Dean Kimpton: Change is very hard and we have to keep trying. Photo / Michael Craig
“Look,” said Dean Kimpton, the new boss of Auckland Transport. “I’m a dad with four boys. I cannot imagine living without cars. My wife’s got one and I’ve got one. You just could not do it, you couldn’t function as a family. That’s the reality of our society.”
Just in case you thought AT is full of people who think we should all ride bicycles. But still, the roads are clogged, so what’s he going to do about it?
Kimpton took a deep breath. He said, “If we’re going to deal with congestion on the roads, we have to have rapid, frequent, reliable, safe, clean public transport.” He patted the desk, quite firmly, as he said each of those words.
“That is the only way that we are going to shift the needle. Not only on congestion, but to meet our objectives around emissions reduction. And I want to add this one: you add access for people who may be struggling to own a car. Okay?”
Kimpton catches the bus to work. In fact, he catches the bus to work on one of the city’s model routes: Onewa Rd in Birkenhead. A steady stream of peak-time buses, many of them double-deckers, zooms along in the T3 lane, while the general traffic creeps towards the bridge. But without the buses, it would be utterly gridlocked. About 70 per cent of commuters on that road are riding a bus.
The AT building is on Fanshawe St, on the edge of the Wynyard Quarter. “Twenty minutes,” says Kimpton. “It’s 10 minutes to the bus and another 10 on the bus. Door to door.”
Kimpton wants the city to work like that.
Also, he wants to get it done in 18 months. That’s the length of his contract, which he says he asked for. Wayne Donnelly, the acting chair of the AT board, told me he thinks it would work well too.
“There’s a lot that can be done in 18 months,” said Kimpton.
We were sitting in a corner room on the fourth floor of the AT building. There are lovely views of the harbour from that building, but this room was on the wrong side, with only another building and a bleak arterial streetscape to look out on.
There was a stand-up desk at one end, whiteboards and a table taking up most of the space. It was blandly utilitarian and I assumed we were in a meeting room. Kimpton, round-faced and quick to flash a boyish grin, but too shy to reveal his age, assured me it was his office.
Eighteen months: move fast, disrupt and put it back better, and move on. No time even to hang a picture on the wall.
WILL HE have time to stop the hating on AT? He said yes.
Why does he think that happens? Why do quite a few Aucklanders even seem to relish the hating?
“Unreliable services,” he said. “And I’d say the political environment has probably added to that.” He meant Mayor Wayne Brown’s frequent complaints about AT.
“But the caveat,” he added, “is that I think the politics of the day is calling out some of the stuff we need to deal with. I don’t mind that, it’s our job. We will go straight into those pain points and we will deal with them.”
Leadership as deep-tissue massage. One suspects the mayor might even approve.
Kimpton said the unreliability issue was “resolvable”, but that does assume they’ll be able to find enough drivers and other staff.
There is progress. “We need 357 more bus drivers, which is down from the 500 shortfall we started the year with.” The Government has adjusted its immigration settings, which helps, and AT is now “working with our PT service providers to bring those in, to be trained up”.
He said their plan addresses the problematic issues of pay rates, working conditions and driver safety, and he was “as confident as I can be” that it will work.
But the plan doesn’t propose to pay drivers as much as they get in Wellington and some other cities and it isn’t fully funded. “We’re working really hard on that.”
He also wants to restore public transport patronage to its pre-Covid level of 100 million a year. It currently sits at about 80 million and he wants the growth to occur this year, “or at least by the end of the first quarter of next year”.
That’s a clear and urgent target and it’s refreshing to hear, although he also said “a lot of things have to line up to make it happen”. He described negotiations with council and the government transport agency Waka Kotahi as “a live conversation”.
Council, meanwhile, is debating an austerity budget and has asked AT to reduce its spend by $32.5 million. And AT itself has just raised fares by 6.5 per cent. This is not a coherent picture.
DEAN KIMPTON is a construction engineer, just like Wayne Brown. He spent 21 years at the infrastructure company AECOM, rising to become managing director, he has his own consultancy and has served on the board of Infrastructure NZ and other industry bodies. He’s also an Auckland Council insider, having spent six years there as chief operations officer.
Now, for a salary of $620,000, he’s in charge of a budget of $2.34 billion. That’s nearly half of the total council spend.
Does he think the hating on AT has any other causes?
