Auckland’s Integrated Ticketing A RWC Political Football

Infratil has scored two tries in its frenetic last-minute bid to win Auckland’s integrated ticketing system from ARTA’s chosen French-led consortium.

Move one: Infratil claims two Auckland public transport operators plan to announce their involvement within the next 10 days or so in Infratil’s own version of a integrated ticketing system called Snapper, a card scheme it has introduced on its Wellington fleet of buses. Snapper is run as a wholly owned subsidiary of Infratil, the Wellington-based company that recently brought us the lockout of Auckland bus drivers. On its Auckland buses, it offers a branded Go Rider card.

These local converts are likely to be minor players but it makes integrated ticketing start to get messy as the whole idea is one scheme, which enables us to travel throughout the region using various transport modes, on one ticket.

You know, as happens already in other first world cities you visit.

If public transport companies here start making deals with Snapper, it will create a fragmented two-company system or would mean operators would have to cope with passengers producing either a Snapper system and another card and require all the complex IT backend stuff to make it happen. And that gets expensive for small operators to have a dual system.

Infratil also claims it has been approached by “two regional authorities to submit regional schemes, including rail solutions.” Snapper already works with three different operators in Wellington and one in Whangarei and is also about to complete negotiations with other Wellington services including ferry, bus and taxi operators in the Wellington region to increase the power of the Snapper card in Wellington.

To try to show how “innovative” the company is with Snapper, one of those new deals is a trial scheme for a Wellington ferry service – the East by West’s Cobar Cat ferry. In December, about 40 regular customers will be invited to take part in the pilot, replacing their normal cash and paper-based ticketing with a customised Snapper card. Passengers involved in the pilot will tag on and tag off the boat, and their fares will be automatically calculated. They’ll also be able to purchase items on the vessel using their Snapper.

Move two: Snapper’s latest promise to the government is that it can work with ARTA to have integrated ticketing on 90 percent of Auckland’s buses, trains and ferries by the time the Rugby World Cup kicks off in less than two years. That is a stronger guarantee than the ARTA – chosen partners are able to make.

It may prove a compelling argument for the Minister of Tourism, who happens to be the prime minister, and for the Minister in charge of the RWC, Murray McCully, who are both keen to boast that another infrastructure advance has been made, thanks to the World Cup. It is something tourists coming here for it would expect to be in place but under the present proposal, only “some form” of integrated ticketing has been promised.

Also extremely appealing to a cost-slashing government is that Infratil says ARTA need pay no up-front costs at all as Snapper’s IT systems are up and running.

Infratil, which runs Wellington airport, has friends in high political places in both National and Labour and are aggressive lobbyists.

There were expectations NZTA would confirm ARTA’s tender choice of French-based Thailes about a fortnight ago. But that day came and went. It was in the middle of Auckland’s bus industrial action, involving Infratil. The lockout was winning that company bad publicity,  few favours among those commuters affected and public threats from ARC and ARTA to cancel Infratil’s contract to run the buses. If by chance, there was going to be an announcement of a change of heart, the timing could not politically have been then – and with still the ever-present potential of more industrial action if the ongoing pay dispute isn’t solved, more delays in the ticketing announcement will only fuel such speculation that Infratil is gaining an upper hand.

To create the system in Auckland, ARTA had selected a consortium made up of French electronics company, Thales, in partnership with the Bank of New Zealand and Transfield services calling it a best value for money, proven, risk minimised solution especially as Thales has delivered a proven multi-modal system in more than 100 cities around the world including; Paris, Toronto, Oslo and The Netherlands. The company offered, in ARTA’s eyes, a proven solution thus minimising any development, implementation and operating risk.

Thailes would create a system similar to London’s Oyster system and Hong Kong’s Octopus system. Like Oyster, ARTA planned to initially implement core functions and progressively phase in additional functionality.

Snapper’s Chief Executive Miki Szikszai publicly labels Thailes “the French armaments company,” which makes it sound part of some axis of evil.

He rants: “Snapper is on such a roll, it now makes no sense for ARTA to contemplate incurring the significant costs and risks of developing its own system. Melbourne and Sydney have been going down this route for years with hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns and legal actions, but have yet to get comprehensive systems of the ground.”

As a final compromise if all that hard sell doesn’t work on the government,  he bizarrely suggests ARTA could accept the new Snapper offer and somehow still involve its preferred tenderer, Thales, in “aspects of the scheme,” if it wished. Can’t personally see how.

Back in July, the transport agency suggested it would give final approval in the much-delayed tender in September.

But it couched that with one of those ominous sounding officialese paragraphs that government departments and ministers put in when they want to hedge their bets.

Namely: “While the NZTA Board has provided ARTA with indicative funding information for the purposes of negotiations with a preferred tenderer, final approval of funding would not be considered until September 2009.  Agreement on funding will be dependent on ensuring that NZTA achieves value for money, and that the system for Auckland is compatible with the delivery of a national system and provides the scope for multiple technologies and operators interconnecting with a core central system.”

That sounded like the door was still open for another company especially as everyone agrees it has to be a national scheme and Infratil is already doing a scheme in Wellington. This is not just about Auckland but the capital and other regions as well so there is a lot of business at stake.

The latest NZTA delay suited Infratil to make a last-minute appeal and try to out-manoeuvre the opposition even though the transport agency has once before rejected Infratil’s pleas.

Whoever wins the ticketing cup and whoever gets shunted to the sidelines, let’s hope the ref blows the final whistle soon. They owe it to officials like ARA’s Mike Lee who have been tirelessly pacing the floor for several years trying to make this important and crucial thing happen.

Related posts:

1. Time To Return The Buses To Public Ownership? In view of the Auckland bus dispute, is it time...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.