The Campaign For Better Transport

Fullers ferry company and connecting bus operators are offering people a week’s free travel over the next month on the following ferry services: Half Moon Bay, Devonport, Stanley Bay, Birkenhead, Bayswater and Northcote Pt.  The offer is valid from Monday 31 August until Sunday 27 September.   Associated feeder bus services are also covered in the offer.

Passengers are asked to register with ARTA and nominate the calendar week in which they wish to travel for free.

The full article in the Herald is available here.

The Herald reports a last minute reprieve for the Coromandel ferry service.

A ferry service from Auckland to Coromandel is to continue as authorities wanting to keep the business afloat look at throwing it a lifeline.

Ferry operator Discovery 360, which runs a service between Auckland and Coromandel via Waiheke, Ponui, Rotoroa and Pakatoa Islands, five times a week, had planned to stop sailings tomorrow.

Discovery 360 said it had lost money since it started the service three years ago and requests for funding assistance from Environment Waikato had been unsuccessful.

About 24,000 passengers used the service on one-way trips over the past 12 months but a spokeswoman said it would need an extra 50 passengers a week to remain viable. “And that’s not likely to happen on a cold August day,” she said.

But after talks yesterday with the Thames Coromandel District Council, NZ Transport Agency and Environment Waikato, the ferry service said it would continue on a month-by-month basis.

Can’t say I’ve seen this service widely advertised in Auckland, but the timetable is here. From memory I think there used to be a car ferry as well.  I would have thought that this would be a great alternative to the Kopu Bridge.

John Roughan’s anti-public transport articles are becoming tiresome of late.  Most recently, he opines that the “active retired do not need free public transport.”

What he fails to acknowledge is that public transport provides choice.  Thanks to free ferries and public transport after 9am, SuperGold card holders now have the choice of spending less money on petrol, car running costs and parking and more on the cafes of Devonport, the wineries of Waiheke or, for that matter, food, heating or gifts for the grandchildren.

Mr Roughan is right to be concerned about the cost of providing off-peak travel to seniors.  His article would therefore have been more useful if he had investigated why tax and ratepayers are paying millions more to transport operators for providing off-peak travel to SuperGold card holders, when the marginal cost must be close to zero.

Perhaps there are improvements we can make to the public transport contracting model. Perhaps the Public Transport Management Act isn’t working as intended.  Perhaps we get greater economic returns from free off-peak travel than we realised.  Unfortunately from Mr Roughans’ article, we’ll never know.