“Mmm. You can look across the organisation and say, actually, we probably, well, not probably, we haven’t been listening to our community as well as we should have. We’ve separated ourselves from the customer we should be serving.”
Brown will be pleased to hear that, although perhaps less pleased to hear this: “I think what we are poor at – this is an NZ Inc observation – is we’re poor at explaining why these changes are happening. To me that’s something Auckland Transport needs to do together with Auckland Council, because they do the Auckland Plan, they run the narrative around the outcomes. AT provides the enabling service.”
Brown has shown little interest in “running the narrative” or “explaining why change is happening”. He wants AT to “listen to and follow the wishes of local communities”.
Last year he told the agency, “You appear to have been focused on changing how Aucklanders live, using transport policy and services as a tool … Instead, AT must seek to deeply understand how Aucklanders actually live now, how they want to live in the future, and deliver transport services that support those aspirations”.
Is Kimpton fazed by that? “You know what? I agree with him. And actually, we agree as an organisation.”
HE TALKED about the value of the big “transformational investments” and how much progress they’d make once KiwiRail has finished fixing the rail lines.
But materially improving transport in Auckland inside 18 months has nothing to do with the big projects. The rail line rebuild, the City Rail Link, the Eastern Busway and the Northwestern service won’t be finished for several years. Light rail and a new harbour crossing will take far longer than that, if they happen at all.
And not a single one of those projects belongs to AT. They are, in effect, government-run.
If Dean Kimpton is going to make a difference – if he’s going to win sceptics to the idea that better public transport is the key to our transport woes – he has to do it with the resources he’s in charge of and he has to do it right now.
And isn’t that what the mayor is asking for anyway?
Yes, he said, he agreed with that too. “We can get a lot more focused on how we use our existing carriageways. The road space.”
He talked about “intelligent transport solutions”: smart traffic lights and GPS transponders on buses, so buses always get green. More T3 lanes and “maybe” dedicated bus lanes. Dynamic lanes, where the use changes through the day.
All of these things have been proposed by the mayor and AT has already trialled transponders on Manukau Rd and Pah Rd.
But it’s not easy. Building bus lanes usually means sacrificing on-street car parks. Every cycleway creates a fuss. And every time a light turns green for a bus, the cross traffic gets another red. Someone has to be very good at “running the narrative” if these things are going to work.
Another thing. There’s a whole industry of “intelligent transport solutions”, so why hasn’t AT done much more of all this already?
Kimpton hesitated and then said, “I can’t answer that.” He talked about the “very deliberate discussion” he’s been having with his executive team.
“I’m looking at the AT operating model,” he said. “We will shift how we organise ourselves so we’re more efficient and we will speed up decision-making.” That seems to mean change is coming at the top, although he wouldn’t say more.
Despite that, about a third of AT’s $32.5 million in cuts will come from laying off staff and it won’t be done according to the mayoral prescription.
During the election campaign, Brown said he would tell the CEOs in the various council agencies to reduce the wages bill for officials earning more than $300,000 by 30 per cent. He said he would also ask for 20 per cent cuts from the $200,000+ band and 10 per cent from the $100,000+ band.
Kimpton seemed surprised to hear about that. He said it’s not how he’s cutting staff costs at AT.
HE’S GOT more. “I know that what Rodney and Pukekohe want is different to what Waitematā or Waiheke need, okay?” So he’s going to develop local plans with local boards.
He knows how to do this, he said, because he did it already for local services when he was COO at the council.
Is he a fan of the Citycentre Masterplan, which seeks to revitalise the central city for workers, shoppers, students, visitors and the growing number of residents? Or, to put it more narrowly, to reduce the number of cars?
“Yes I am.”
So what did he think of the complaint by Simon Bridges, CEO of the Auckland Business Chamber, that the Santa Parade might have to shift? Bridges said the redesigned Queen St could mean the carriageway is no longer wide enough.
Kimpton was puzzled. “I did go and look down Queen St. I couldn’t understand why there were any constraints on the floats. It’s tree-lined and it’s awesome.”
Perhaps Bridges wasn’t aware they had the parade there last year and will have it there again this year?
“You’re articulating the problem I’m trying to lean in on. If we don’t keep on trying to do this there’ll be no change whatsoever, so I’m having my go at it.”
Try saying yes for a change, I think that means.
What about carbon emissions? Kimpton said while the immediate focus was to get bus passenger trips back to 100 million, the public transport target in the Transport Emissions Reduction Plan, which is council policy, is 550 million. By 2030.
