This post is both a bit of a bouquet and a brickbat. Auckland Transport appears to have quietly introduced some new rail monthly passes that will come into effect as HOP rolls out later this Saturday. The positive thing is that they finally acknowledge that not everyone travels to Britomart so gives people more options, the problem though is the pricing doesn’t seem to provide a lot of value in many situations and the graphics on the sign can be a little confusing. First though, here are the current monthly pass options:
Here are the signs that are now adorning the top up machines on platforms:
As mentioned it is good to see the additional zones added in but my concern is that they aren’t really priced correctly. Take the western line for example, the vast majority of people going to New Lynn from the west will likely be getting on between Swanson and Fruitvale Rd as not that many people use Waitakere station at all. For them it is either a one or two stage trip that with HOP money will cost either $1.62 or $3.06. That means to get any value out of it you will have to take quite a few trips each month, the numbers of how many are below:
Most months have between 20 and 22 working days in them so even if you lived in say Swanson, you would pretty much need to catch the train every single working day just for the pass to be worthwhile. If you happened to be sick and not go to work for one day then it might actually work out more expensive for you. If you live only one stage away, like at say Henderson, then even two train trips per day including the weekends would still work out more expensive.
So all up I do like the idea of new monthly passes for other parts of the network but perhaps AT need to do a little work on the pricing to actually make them an attractive or even practical option as at this stage I can’t see anyone realistically buying some of them.
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Wait, the one stage fare is going to be $1.62? I thought fares weren’t supposed to be increasing from the existing 10-trip price? Even if it’s just two measly cents…
The AT public transport website says $1.60 = 1 stage Hop price, and $3.00 = 2 stage Hope price.
Monthly passes starting at $120 is too much. I would have liked to see something more like $80 per month which works out to be $20 a week which sounds marketable!
Presumably the “monthly pass” will eventually go away, and we’ll just get ‘free’ travel once we go past a certain level of travel/spending for a rolling 30 day period – across trains, buses, and ferries?
We shouldn’t have to “think” about how to save money or calculate monthly vs 10trip/hop prices and sick days. People should just focus on the travelling part and let the system sort out the cheapest way to charge it.
Maybe I’m being wildly optimistic.
You would presume that would be the case yes – monthly prices would be replaced by stored value, which would be capped beyond certain points. Then you don’t have to choose to buy a monthly pass at all: You just swipe away and everyone gets the discount when they qualify.
That’s how Brisbane and Canberra works, and it’s very popular (although they set their caps too low, e.g. 9 trips per week, when it should probably be capped on spend more than number of trips.
Seconded.
These must just be temporary as surely new monthly plans will be introduced as part of the roll out of integrated fares? There would be no point of having seperate monthly passes on the different modes. So it’s good to see that AT is willing to make it better for customers in the short term while they work through the long term solution.
As rob mentions above, a price cap should be the go.
As for the substantial part of your post, I disagree. I don’t see why peak-time commuters should get a special discount when they’re not only the richest transport users but also taking PT at the peak is the costliest service to provide marginal capacity on. I’d support a much cheaper off-peak monthly or daily pass, but I don’t think a monthly pass for peak travel should be cheaper than 44 one-way fares.
I don’t see how being the ‘richest transport users’ has to do with anything? Why does that make a remote bit of difference, public transport shouldn’t discriminate against anyone.
However although I agree off-peak travel should be discounted to encourage spread of travel times, I imagine that would be quite hard to implement when integrating into the final monthly plans when AT HOP is fully integrated including the fares. There will need to be a price cap system in the future I believe.
Basic economics – commuters willingness to pay is on average higher. It’s nothing to do with discrimination, unless you consider offering a discount on children’s ticket’s to be discrimination?
I call it “progressive pricing”.
Basically, I agree – encourage the behaviour you want to see. Except on-peak PT travel, while it has the highest marginal cost, removes cars from the road and reduces congestion (ie. widest economic value). Off-peak travel has a lower marginal cost, but has less wider economic value. Question is, do you tweak those knobs via fares (demand side) or subsidies (supply side)?
Technically, it’s all just software. It should be easy enough to have an “off-peak” monthly cap which kicks in? And a different on-peak/total cap/rate. Of course, the more complex it gets, the more people have no idea why they’ve been charged $X for a particular trip. But I’m okay with that as long as there’s some way to review my travel/spending later.
Off peak discount was apparently implemented in Melbourne several years ago. My understanding is that it was free to travel if you arrive at your destination before 7am. Now this sounds great for customers but pretty expensive for the council / ratepayers etc to fund. Guess what? Not the case at all. There were significant cost savings but not having to run as many peak vehicles (and drivers) as a reasonable portion of commuters chose to travel early. By saving on 50-100 peak buses this money more than paid for the ‘lost’ fare revenue. If this is the case and the approach is cost neutral or even saves money for AT / NZTA, then should this not be investigated seriously as an option in Akld? Of the approximately 1,000 buses operating in morning peak, less than half would be in service before 7am looking at the timetables. Same would apply to trains and ferries presumably.
If your argument is that the pass should be cheaper than a month’s worth of return trips to work then I think you’re missing the point of the pass. It should be priced to encourage its use for all sorts of trips throughout the day. That said I find $120 a month for a pass JUST for the train is ridiculous, if this included all the buses then maybe it would be reasonable but still expensive. But for it to include just a single mode I find very unreasonably priced. As a comparison, monthly passes in Zurich, Switzerland cost on the order of 70CHF so less than 100NZD, and a monthly pass in Boston, USA is 60USD, again less than $100.Both these passes include all modes, train, bus, tram etc etc. So for a pass for a single mode in Auckland to be these sorts of prices just shows how of of whack and poor value for money (for a user) the whole PT system in Auckland is.
Monthly passes for the whole of Rome are currently €30,00 (i.e. NZD 48.00). That’s buses, trains and the metro. And the level of service is far superior to what we have here.
The $120 per month for sectors at the end of each line means AT haven’t thought through the marginal costs, and that there is underutilised capacity on peak services in these sectors. Even if a much cheaper monthly fare were offered, the number of passengers with monthly Zone B tickets alighting at New Lynn on a Brittomart-bound morning train would be much lower than the number who join between New Lynn and Mt Eden. Service capacity is normally determined by demand in the central part of the network. Any capacity that can be sold on end-of-line sectors is a bonus.
The fares are (once again) too damn high.
Absolutely – I look at this and the fact that getting my commuting passes is just shy of $2400 per annum. Makes me want to drive
Which raises the point of why they don’t have an annual pass?
The thinking that zone B should be a circle around zone A also leads to the A/B pass being ridiculously expensive – just like it is currently.
How hard is it for AT to look at Melbourne and realise that consecutive zone passes are way easier to understand and much more likely to be utilised?
Am I reading this right? City Zone *excludes* the Link?
These are train only passes, the (inner?) link is a bus service, hence it is excluded here.
When the proper fare system, as proposed in the draft RPTP, is introduced there will not be ‘mode discrimination’ like this – I suggest you read this post http://greaterakl.wpengine.com/2012/10/05/thinking-about-fare-zones/