Anyone who takes a bus in Wellington knows about Snapper cards – the little red credit card lookalikes that make a voice blurt: “Please Don’t Forget to Tag Off”, “Card Value Low” and, most ominously, “Insufficient Funds” as you board.
They let you travel at a discount to cash fares and some day, hopefully, they’ll be in a lot more shops and cafes than they are now. They’ve had their teething problems and probably discourage the congenitally introverted from ever taking public transport with their braying messages, but they do seem to work.
By the end of this year, says Tim Brown of Infratil, which launched Snapper in Wellington, they could be in use on all bus lines, rail services, ferries, taxis and even the Wellington cable car.
He already has a Wellington Stadium pass with a Snapper card built in that knows he’s a season ticket-holder, creating a secure entry system to the big games that beats the pants off the mauled bits of cardboard that most of us punters use to get through the turnstiles.
The Snapper system uses world-class technology that stands the daily test of 25 million transactions in the teeming public transport systems of the South Korean capital, Seoul, and it’s cost less than $11 million to get to this point.
Imagine a system like that, says Brown, in operation on Auckland transport when the Rugby World Cup is on. You could leave the house without your wallet and take buses, trains, taxis and ferries to get to Eden Park, swipe your way into the game, buy a beer in the stands and get home again – all with just your Snapper card.
That is Infratil’s vision. Brown says it could be implemented well before the Rugby World Cup, draw on lessons from the Wellington launch to go more smoothly, and best of all, not a cent of ratepayers’ money would be involved.
Except that it will probably never happen. Instead, says Brown, the Auckland Regional Transport Authority will spend many times what Infratil proposes and may, if all goes smoothly, have a pilot scheme in place by some time in 2011.
ARTA controls the introduction of electronic ticketing for the country’s biggest city, and is so ideologically opposed to a private sector solution, says Brown, that it is hard-wired to expect the successful implementation of Infratil’s solution to be “all a horrible private sector mistake”.
As a result, ARTA and its chairman, Mike Lee, will end up giving Aucklanders something very like a Snapper card, at very much greater cost, through a French rather than a local provider, and none of this in time for the Rugby World Cup. Infratil have beaten several paths to the door of Transport Minister Steven Joyce, whom Brown says would have “killed it (the ARTA process) in five seconds” if he could have, but the system must grind on.
In the process, he notes, ARTA has already spent $11 million – more than it cost to implement the whole Snapper system in Wellington – just to hold the tender process for Auckland’s system. It appears almost certain to see a contract awarded to the French provider, Thales, who will have no more than a pilot scheme in place by 2011.
Worst of all, says Brown, this will all be done on the public purse when private money would willingly take the risk and do it at lower cost.
Now, of course, Brown has an axe to grind. He must be particularly steamed to have the head of the New Zealand Transport Agency, Geoff Dangerfield, dismiss the Snapper as no more than a “bus-based stored value card”. Dangerfield is in charge of thinking about a national e-ticket system, which of course Infratil would love to run.
As Snapper’s CEO Miki Szikszai said yesterday: “Obviously we need to have a chat with him. We have a different view of our capability.”
Infratil was also unsuccessful in challenging the way the ARTA tender round was conducted and, in the best Kiwi traditions of giving a dog a bad name, Snapper and Infratil are in danger of just looking like sore losers.
ARTA’s Mike Lee is certainly rampantly unsympathetic, telling BusinessWire recently: “Infratil have their own semi-integrated ticket which they are now trying to foist on Auckland, lobbying their friends in government. It’s not up to international standards.
“Infratil would increase their monopoly influence over Auckland. All my advice is that the Snapper card and Infratil don’t come anywhere near the winners but want political influence by holding up the process.”
But hang on – Snapper is in place and working in Wellington, and is clearly lower cost than whatever process ARTA proposes since it’s already spent more on a tender than Infratil spent getting it up and running. And if ARTA isn’t a kind of monopoly, then what is?
And as Brown gleefully observes, a Sydney local government effort to introduce e-ticketing has only just been abandoned after years of enormous cost, for a system that was supposed to be in place for the Sydney Olympics, however long ago that was.
Why would we trust local government to do this sort of thing well, he argues?
Infratil’s interest in this is naturally profit-driven – it owns the bus companies in Auckland and Wellington and it wants to capture as big a slice as it can of the spending on transport, coffee, buns, and newspapers that go with the working day while automating its cash handling. No doubt it earns interest on funds deposited on the thousands of cards in circulation.
But if the alternative -public ownership – requires far longer, potentially greater execution risk, lost opportunity for a showcase world sporting event, and unnecessarily large costs to taxpayers and ratepayers, what are we gaining from all this? Why does it matter who owns it as long as it works and doesn’t cost us all more than it needs to?
So here’s a suggestion. Next time you find yourself listening to Bill English rabbiting on about New Zealand’s feeble productivity and the need to do things quicker, smarter, and cheaper, and you’re not quite sure what he means, think of this example.
