of the proposal are.
Otago regional councillor Elliot Weir said signing up was not a commitment. He is of course right. There are various steps to go through before the ORC actually commits ratepayers here to paying who knows what for free buses.
These steps should be to work out the vision and values around the buses, which include such a thing as the ratepayers paying rather than users. Then the ORC should to set out what is being proposed and what it would cost. Then take that to a long-term plan (LTP) process, namely consult. That is not what happens currently.
The current plan includes five objectives relating to buses. The three which are comprehensible are:
1 To contribute to carbon reduction;
2 To be safe, accessible, increase patronage and satisfaction;
3 To have fares that are affordable to users and the community.
There is a target to increase the proportion of journeys taken by bus from 3.4% in 2018 to 8% by 2030.
No notice has been taken of objective 1. There was an opportunity to be involved in discussions on the effect on carbon emissions of the total disruption of all central city roads at once, but it would seem this was not taken into consideration.
Objective 2 as regards increasing patronage and safety is getting nowhere as well, despite significant concerns expressed by Cr Alexa Forbes and others. We are told that patronage has increased recently. We can only imagine this must be either because
of a recovery from the
13% drop in the previous
year, or because the reduction in services increased
the number per service.
Objective 3 has morphed into an idea that it is only concerned with affordability to users. Then it has morphed again into affordable means "free", which means paid for by the ratepayer.
The ORC has agreed to spend millions of dollars more per year on buses recently, for the most part outside the annual and LTP processes. Much of this has been to increase the wages of bus drivers, in three separate jumps, to $30 per hour.
Paying drivers more appropriately for the work they do could well have been an objective in the LTP. It probably should have been.
But it wasn’t. You could at a stretch say this was to increase availability of drivers and therefore to maintain services, but it was never mentioned in the objectives and visions that there was a driver shortage. Nor has any connection been made between the increases of wages and a flood of new drivers.
The millions of extra dollars committed to buses has been moderated by the reduction in services, both planned and unplanned, and a consequent reduction in payments. While a novel approach to reducing cost, this hardly speaks to increasing patronage and satisfaction.
Satisfaction surveys around bus services are done periodically, the most recent asking us to believe that people are around 95% satisfied. It seems unlikely that those who have given up trying to catch a bus, or didn’t catch one because it didn’t come or waited in Queenstown in the dark and causing worry to themselves and others have been canvassed.
Staff at the ORC have a lot of information about the buses: they regularly share what they have with councillors. Some councillors will also know that the transit app tells bus users to expect significant delays.
But instead of councillors being concerned that the objectives are not being even paid lip service to, many continue to clamour for the virtuous pronouncements about how they support buses, services should be extended and that the bus fairy should pay for them.
Please councils, follow your own objectives. Concentrate on a reliable bus service which is funded in proportion to usage, remembering that when they were free they still weren’t highly used in many areas. Don’t look at providing new services, including taking over Wanaka services, at whatever cost, until you can reliably run the current services.
And always cost your proposals and put them in your proposed ratepayer annual plan processes for us to comment on, rather than spending millions of dollars of unconsulted funds.
You can always be virtuous at home using your own money without consultation with ratepayers.
hcalvert@ xtra.co.nz
- Hilary Calvert is a former Otago regional councillor, MP and DCC councillor.
