Buses' Last Stand? Recent Urban Transit Reform in New Zealand

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

 1. New Zealand has a three-tier system of government which descends from the centre, via regional authorities, to territorial authorities. In practice both of the latter are treated as forms of local government and jointly referred to as ‘councils’; there are no federal states in the Australian sense. Everyday references to the ‘state’, as in the sense of state highway, thus similarly refer to New Zealand as a whole. In this review, all references to cities refer to the relevant regional authority, unless a territorial authority of the same name is being singled out for attention.

 2. The word commercial and its derivatives will sometimes be used as a shorthand for ‘commercially registered’ or profitable on ticket sales alone; it will not denote private bus services operating in a publicly contracted system such as the so-called ‘commercial contracts’ operating in New South Wales.

 3. For all statistics, see MOT (2006).

 4. See URL: http://www.maxx.co.nz

 5. It should be emphasised, however, that most commercial registrations in Auckland seem to have occurred only after an overwhelmingly dominant Auckland public operator known as the Yellow Bus Company was privatised in 1998, some nine years after the enactment of the TSLA and some three years after the proposed date of the introduction of an integrated ticket in the passage quoted above. In other words a succession of opportunities to procure a more integrated system in Auckland under the TSLA were lost, at a time when public authorities were still in a relatively strong position to insist upon it.

 6. This is indicated by the previous note.

 7. See URL: http://www.metroinfo.org.nz for up-to-date timetable and fare information in Christchurch, and ULR: http://www.maxx.co.nz for the equivalent in Auckland. Some commercial bus operations such as Trent Barton in the Nottingham region of England, and NorthStar on Auckland's North Shore, have also adopted advertising-free liveries and higher frequencies to build patronage; however, problems of ticketing integration and financial guarantees remain, and are perhaps more acute in the New World dispersed city than in Britain where commercialisation began (cf Mees, 2000).

 8. All currency values are in $NZ.

 9. Walters (2001) describes Christchurch as operating a tram service in addition to buses. However, the Christchurch Tram is marketed as a tourist experience and the tickets are expensive (URL: http://www.tram.co.nz).

10. For more on the importance of core levels of service, see Galt & Eyre (1987), Clements (1997), Pund (2002), Setty (2003), Balcombe et al. (2004) and Wallis (2004).