Even if Tim Brown is only half-right about the hurdles a good idea faces in this country, we should all be very worried. It’s no way to run a bus service, let alone a country.
(BusinessWire)
Looks like ARTA has an axe to grind with Infratil and would rather waste Auckland rate payers money than see a cent of profit go to Infratil.
So profit cap it with genuinely transparent books? There has to be a point at which the client (us) is no longer happy with it being a monopoly. Monopolies are not in themselves evil – until you are being shafted by one. If Infratil have the sustainability of the “cow” in mind then they will not “milk it of cash” too greedily.
If it is true that ARTA have already spent $11M on the process with no deliverables then somebody needs their botty smacked (sorry Sue) – maybe with the empty public purse?
It is never too late to abandon the existing project and loose the 11 million already spent by ARTA and let wise counsel prevail. Why should the tax payer loose more money (it will be much more) putting good money after the bad?
Also why should we desist from using the private sector when it can deliver better and at lower costs and in time for 2011?
I think that the government and in particular the politicians should look towards saving the tax payer’s money, specially in these times and do what is best for the people and not what is good for themselves.
What a shame that Mike Lee and ARTA are such control freaks. I’ve watched, with great interest, the introduction of Snapper in Wellington. There is no logic for ARTA and Lee to be so antagonistic regarding Snapper other than that they have their collective minds closed to the opportunity Snapper offers and a rabid desire for control. All regardless of the cost to their constituents, we the long suffering ARTA ratepayers. Closed minds very much come to mind when you consider the Lee/ARTA approach to the use of diesel powered transport. In an NZ Herald article on environmental issues not long ago, Mike Lee stated categoricaly that ARTA will not even contemplate using diesel powered vehicles because they are so environmentally unfriendly and innefficient. Mike, Mike, hello, wake up! Maybe that view had relevance 15 years ago. But today? And Lee/ARTA wonder why so many of us can’t wait to get rid of their mindless, controlling, bloated, inefficient (and monopolistic) bureacracy. Keep at it Tim (Brown), the good guys do win in the end. It’s just that in the meantime in Auckland, the constituents get screwed by paying for Lee/ARTA’s experiments and mistakes, all in the absolute desire for control. Jaydee
Thank you
C’mon Smellie, get with it. Snapper is nothing more than a pimped-up debit card. The reasons for ARTA going with Thales are manifold and include;
1. Integrated ticketing requires a centralised accounting/charging system. Snapper confines each fare to a single bus tag on/tag off. Proper integrated ticketing lets you tag on once at the start of your journey and tag off once at the end – all within a specified time period dependent on the distance travelled and modes of transport. You need to be able to let a traveller use, say a bus, ferry and train for one journey and be charged one (discounted) fare for the whole journey. The discount would vary according to the length of the journey.
2. Because of the above limitation of Snapper, it costs $4 to travel from Karori to Lyall Bay in Wgtn, but $6 to travel from Island Bay to Lyall Bay which is only 20% of the former’s distance – not what integrated ticketing is about.
3. If snapper was to become NZ’s integrated ticketing system provider, Infratil/NZ Bus would be privy to other transport operators’ fare revenue and passenger loading information which would give it an unfair advantage in the tender rounds for government subsidies. You don’t see Infratil/NZ Bus providing this information to their competitors.
4. Sydney used a different system provider – not Thales but an Australian one that I believe Infratil director Duncan Saville has links to. Some of the problems were caused by several independent transport operators wanting to keep their own ticketing system – exactly what NZ bus is trying here.
5. The Thales system has operated very sucessfully in many of the world’s major cities for several years. Snapper is just a newcomer that has already had a very chequered history in Wellington.
Will
Some corrections
1. Snapper runs on a centralised clearing house, which is the same that runs 25 million transactions per day in Seoul and has done so for the last 5 years. We have full transfer capability based on time of day, peak/off peak, and mode. The examples you give are completely possible with Snapper – it’s the fare policy that governs the actual price paid.We have the capability to do this now. Just take a trip on a Valley Flyer bus and see that transfers are live and well on the Snapper system.
2. Our business is based on complete separation and transparency of the data. We don’t run a ticketing system, we run a scheme. Schemes are about protecting their members own business interest while at the same time delivering capability that other scheme members benefit from. We have non-Infratil companies signing up now who are naturally confident that their data remains their data.
3. Snapper is approaching 100k cards on issue in Wellington without any taxpayer or ratepayer subsidies. There is no doubt there were issues at the start. Those are behind us now and we have processed almost 10m transactions at 99.99% accuracy. It’s based on the system used in Seoul which processes billions of journeys per annum. To put that in context, *all* of NZ’s annual public transport transactions are processed in 4 days in Seoul.
On top of that, we have completed all the localisation, we’re up and running and there is no taxpayer or ratepayer risk.We think we are in the best position to provide a system for NZ – we are already doing it.
Miki
CEO
Snapper