There is no plan in place to achieve that target. How seriously are they taking it? “The strategy group is working on it. I’m pushing them hard.”
But? “It’s not funded.”
WHAT ABOUT the slower speeds campaign? “Yes, I’m absolutely committed to it. It works and we get really good feedback, from schools, from communities.”
It does work: on the roads whose speed limits were reduced in 2020, AT says the rate of deaths and serious injuries (DSIs) has fallen by 39 per cent. The same thing has not happened on other roads. Extrapolated over 10 years, the agency says, this will mean 200 fewer DSIs.
It’s also controversial. “Well, there are communities that want traffic to be slowed,” said Kimpton, “and there are those in the community who don’t want it to be slowed at all. We have to navigate that. It’s another part of the customer experience.”
Because the city now has a “massively built-up fleet of vehicles”, he said, AT believes the aim must be safety. Nearly half of all DSIs on the roads happen to people not in a car.
This brought us to road cones. Kimpton called them a “trigger issue” and suggested that as long as the issue isn’t dealt with, “we’re going to continue to be distracted by it”. He supports the mayor’s campaign to reduce the number of cones on the roads.
And cycleways? Kimpton hummed and hawed and talked about choices and managing conflicts and eventually said, “You’ll still be getting cycleways but … we’re going to have to be a little bit more agile and cost-effective. You ask me what that looks like, and we need to work that through.”
I suggested we already know what it looks like: the cycleway on Nelson St.
That’s a reallocated strip of existing road, physically separated from cars by a line of concrete or plastic buffers. Cheap, safe, highly functional and not disruptive to traffic.
He said, “Yeah, so if that works, and that achieves our objectives, that’s what we’ll do.” But then he went back to saying, “The challenge is that we have to think about this carefully because our capital is rationed. I’m saying we need to make rational choices about what we can afford.”
IN A little over a month, the AT board will discuss what Dean Kimpton calls his “roadmap”: a plan he’s working up for what he wants to get done inside 18 months. “How to move buses more quickly through the network” will be top of the list.
At the same meeting, all the rhetoric and promises will be put to the test. The board will vote to start work on, or cancel, its plans for the north end of Great North Rd. The area is changing fast, because of residential and commercial growth, and the plans include dedicated bus lanes, more bus stops, more safety for schoolchildren, more greenery and better flood controls, better parking and management of car carriers. And, yes, a cycleway.
The project is already funded in the AT budget, with extra support from Watercare and Waka Kotahi. It’s been through a consultation process called Connected Communities, which revealed it has the backing of business, residential and other community groups, along with the local schools and the local board.
Kimpton described that support as “significant”. He said Connected Communities is “a model for how I think we need to do other projects”.
As always, there are some opponents, and they say they haven’t been listened to. But with this project, Auckland Transport has done as it was asked. It “listened to the community” in order to “deeply understand how Aucklanders actually live now, how they want to live in the future”. The plan aims to “deliver transport services that support those aspirations”.
Will it proceed, or will the AT board decide that “listen to communities” is merely code for “don’t change anything”?
“Change is really, really hard,” Kimpton told me. “And the worst sort of change is one that drags out.”
IT’S PRETTY clear Kimpton wants to work with Brown, not against him. But as several councillors made a point of telling him at a council meeting this week, he and AT are bound by existing policies to reduce emissions and make the roads safer. And just like Brown, they expect him to deliver.
“I don’t think,” Kimpton said at one point, “we’re fully there yet in terms of understanding what we need to do.”
Councillor Christine Fletcher was hopeful: she praised him for “encouraging pragmatism”. He himself possibly thinks he has more to offer than that.
He talked to me about libraries. “Libraries are loved by Aucklanders. So my challenge to myself is: how do we make public transport as much loved as libraries?”
He was thinking about train stations and the big bus stops like Midtown and the stations on the Northern Busway. “What other services do I want to bring in? Click and collect shopping? Or maybe I can return my library books. During Covid, they did pop-up libraries, they brought the books to the people. How do I take that as a principle and apply it to public transport?
“How do we shift the bus stop from being a utilitarian place where I hope I don’t get wet, to a place that adds value to me as a user? I haven’t played it out yet, but that will be our direction. How do we add value to the customer experience?”
In 18 months.
'We are happy to have someone who believes in the people and community of Flaxmere.'