Timothy
Welch, University
of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau
Last
week, within the space of 24 hours, voters heard two very
different proposals to improve New Zealand’s public
transport system.
On Wednesday, Labour
promised to cap weekly fares at NZ$20 in Auckland,
Wellington and Christchurch – and $10 everywhere else –
if elected to power in November.
On Thursday,
Transport Minister Chris Bishop, of incumbent National, responded
by suggesting the government could use its $450
million fuel emergency fund for more trains and buses at
peak times.
One policy lowers the price. The other
adds service.
But, while both sound sensible,
neither represent a serious plan to meaningfully address the
challenges left by decades of underfunding.
The
flaws of fare caps
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Under Labour’s cap – which
would apply to fares across buses, trains and some ferries
– the biggest winners would be those commuters who pay
full fares to regularly use services.
In Auckland
alone, about 25,000 passengers come close to reaching the
city’s existing
$50 weekly fare cap. For an Auckland passenger who makes
ten two-zone trips each week at a cost of $49, Labour’s
cap could save them roughly $1,500 a year.
For
other users, the gains would be comparatively modest. A
two-zone Community
Connect passenger paying half-fares, for instance,
currently spends $24.50 for the same ten trips. Their weekly
saving would be just $4.50, assuming existing concessions
remain in place.
And in smaller centres,
affordability may not be the biggest barrier at all. A $10
cap matters little if the local bus service runs only twice
a day.
Moreover, cheaper fares aren’t necessarily
what get people out of cars and onto public
transport.
When New Zealand rolled out a half-price
fares scheme over 2022-23, just 12% of patrons were
found to have shifted from cars or taxis; another 15%
moved from walking and cycling.
Labour estimates
its cap would lift patronage by 6% and cost $65 million a
year. That is just 1.1% of the $5.72
billion invested through the National Land Transport
Fund in 2024/25 and roughly a tenth of what the fund spends
each year running the country’s buses, trains and
ferries.
So, it’s affordable at the scale of the
transport budget. But it’s also premised on Auckland
keeping its existing weekly $50 cap and Christchurch keeping
its $20 cap.
The extra passengers also need
somewhere to go.
Auckland’s frequent routes run
at 43% of capacity on average, but averages hide crammed
buses on the Northern Busway and Dominion Road. Wellington
recorded 3.6
million public transport trips in March – its busiest
month on record – while warning some services were growing
full.
The question, then, is how a public transport
system accommodates any extra passengers a fare cap might
attract.
That’s where the government’s response
enters the picture. Chris Bishop said that, if the
government did spend its $450 million emergency fund on
public transport, it would likely go toward extra peak
services rather than fare subsidies.
But his
suggestion is not backed by any Cabinet decision or funding
allocation. There is no indication of which networks might
receive support, how many additional services would be
provided, or where they would run.
As such, the
idea appears more like a minister musing than a concrete
plan – even if it might actually help address those
problems of frequency and reliability.
Still,
buying buses and running useful services are very different
things. Extra services need drivers, depot space and
permanent operating money – and an emergency reserve can
be spent only once.
Competing
objectives
On top of this are those structural
problems exacerbated by current transport policy
settings.
Councils are presently
expected to recover a greater share of public transport
costs from fares and other private revenue. Yet that
contribution has fallen sharply, from 40% in 2016/17 to less
than 10% in 2022/23.
At the same time, operators
are facing rising costs. Greater Wellington says higher
diesel prices are adding about $130,000
a week to Metlink’s bill. It has warned it may need to
cut services or raise fares and has asked the government to
ease farebox recovery expectations.
The
contradiction is obvious. The government may be willing to
spend emergency funding on additional services, while its
standing policy encourages regions to recover more of their
costs from passengers.
A functioning public
transport system should not leave users to choose between
affordable fares and useful services.
It should
provide both, while preserving existing concessions,
targeting capacity where networks are already under
pressure, and investing in bus priority. After all, a bus
stuck in traffic is just a more expensive traffic
jam.
In 2026, what New Zealand needs most is a
durable agreement on who pays for public transport and what
the system is supposed to achieve.
By contrast,
Labour’s policy might be viewed as offering a cheaper
ticket without a plan for the passengers it attracts.
National, for its part, is offering the possibility of more
buses while telling regions to squeeze riders
harder.
Neither appear to be incentivising a
transport system planned around long-term need and, rather,
seem to be prioritising polling bumps and short-term news
cycles.
Timothy
Welch, Senior Lecturer in Urban Planning, University
of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau
This article is republished from The Conversation
under a Creative Commons license. Read the original
article.
