Auckland Transport boss Dean Kimpton on carpark delays and the future of bus lanes, cycleways

Three hours stuck in a shopping mall carpark. Traffic problems in Auckland hit a new low this month when Saturday afternoon shoppers reported not being able to get out of the parking building at Newmarket’s Westfield mall.

Why did that happen?

Auckland Transport chief executive Dean Kimpton takes a deep breath and talks about carpark management, shopper expectations, nearby roadworks. But he doesn’t really seem to know what to say.

The AA has suggested AT should phase the traffic lights to avoid the problem, but he’s not impressed. “We have to phase the lights for all the traffic in Newmarket. You can’t just change one bit and think it won’t cause problems somewhere else.”

Kimpton notes there were long queues of people heading into the Westfield carpark that day, as well as trying to get out. The implication: If it’s really hard to get in, maybe don’t try.

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AT wrote to the mall companies last week. “We’ve encouraged them to take some really proactive measures in how they manage parking and keep their customers informed. Because their customers are ours.” They also asked the malls to promote public transport.

But as with congestion problems everywhere, Kimpton knows there’s no easy fix. The problem isn’t practical, it’s emotional. People want to drive to the mall.

Newmarket is on four of the city’s five rail lines and has at least a dozen bus services. When it comes to good public transport, Newmarket is what that looks like, isn’t it?

“Yes,” says Kimpton.

So is the lesson that even when you build it, they still won’t come?

“I’m not a believer in ‘build it and they will come’. There’s a cultural resistance: we love our cars. And I think there’s an immaturity around Auckland growing as a modern city.”

He doesn’t mention the one thing that really might make a difference: the company could stop providing two hours of free parking.

Auckland Transport boss Dean Kimpton: Newmarket's public transport is as good as it's ever going to be, but people still want to drive. Photo / Jason Oxenham

In the AT building, there are rows and rows of bleakly functional desks. It’s a modern building but it’s like there’s a ban on making it look nice.

Kimpton used to occupy a spartan corner office, but even that was too much. Now, he has a stand-up desk on one of the rows. Same as everyone else.

It’s Friday when we talk, and there’s a lot of working from home going on.

“Yeah, Fridays,” he says. We go and sit in the building’s foyer, where at least it’s comfortable. Kimpton’s own concession to Fridays is to wear jeans.

He’s on a short contract – only 18 months – and when the Herald interviewed him in April, at the start of his term, he talked a big game.

“There’s a lot that can be done in 18 months,” he said then.

He promised to raise public transport patronage from 80 million to 100m trips a year. He was going to eliminate the shortfall of 500 bus drivers that was destroying the reliability of bus services. He had all sorts of plans for making better use of the roads.

Also, at that time, AT had just raised fares by 6.5 per cent and was under instruction from Auckland Council to carve $32.5m from its budget.

Kimpton made those cuts and also eliminated the driver shortages. But public transport trips are tracking at only 85 per cent of the target.

“We’re not there yet,” he says now. Bus services are at 90 per cent, “but unfortunately, rail is sitting at about 60 per cent”. KiwiRail’s extremely disruptive maintenance programme is still taking its toll.

Are we making better use of the roads yet?

“I accept the challenge,” Kimpton says. “We know that over the next 10-15 years, the population of Auckland will grow by some 250,000 people. To meet the demand, we have to get more efficiency on the existing road network and more use of public transport.”

He talks about “dynamic lanes”, transponders on the buses to sync with the lights and “getting parking off main roads and into off-street parking”.

With the support of Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown, he says, this will all be a big focus for next year.

But Kimpton said all this in April. Has there been any progress?

“The transponder trial worked really well. There’s a number of dynamic lane examples out there. The challenge is that by the time you’ve consulted on the changes, you just can’t do this overnight.”

Any other examples?

Yes, he says, and talks about a plan to persuade corporates to shift their staff on to public transport. The companies pay for Hop cards and save substantially more by not having to provide car parks.

“We’ve done some trials, and we’ll go large on it next year.” The plan is to roll it out “corporate by corporate and precinct by precinct”. He mentions the Wynyard Quarter, East Tāmaki and the airport.

Auckland Transport boss Dean Kimpton: Why don't corporates offer their staff HOP cards instead of car parks? Photo / Jason Oxenham

Next month, Mayor Brown will reveal the draft of his first 10-year budget, and it will not be pretty, especially for AT.

“Either we’ll have a minimum viable capital spending programme,” says Kimpton, “or we’ll have something that just holds the line with growth.”

