Posts by Matthew Poole
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to BenWilson,
Even the one second delay of Hop is one second of life all the passengers never get back
Yeah yeah, break out the sarcasm. Each individual passenger, it's irrelevant. Multiplied by thousands of passengers over hundreds of buses every day, it's an enormous amount of time wasted.
You clearly don't care, and at a personal level I only care when I'm on a bus that spends several minutes sitting at a stop while the driver takes care of passengers who're paying cash, but looking at the bigger picture this is not about individual passengers on individual buses. It's about the entire regional bus system.
Greg Dawson, not personally involved with Snapper, but a lot of my hate is Infratil's tantrum and associated Ministerial meddling when they didn't get the tender. That has held up deployment of HOP, and muddied the brand significantly in the eyes of Auckland transport patrons: "Why do I have to keep getting this card replaced?" Their system is inferior to what's specified. I've had issues where my HOP has failed to read first time, and I carefully split my H&E card and my HOP card to separate sides of my wallet so that I can flip it open to the appropriate side.
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to BenWilson,
There’s lots of ways of making flash passes. They could be day-coded, so you can only use your pass on, say, Friday. There’s lots of possibilities that don’t require making expensive hardware and software.
And if I want to make an ad hoc trip when I feel like it, I'll have to carry around seven of those passes. Which are valid for how long? Or how many trips? How to count off the number of trips used? Seriously, if we went to two zones, or three zones, we'd still have to really heavily cut the price of monthly passes before I'd buy one on the off-chance that I'd use it. I don't want to have to rely on having cash on me to know that I can use public transport. I want one pass, and one pass only. So either we go for a zonal system with a low monthly charge (for my current usage pattern I wouldn't even buy them if they were $100/month, to give you an idea of what I consider to be low), or we go with a smart card that can handle all of the flexibility.
Why on earth would we buy, or even lease, additional rolling stock from overseas?
Because the carriages are overcrowded?
And we can only fit six carriages onto most of our platforms, so we can't just add more carriages to most existing peak-hour trains that are terribly, terribly full. All we can do is add more trains, requiring complete locomotive sets. Not a particularly good use of money for a problem that's already being solved in the near-medium term. And still, Britomart.
You knock a minute off an hour long trip by taking away the cash transaction delay. But having more buses coming more frequently, from a lot more destinations, with a lot more express buses is clearly going to do one hell of a lot more to improve matters.
It's a whole lot more than a minute. It's more like 10 minutes, or more, on long-haul services. The dithering around with cash can be nearly a minute at one stop with one passenger, by the time they get out their wallet, get out the cash, get the ticket, get the change, put the change away, and get out of the way so the next cash-paying passenger can get started. Keep an eye on what happens next time you're on the bus. Plus, even if it's only one minute per service journey, multiply that by 200 buses (which is a very, very low-ball estimate of how many enter the CBD in the morning peak) and you've got over three hours of time wasted. Every day.
Adding more peak services is expensive, because your marginal cost of adding another bus is buying a whole extra bus. Making services more efficient, such as ending the practice of buses running routes that largely duplicate train routes, allows better use of resources without having to purchase extra resources.
Is that really conservative? Are you trying to tell me that 30 people on every bus pay cash? Based on a 20 second transaction. I’m genuinely curious – if the cash handling time is really that high, then the savings sound worthwhile.
Based on my observations, for a long route it would be at least that many. I've watched five people get on at one stop and pay cash. If you've got two stops per kilometre (conservative) and the route is 15km long, even an average of one passenger per stop paying cash gets you to that 30 passengers. I realise it likely doesn't extrapolate like that since once you get into the suburbs people are more likely to be regular users and have a pass, but multiply the effects across hundreds of buses and you can see how these savings rapidly add up.
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to BenWilson,
users of it are hardly going to find it that much of an arse to own a couple of bus cards, and occasionally to pay cash for a ticket if they want to do something unusual.
That's what we have now. It's balls. I have a train ticket, a HOP-Snapper card and a Howick & Eastern card. That's three different transport tickets, each of which requires different ways of being topped-up/purchased, credit for each of which is non-transferable, and all of which are taking up space in my wallet. I, and many, many others, want a single card that works everywhere. If that's a paper pass then great, but since I don't use public transport every day I don't want to buy a monthly pass. That means a multi-ride ticket which then needs to be clipped by the driver/fare-collector, which adds time. I absolutely don't consider the status quo to be acceptable, in any way, because it's keeping us tied to the fragmented bullshit delivery system foisted on us by 1990s National.
There aren’t more trains to put on
What, nowhere in the whole world?
We've got a half-billion-dollars worth of new trains on order, due for delivery within the next four years. Why on earth would we buy, or even lease, additional rolling stock from overseas? We're already using freight locomotives to drag around passenger carriages, which is hardly an ideal use of expensive locomotives. Plus there's the Britomart issue.
they probably have to just wear those lost fares.
But we've got a public transport-hostile government who're demanding ever-greater levels of farebox recovery. "Just wearing lost fares" is a non-starter, and it should never be an acceptable solution in any case. Implementing systems that make it much harder to free-load while not making it significantly harder to participate (and, in this case, generally making it easer) are much more desirable.
I can see that it makes the bus a little faster to have a whole lot of Hoppers. Presumably over a long period of time this actually amounts to a saving on the large capital outlay involved in the system.
