KEY POINTS:
Auckland's transport suffers from too many bureaucrats - not enough boffins. Inaction on public transport tickets is a good example. For many years the ARC has sat on its hands rather than improve ticketing or the other things that would help to provide a viable alternative to cars.
Regional bureaucrats are too timid to make use of their considerable influence on transport - 74 per cent of public transport buses are directly contracted by the regional agency ARTA, all rail services are contracted, many ferries are contracted, some school buses are funded and it appears that ARTA also funds concession fares on buses that are not contracted.
Many business would relish having the level of supplier dominance it enjoys. With such influence, advance on ticketing should be child's play.
Most bus companies run both contracted and non-contracted services, usually with the same tickets and fare system, and customers and most staff can't tell the difference.
Bus company boffins are unlikely to want to operate one ticketing system for contracted services and a different one for non-contracted, particularly if the same bus and driver do both types in a normal day.
Ticket regimes can be confusing enough for customers and staff, so having two - the company's own in parallel with anything new from ARTA - will make no sense over time.
ARTA began life as a re-branding of the lethargic ARC transport bureaucracy, and, not surprisingly, has a similar horizon beyond which it chooses not to see.
Currently ARTA is aiming low and bowling wide with its suggestion to standardise fares across the 26 per cent of bus services that are not contracted. This is not necessary for better ticketing, won't please the bus companies, and there are better first steps.
Transferable tickets (enabling passengers to use more than one bus for a journey without paying more than once) need not be high-tech. In London, passengers with a paper bus pass are counted by the bus driver pushing a button for each pass seen. Nothing clever in that.
Flat fare tickets (one price for any distance - a simple concept and real boon for people on low incomes), as on the New York subway and London buses, seem beyond the ARTA horizon.
Yet there is really nothing technical or legal preventing 74 per cent of Auckland's buses starting with flat fares and regional bus passes this year.
And a step up to even smarter ticketing is not hard or expensive. Given the electronic ticket machines Auckland bus companies use (many of these more modern than the 10-year-old machines in London's red buses), a software change is perhaps the largest expense.
Some Auckland companies already issue passenger smart cards too as customer and operator benefits are well recognised.
Prepay daily capping (limiting the total cost each day to be the same as a day pass) has proved popular in London - once a certain number of journey fares are have been charged, all further journeys are free. If few journeys are taken they are charged individually.
Also, if smart cards are contact-less (just waved at the ticket machine), the shorter time taken for a long queue of people to board a bus means quicker journeys for passengers, improved bus utilisation for operators, and reduced pollution from the bus for everyone.
Quick boarding also means that in busy streets the bus stays in the traffic - no pulling into a stop, no bus-bays required - as the pause to pick-up a handful of passengers takes no time at all in a line of slow-moving vehicles.
Off-peak fares have been around forever in other cities. Why not Auckland?
Another ticketing concept is a monthly bill for trips, just like a phone bill, with different charge rates by time of day, discount for taking more trips, no charge for changing buses or trains on the one journey, and further discount for favourite destinations.
These are on the cards for travellers in England. But not Auckland.
Despite the years of dialogue among bureaucrats, letters between committees of councillors, submissions to the Government, mentions in council dispatches, platitudes to the public in this paper, and the odd word with bus companies, ticketing progress is imperceptible.
Instead, ARTA continues bleating the well-worn ARC line to the Government about how it needs more powers and 100 per cent control before it can start doing anything useful.
In November an ARC politician got into a lather in this very paper about Government control. This is pure theatre - looking for windmills to poke at instead of getting on with the job. Other regional councils haven't taken this line.
ARTA appears to have been created to remove transport from the reach of ARC politicians. Perhaps the idea has backfired. Boffins are absent. Lethargy reigns supreme.
Regional bureaucrats have plenty of power at their fingertips. Getting them to lift a finger is the hard part.
* Steve Doole works on transport smart card ticket systems in Britain.