That suggests few, if any, roading improvements in places like Lincoln Rd and Lake Rd on the North Shore, and no more e-buses, additional bus services or cycleways.

And no extra spending to help public transport use hit the 100m target, let along anything to push that figure to 550m. That’s the goal for 2030 set by the council in its own Transport Emissions Reduction Plan.

Will the budget even be viable? “Yes, I think so. But we are deeply constrained.” Attention will switch to revenue, especially fares, parking fees and fines. “How do we maintain and grow our services in ways that take pressure of ratepayers?”

What about doing everything more cheaply?

“I can assure ratepayers,” he says, “that there are projects we say no to, or we need to think again. Take out any gold-plating, strip it down to its minimum.”

Such as?

“The Eastern Busway. We made a strong challenge and they did a good job, they responded. And we won’t be doing the big urban cycleway projects - we can’t afford them.”

He adds that contracts have been let for the Great North Rd and Pt Chevalier cycleways, so they will proceed. But he’s taking a good look at Glen Innes to Tāmaki.

And he has a message for cyclists.

“In that emissions reduction plan, cycling is supposed to rise to 17 per cent of all trips. But it’s still stuck on 1 per cent. We’ve got the facilities available and people aren’t using them. My message to the cycling community is this: ‘If walking and cycling are important to you, then do it.’”

Auckland Transport boss Dean Kimpton: A message to cyclists - if it's important to you, then do it. Photo / Jason Oxenham

In April, Kimpton said, “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.”

That’s changed now, he says. “You’ve seen us focus on listening to our communities, and our customers, and there’s lots of evidence on that.”

Really? Just this month AT was given a trenchant telling-off by Brown for not consulting properly with Karangahape Rd businesses about replacing on-street car parks with fulltime bus lanes.

“There are things we definitely need to learn from that,” says Kimpton. “Communication was poor. I think we own that. Once we spotted it, we fronted up.”

The bus lanes on K Rd are one small part of AT’s current flagship new bus service: the Western Express, known as WX.

The service operates on Waka Kotahi New Zealand Transport Agency’s new busway route along the Northwest Motorway, although it’s not a dedicated busway. WX uses the motorway shoulders, and in some places, the buses have to merge with general traffic.

On the good side, it runs every 10 minutes from 7am to 7pm, and less frequently before and after that.

“We’ve taken an existing bus service, broken it apart and put it back together,” says Kimpton.

“Normally when you do that, you get a dip in patronage. People take a while to try it. They say it’s too hard, they don’t like the change, they think maybe they’ll have to catch two buses instead of one. We haven’t seen the dip. We’ve seen an increase.”

WX puts 100 extra buses a day on to K Rd, pushing the total up to 852. That was the prompt for AT to remove the parking, before they decided to hold off.

Now they’re monitoring the congestion and general street use. Already in week one, there were 1200 more pedestrians on the strip.

“Next year, we’ll go back to the business community and we’ll say, ‘This is what we’ve learned, here’s the statistics’, and we’ll agree what we need to do.”

Consultation, done right. It only took a mayoral meltdown to make it happen.

But what about the problem at the other end of the route, where bus stops are stranded on traffic islands surrounded by streams of rushing traffic?

Kimpton doesn’t defend this. “I agree completely. We have expressed our concern to Waka Kotahi about how we are going to resolve those issues. There are elements of the bus service and its interaction with the state highway network that are taking too long.”

As of this week, Dean Kimpton will have a big new task on his hands: building a relationship with the incoming Government.

Issues to work through include congestion charging, petrol taxes and other revenue streams, busways, freight and passenger train services, speed limits and the impact of the CRL. Top of the list for Kimpton and the mayor, though, is integrated long-term planning.

Brown persuaded the last Government to help him draft an integrated plan, and its fate now lies with Simeon Brown, the new Minister of Transport as well as Auckland and Local Government.

How does Kimpton think the new relationship will work?

“We’ve been well warmed up to the change of Government,” he says. “We’ve had open discussions with them about what their policies might look like, but also what we believe Auckland needs.”

Not giving away much there.

Auckland Transport boss Dean Kimpton: "We've got to put customer delight into the mix." Photo / Jason Oxenham

Back in April, Kimpton talked about libraries. “Libraries are loved by Aucklanders. So my challenge to myself is: how do we make public transport as much-loved as libraries?”

How’s he doing?

“The challenge then was to get public transport up and running properly, and we’ve done that. Now we know that if we’re going to get more people using the services, we’ve got to put customer delight into the mix.”

Customer delight. If the alternative is to be stuck for three hours in a parking building, you’d think that would be quite easy.

Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.