Auckland’s public transport crisis

Analysis: The city is staring at three years of frustrating rail hassles and a whole lot more, writes What’s gone wrong with bus, rail and ferry services?

Auckland is in the midst of a public transport crisis.

No-show buses, three years of looming rail shutdowns, and crew shortages on the ferries are crippling the city’s public-transport system.

There’s a bus-driver shortage when buses are being promised to fill the gap when trains stop running for three years on a major rail upgrade.

Even cycleways are not immune. A section of the popular Grafton Gully cycleway closed suddenly this week until mid-January for a power-supply upgrade to Auckland City Hospital.

Mayor Wayne Brown said on Tuesday it was time to move to an “emergency footing” to maintain transport services, now and over the next few years.

Aucklanders should not and would not accept three years of rail disruptions and cuts to bus services, said Brown, who gave Auckland Transport (AT), KiwiRail, and even Transport and Immigration Minister Michael Wood a nudge to do better.

Wood, an Auckland MP and regular user of public transport, came to the table last weekend with an additional $61 million to lift bus-driver pay and conditions.

AT interim chief executive Mark Lambert acknowledged commuters faced a “driver-shortage crisis” causing significant disruption and warned of challenging times ahead for rail passengers through long overdue maintenance to KiwiRail’s tracks and infrastructure.

Here’s what in store.

Rail

Commuters face three years of disruptive shutdowns from Christmas on the Southern, Eastern, and Onehunga rail lines.

KiwiRail is doing a $330m rail network rebuild on the three lines to pave the way for more commuter trains when the City Rail Link opens, sometime from 2025.

From Christmas, trains will not run on the Southern line between O¯ta¯huhu and Newmarket and the Onehunga line for three months.

This will be followed by the Eastern line between O¯ ta¯huhu and Britomart being closed for nine months and sections of the Western line being closed in 2024 and 2025.

The shutdown will affect an average of 8000 commuters a day.

The rebuild follows two years of shutdowns and speed reductions in 2020-2021 while KiwiRail replaced rail tracks and sleepers. The work will replace the rock foundations under the tracks, some of which haven’t been renewed since the 1870s.

Buses will replace train services, with Auckland Transport saying it will promote current services and have ambassadors on-site at affected stations to help passengers.

More information about alternative travel options for Onehunga and Southern line customers affected by the first stage of work is expected to be available this month.

KiwiRail chief operating officer — capital projects David Gordon said the work would frustrate commuters, but had to be done. Given its scale, it could not be done by short shutdowns or closing sections of the track but allowing some peak services to meet the CRL opening date, he said.

“Like roads, rail lines wear out from use. We’ve been undertaking routine maintenance and replacing worn-out track and sleepers and we’re now moving on to something more fundamental.”

Gordon said that while most of the rail network rebuild should be done before CRL construction was complete, it was likely some lower patronage lines — such as the Manukau to Puhinui line, the Swanson to Henderson section of the Western line, and the part of the rail network between Newmarket and Britomart — would be completed after the CRL was open.

In a report this year on the governance of the CRL, Auditor-General John Ryan said AT and KiwiRail had signalled that between now and 2036, a further $7.5 billion would have to be spent on the rail network to realise the full benefits of the CRL.

KiwiRail and AT are developing a business case for this work. Last year, the Herald reported the cost was $6.7b for additional tracks and trains, lengthening platforms for nine-car trains, removing all level crossings on the Southern and Western lines, and a signalling upgrade.

Buses

From tomorrow, AT will suspend 1000 bus services across Auckland in response to the driver shortage.

AT says the move will provide “more certainty” to Aucklanders irked at opening their AT mobile apps to see lines of “cancelled” services.

Some 12,000 Auckland bus services will continue every day, however, which AT said accounted for more than 85 per cent of the network.

The routes most impacted by cut services include the City Link, Inner Link, and the Northern Express, with

26 to 53 scheduled buses cut for each route every day.

Buses operating in and around the central suburbs would see the greatest number of removed services. In total, 931 services a day would be discontinued.

AT is aiming to keep a number of scheduled services, including the first and last trip of the day, and school buses and city routes with high patronage of students.

AT’s group manager of metro services Darek Koper said the driver shortage meant AT hadn’t been able to deliver the full scheduled service for “some time now”.

“This year we have struggled to operate our full bus timetable because of the effects of the national driver shortage, which has led to far more cancellations . . . than we would usually see.”

There is a nationwide shortage of

800 drivers, 500 in Auckland. The impact of Covid-19, immigration settings, poor pay, and working conditions that include split shifts led to the issue, although three rounds of pay rises this year have lifted the hourly rate from about $23 to $25 towards $30.

Ongoing and regular bus cancellations have frustrated passengers since April but Koper said the timetable changes would reduce further cancellations and give passengers more certainty in planning trips.

“We’re not taking anything away that’s currently running. We are just temporarily removing them in the timetable, so they won’t show up and then appear as cancelled.”

Buses account for 74 per cent of Auckland public-transport journeys.

Ferries

There’s bad news for Waiheke vineyards and restaurants banking on a holiday season boom after Covid.

Ferry operator Fullers will shift to its summer timetable 15 crews, or 60 staff, short of the number required for its “optimal” 122 sailings a week. It’s set to be nine sailings short.

The firm aimed to add an extra 32 weekend sailings from October 17. That was not as many as it would like, and it warns there will be no staff for backup and contingency vessels.

Fullers will offer a 35 per cent discount for those who travel to Waiheke off-peak in a bid to smooth demand.

All Coromandel sailings have been suspended (service to the peninsula is usually seven days in peak summer and three days in the rest of summer) and Rangitoto service has been reduced.

Chief executive Mike Horne said Fullers had been grappling with skills shortage issues for more than a year.