If, conservatively, HOP saves 10 minutes of stop dwell time for a bus that's doing a 50-minute run, that's 20% quicker trips for passengers and allows a corresponding 20% increase in the bus' return-trip availability. Those are big numbers. I've watched buses sit for three minutes getting passengers on board, at a single stop. Millions of minutes a year, wasted on idling while bus drivers deal with passengers' payments. Obviously HOP won't end cash payments, but it only needs to shave five seconds off the interactions of 120 people to save 10 minutes. If we build and upgrade roads on the basis of time savings (I know, I know, flawed to all hell, but it's the system we have), why should we not rate public transport spending on the same basis?
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to Tamara,
Yeah, that's the bastard Snapper hybrid. The real HOP will be a lot quicker and a lot more reliable, if the design specification has actually been followed. Snapper is, as I've said above, slow and unreliable.
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to BenWilson,
Sure, but most trips (don’t have the stats, but still), are commutes and they are always the exact same thing.
Which is great, if your aspirations are nothing greater than to have a public transport system that is little more than a way to move commuters. If, however, you want to make it a viable alternative to owning a private car, it needs to be a whole lot more flexible. HOP allows for that flexibility, and coupled with the redesign of bus operating patterns we're going to start becoming a city where, for increasing numbers of people, owning a car is not essential.
Sounds like they could get more people on the job at peak times. The improved revenue would probably pay for it. Or perhaps they could be trained to be more pushy.
I've been on several trains where it was simply impossible for the train staff to get through and check tickets before people started getting off again. I've heard of trains making it as far as Mt Albert station from Britomart before some people had their tickets checked, and that's a function of not only the density of the packing but also of the train staff having to clip tickets, sell tickets, hand out change, etc. More people might help, but it's also more people trying to move through absolutely packed carriages.
If the train company wants to be all stally and collect every fare, they could put more trains on.
Uh, no, they couldn't. There aren't more trains to put on (literally, Auckland is out of rolling stock at peak time) and there also isn't movement capacity at Britomart during peak hours even if there were more trains available. It's no exaggeration to say that there is no more room to send trains to the CBD during peak hours.
And a touch card is slower than a card you simply show
The Snapper cards certainly are. However, the actual HOP system is supposed to read with high accuracy (another Snapper fail) in under a second. Also, while the driver is dealing with a passenger who's paying cash passengers with HOP can continue to board. If everyone has a visual pass, there is nothing faster. In the real world of public transport in Auckland, though, there are lots of combinations and there are lots of people paying cash. I don't think I've ever got on a bus heading away from Symonds St and not had someone getting on who's paying cash. For the 20 seconds that the driver is dealing with that one person, you could board another 10 people who're using touch cards or you could have the driver take 30 seconds to deal with the passenger while they board half that many people.
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Hard News: The frustrating politics of…, in reply to slarty,
Sorry! Didn’t spot the irony :)
Have some NZ Government thought on the issue:
http://www.justice.govt.nz/publications/publications-archived/2002/protecting-our-innocence/child-prostitutionhttp://www.courtsofnz.govt.nz/speechpapers/NZ%20trafficking%20Paper%20-%20final%20-%203%20Feb.pdf
Also, we've been on the State Department's list since 2007, along with Australia. This is not a new issue. Again, you seem to think they've manufactured some random concern for whatever reason, instead of wondering whether there's actually fire causing the smoke.
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to Paul Campbell,
also people don’t have to all get on at the front – people can get on and swipe through any door – makes loading and unloading even faster
If you have double-width doors, certainly. If, however, you've got a single-width rear door and you have people trying to alight it's going to be a lot slower trying to fit through bi-directional traffic.
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to BenWilson,
MInd you, a cardboard ticket that the driver clips, or simply looks at, is pretty damned fast, gets money off people, and costs next to nothing to set up. I’d prefer it to owning a Snapper card myself. Not a big fan of technology for its own sake. Has the added advantage that you can just look at it to work out how many trips/days you have left.
Works fine for fixed-value trips and zone-based passes, but the second you need to do a trip that's outside what's contemplated by whatever pass you hold (have a two-stage pass but want to go three stages, for example, or have an A-zone pass and want to go to zone B) you start having to bugger about with cash. Having different passes for different kinds of pass is also an administrative hassle, since those have to be managed, distributed, prepared, etc. A stored-value card is much more flexible since you can do things like daily fare caps for casual users (time-consuming to implement if driver interaction is required to validate), and online balance management. Plus you get much, much better patronage stats from stored-value.
Regarding the loss of revenue from free-riders, Auckland is currently losing a lot of revenue on peak train services because the on-train staff simply cannot move to collect tickets. Not allowing people on/off the Britomart platforms without a ticket will take care of that.
I'm a fan of large fines (if I read the sign right, in Berlin it's EUR400) for not having a valid ticket. If the cost of getting caught is high, people are more likely to comply. At present the fine here is negligible and it's actually the economically-optimal course of action to game the system since on the off-chance that you get caught you're still going to be ahead financially. Taking away some of the on-train staff and instead using them to conduct random ticketing compliance audits right across the Auckland transport network would be very effective, especially since they're moving to a driver-plus-one model with the new electric trains. -
Hard News: The frustrating politics of…, in reply to slarty,
I must say Matthew, I think it’s a little naive to think that the US even considers whether a matter actually affects them
More that they tend not to pay attention to anything unless it affects them.
Also, are you sure you're positioned to call me naive when you appear to be ignoring the discussion within NZ about our child sex trade? This is not something the US just made up because it somehow suits their internal politics.
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to Steve Barnes,
Whitey gets to go home again
Not yet he doesn't. He hasn't had all the charges dismissed. I'm very curious how the judge reached this particular conclusion, but your insinuation that this is some kind of old boys' network at play doesn't sit well with the reputation of our judiciary for being uncorrupted and impartial.