Opinion: Constantly tracking Metlink operational performance

Penny Gaylor.

Weekly column by Kāpiti's Greater Wellington Regional Council representative Penny Gaylor.

On Thursday is Greater Wellington Regional Council's first transport committee meeting of the year.

One of the items on the agenda is a report on the operational performance of our Metlink public transport services.

Metlink has a growing array of information that helps us better appreciate and understand the performance of its public transport network, and to enable the public to have easily access to this information, operational reports are updated monthly when the information becomes available and are then published on the Metlink website.

Here's a taster of the kind of information then will find us providing for public information.

To set the scene and context of the numbers, at 11.59pm on December 2, New Zealand moved from the Covid-19 Alert System to the Covid-19 Protection Framework (also known as the traffic light system).

For the month of December, the Wellington region was at the orange traffic light setting.

Bus passenger boardings for December 2021 were 1.5 million.

Under alert level 2 and under the orange setting, monthly boardings were lower than usual.

Boardings over the month were 92.1 per cent of December 2020 boardings.

November 2021 boardings were 96.2 per cent of boardings for the same month in 2020.

The reliability metric is a measure of services deemed to have run.

Reliability for December 2021 was 98.4 per cent, compared with 98.6 per cent in November 2021.

The punctuality metric is a measure of services departing from origin, leaving between one minute early and five minutes late.

Punctuality for December 2021 was 95.4 percent, compared with 95.7 per cent in November 2021.

Rail passenger boardings for December 2021 were 0.7 million.

Boardings over the period were 84.0 per cent of December 2020 boardings.

This compares with November 2021 boardings being 92 per cent of boardings for the same month in 2020.

Reliability for rail in December 2021 was 92.4 per cent compared with 98.6 per cent in November 2021, while punctuality was 88.0 per cent, compared with 93.0 per cent in November 2021.

As we will know on the Kāpiti Coast, in December floods, slips, and resulting speed restrictions all affected reliability and punctuality in December 2021.

Last year the transport committee requested that information on farebox revenue shortfalls on a monthly and year-to-date basis be included in these reports.

In December 2021, there was a budget shortfall of $1.3 million (-21 per cent), and a shortfall of $15.5 million (-33 per cent) for the year to date.

Waka Kotahi has agreed to finance 51 per cent (current funding assistance rate) of the additional revenue shortfall to 30 June 2022.

The remaining 49 per cent shortfall will be financed from debt funding as set out in the GWRC 2021 long-term plan of up to $7.5m for FY21-22; $6m for FY22-23 and $4m for FY23-24.

Any additional funding shortfall will be reassessed towards the end of the financial year to determine whether this will be loan or reserve funded.

That might be a bit dry, but as well as a taster of information publicly available, it shows how we are constantly tracking the quality of service and financial impacts in these challenging economic times.