Brian Rudman: Auckland's woes get hearing in capital

COMMENT

Auckland mayors and their chief executives fly to Wellington at dawn tomorrow for an 8am meeting with Prime Minister Helen Clark to discuss, among other things, the governance crisis facing Auckland transport.

It's a shame that not one of the Aucklanders will have been inside a bus or train - except perhaps for publicity purposes - in living memory. Not as a regular commuter anyway.

If they had, they might appreciate the urgent need for action. Above all, they might find time to stop squabbling and get on with creating a regional entity to run Auckland transport.

The farce of Auckland public transport hit a new nadir over the weekend with train operator Tranz Metro fingering the all-suffering commuter as the main cause of trains being late. Auckland manager Paul Ashton attributed 35 to 40 per cent of the blame for train delays on punters taking too long to get on and off trains. Well sorry, Paul. Maybe your guards should be issued with subsidised cattle prods. And louder whistles so that travellers who have nodded off waiting for an hour-late train can be more easily roused from their slumbers.

Instead, Tranz Rail came up with a fail-safe method of speeding up the train. It closed Tamaki station.

So much for the 74 former customers a day who braved that pigsty that passed for a station. Let's hope Tranz Rail doesn't get carried away and close all stations so it won't have the inconvenience of dealing with passengers at all.

As for the local government regulators, they've just wrung their hands and said there's nothing they can do.

The life of the bus commuter is almost as fraught, in my experience. You'd think running a one-stage bus route along a basically straight road from Herne Bay into town would be a doddle. I use the morning service. For years the buses have been timetabled to run on the hour, and 20 minutes either side. At best, time-keeping has been erratic, but after the Britomart train station opened everything went hay-wire.

Bus operator Stagecoach blamed Britomart, though our bus doesn't enter the hallowed area. Then, about two weeks ago, the buses suddenly started turning up like clockwork. The only problem was they were three or four minutes early, arriving just as I got to the end of my street on the wrong side of the road.

It's your timetable, said Stagecoach, which sent me an update which had the buses leaving five minutes earlier these days. I pointed out the timetable attached to the bus stop still showed the earlier times and was told it was the regional council's responsibility to renew it not Stagecoach's.

Since then it's become academic again anyway. The buses have reverted to turning up at their convenience.

Yesterday as I stood for 20 minutes before a timetable that had no relation to the day's bus movements, I hallucinated about an independent organisation whose sole function was organising, planning, funding and co-ordinating transport across the region. One that managed to get a bus or train to turn up on time and oversaw the planning and building of roading.

It's hardly an original dream. Across the region every local authority is beavering away promoting their own versions of it. There are versions where the regional council predominates, which are hated by the territorial local authorities that see the ARC as the font of all evil.

The TLAs, for their part, want to dominate any new body. There are also hands-off models following the governance structure of Watercare, which keeps politicians at arm's length.

Meanwhile in Wellington, officials working for Finance Minister Dr Cullen have come up with four proposals on Auckland regional transport governance which are expected to be canvassed with the Auckland delegation when it meets Helen Clark tomorrow.

If there's a common thread in all the proposals I've heard about, it's the desire to end the Balkanisation of transport governance in Auckland. In public transport, for example, there are at least 10 funders involved, from Government agency Transfund, through regional bankers, Infrastructure Auckland to each local council.

As for rail, it would take a week's worth of my columns to untangle the messy governance paralysing that service.

What simplifying transport governance means in practice is collapsing the redundant, manager-heavy Auckland Regional Transport Network into the new structure.

It means reducing Infrastructure Auckland's expensive, time-wasting, nit-picking powers.

It means Aucklanders working together, with the help of Government agencies, to implement the regional land transport strategy.

Hopefully, it might also mean a new and better Tamaki railway station. To say nothing of a regular Herne Bay bus.

But to achieve such dreams, we first need a clear indication from the Government and Helen Clark that reform is on its way, whether or not Auckland's squabbling politicians agree.