My father’s latest obsession – well he’s had this obsession for about 10 years now and his enthusiasm for it has never waned – is counting the number of passengers on public buses.
His joy is not so much in the counting, but rather in the glee with which he can announce the total count to anyone who will listen. He is interminably delighted to proclaim: “I only need the fingers of one hand to count the passengers most days.”
While we don’t ever discuss it – maybe because he knows I’m a bike person – I fear public spending on cycleways is probably fertile ground for additional frustrated utterances on his part, “… $10million of my tax money spent and you never see a bike on that damn cycle path, pfft!”
My default position is generally diametrically opposed to his on such issues – it feels like the right thing to do to give balance to the universe: If my dad and Mike Hosking are sitting on the port side of the boat, I feel an automatic inclination to move immediately to starboard – I like to think I provide ballast to the zeitgeist.
Though I am reluctant to admit it, sometimes I worry that maybe he has a point. I sat with him in a restaurant in Auckland earlier in the week. We had a window seat on a main road. His total count for the lunch: 13 buses in one hour 11 minutes with an average of 3.5 passengers per bus (not including OUT OF SERVICE and DRIVER IN TRAINING participants).
I rolled my eyes – “Dad, we’re here for lunch, not train[bus]spotting.”
Yet there was something quite disquieting about his stats.
Fast-forward 48 hours I found myself seated mid-bus on the number five from the Mount to Tauranga. Upon arrival I realised I had been the only passenger for the entire journey.
To an extent these observations may be outliers. Try catching a bus in central Auckland at 5pm, or in front of Tauranga Girls College at 3.30pm on a weekday – the average patronage then starts to look a lot healthier.
And therein lies a predicament: we – well most of us anyway – want public transport to be readily available and well patronised in New Zealand.
But peak demand, by definition, is only at ‘peak’ times, meaning we are stuck with over capacity at other ‘off-peak’ times – they’re the ones my dad knows all about.
The bus operators aren’t stupid, they’re generally astute commercial managers.
Civil servants, for the most part, are not stupid either – they are constantly in the public-eye administering big budgets, managing valuable assets and organising significant human resource rosters.
Neither group – the bus operators nor the local body authorities – wants to see near-empty buses on our streets. Their promotions, pricing and planning are all aimed at overcoming the low patronage.
Build it and they will come, as a philosophy, seems to have fallen short when it comes to urban bus networks in much of the country.
Why not go bespoke then, with a network of small-footprint, short-route mini-buses?
While these may be cheaper to purchase and easier to move, they still have to be driven by someone (for the time-being) who needs to be trained and paid, and the question still remains, “What happens at rush hour?”
The answer lies with us, the commuters; Not with the council or the bus company but with us, the residents.
I sometimes wonder if the bus companies earn more from the ads on the back of the empty buses than from the fares paid by the peak time-users?
Maybe that’s the way it should be.
We want a reliable, regular bus service … and we want the bus service to be well-used … so the ball is in our court to use it. They have built it, it is up to us to come.
Every journey begins with a single step. Let’s start by aiming to raise that average from 3.5 passengers to 10 passengers per bus in off-peak times – let’s face it, half passengers are really no use to anyone.
Related: When is GDP not GDP?
