On track for confusion

File under: transport, sustainability, Wellington

What are we to make of the lead story in today's Dominion Post? "Commuters face levy for $2b upgrade", it says. Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether it's fair to ask today's commuters to pay for future upgrades, surely a $2 billion upgrade is a substantial investment and should significantly increase the capacity of our packed buses and trains. But how much of that sum will actually go towards improving the service?

There's little detail in the article, but it quickly becomes clear that this is not an announcement of a brand-new $2b investment:

Greater Wellington regional council has already budgeted $1.33 billion for public transport till 2016. But officials now say a further $670 million is needed to encourage more people to swap cars for buses and trains.

Of the extra money, "more than" $500 million would go to upgrading rail infrastructure, such as electrifying the main trunk line to Waikanae and doubling the tracks between Pukerua Bay and Paekakariki, and these are measures that public transport advocates such as Option 3 have been promoting for a while. This could definitely increase capacity on the Paraparaumu line, so it's to be applauded. There's no information on what the rest of the money being asked for (up to $170 million) will be for, so it's hard to see whether that will help improve capacity.

Of the $1.33 billion already budgeted for, how much will go towards increased capacity? Very little, as far as I can see, but it's hard to tell. The transport section (83kB PDF) of the regional council's current proposed long-term plan makes no mention of such a figure. All I can find is a table on page 49 about "procuring a range of passenger transport assets costing a total of $523.1 million". This shows that $343.1 million will be spent on new and refurbished rolling stock, and the rest on a mixture of station upgrades, bus/rail interchanges, accessibility, real-time information and integrated ticketing. It's important to improve the passenger experience, but it won't provide more capacity.

So, of the "new and refurbished" rolling stock, will there be any net increase in the number of carriages available? Again, there's no information, but a bit of searching through the regional council website uncovers a news release from last year saying that the 58 new electric units will "initially replace English Electric Units and then increase passenger capacity". This part of the upgrade will cost "more than $160m": that's less than half of the total rolling stock upgrades, and we still don't know how much of that will actually go to increased capacity! I'd guess it's not much, since they were only planning on maintaining a 15.6% share of commuters, not increasing it. For the sake of argument, let's estimate that $100 million goes towards new capacity rather than just replacing the museum pieces currently on the tracks.

Of the existing 10-year budget, that's $100 million for increased capacity and $423.1 million for refurbishment and miscellaneous improvements. Where's the rest of the $1.33 billion? I'm no expert at reading accounts, but the 10-year financial forecast on page 47 of the plan indicates that the rest is just operating expenditure, and doesn't go to upgrades at all. So let's break down the details of what the Dominion Post calls a "$2b upgrade":

Only about $600m can truly be said to be devoted to increasing capacity, and that's if the new proposal goes ahead. A further $170m might be, if we knew the details. $420m goes towards improving the passenger experience: some of that might be counted as an "upgrade", but much of it is just long-overdue maintenance. And the rest, nearly $640m, is just normal operating costs over the ten years of the plan, and should never be included in a story about new investments.

So, this is hardly "an ambitious $2 billion plan to improve Wellington's public transport"! The Kapiti upgrades are indeed significant news, and it's heartening to see that they're finally aiming to increase mode share to 20% rather than keeping it static, but if we really were to get $2 billion invested in public transport we would expect much more. It's hard to know whether the Dominion Post has an agenda to make public transport look like it's getting more money than it actually is, or whether it's just sloppy journalism. Despite their general pro-motorway bias, I'd suspect the latter, especially when you look at the headline on page C1: "Property values drift down". Really? No, they're just not increasing as fast as they were. We should expect better from our only daily newspaper.