Mike's Minute: The public transport conundrum

The Mike Hosking Breakfast

Have a look at the report out in Sydney into their new metro line.

This is the $21b behemoth that opened a few weeks ago that was going to transform Sydney's public transport.

It seems, at first report, to be working – and in that is the clue to public transport generally and whether or not it is successful.

The trouble with transport here, and let's be honest, we are really only talking about a couple of cities i.e. Wellington and Auckland that in theory have systems outside of a few random buses.

Wellington is famously hopeless and with Auckland it is hard to tell whether they are far behind, or quite possibly even more useless.

Anyway, the early numbers from Sydney show there has been a large drop in numbers through the busiest of the heavy rail stations.

The trick here is the “build it and they will come” scenario, which is the one that they will claim they use in this country but has never really turned out to be reality.

The buses famously in Wellington went up the wrong streets, ran out of gas and never turned up in the first place. They will claim they have fixed that, but the trains are still famous for problems.

Auckland buses have been hit and miss forever and they didn’t have drivers for a while. But they too will claim they have fixed that. Our kids eventually refused to go for the simple reason they literally would not have got to school on time.

The trains are permanently cancelled for the never-ending schedule of maintenance.

So the theory has never met the reality.

In Sydney, where it is working, the question they will need to ask is, is having a new metro taking people off heavy rail actually solving anything?

And if people are leaving cars at home and taking the metro, how many of them are there? If you are merely shifting one commuter from a train to another train that doesn’t strike me as a big time solution. If you're moving them out of cars you might be onto something.

It's still early days, but four weeks in the falls in train numbers are as high as 40%.

But then, their system works. And in that consistency and ensuing reputation for reliability is the real answer to the public transport conundrum.

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