The Post: Innovative, technologically savvy – not words you’d normally associate with councils

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For Nat Fraser, a vision-impaired resident of the Tawa hills, getting the groceries home used to be a tricky business. Living well away from conventional bus routes, she struggled with the long uphill walk home laden with shopping bags.

“I still need to have one hand using my cane,” she says – so carrying the shopping in the other created a safety hazard. “I don’t like not having one hand free. Then if I trip up, I haven’t got anything to save myself.” Her limited budget, meanwhile, largely ruled out taxi use.

Then, in May 2022, came Tawa’s trial of “on-demand” public transport: five 14-seater minivans that don’t follow fixed routes but can be hailed, using an app, from 600-odd locations around the suburb. Rides are a flat-rate $2.50.

I tested the service myself a few weeks back, in the company of Greater Wellington Regional Councillor Thomas Nash. Having caught the train to Tawa, we downloaded the app, requested a ride, and waited a few minutes for a minivan to hove into view. “It’s a big Uber, basically,” Nash said cheerfully as we climbed on board.

The comparison is inexact but telling, because – love it or loathe it – Uber is widely held to be everything governments are not: innovative, disruptive, technologically savvy. We typically think of the state as slow, out of touch, unable to deliver anything except bog-standard, mass-manufactured services – like conventional public transport.

The Tawa on-demand trial, however, tells a different story. Like any innovator, the regional council had spotted a problem. While standard bus routes served many Tawa residents well, other homes were as much as 25 minutes’ walk from a stop.

The suburb’s steep hills often made walking and cycling impractical. And, in the absence of public transport for the “last mile“ between the train station and home, some residents were driving the whole way into town, worsening congestion and emissions.

But cost and geography – Tawa’s winding roads can defeat standard-length buses – made adding normal bus routes infeasible. So the regional council turned to the on-demand services increasingly used by public bodies the world over.

The results, according to a council paper from June last year, were impressive. Patronage rose from 500 trips in the first month to 5500 a year later. Customer satisfaction was 96%, and surveys suggested almost two-thirds of users would otherwise have travelled by car.

When Nash and I did our test run, we were the only people in the minivan, but the regional council says just under half of all on-demand trips involve multiple passengers – and thus genuinely look like a public-transport service, or perhaps an Uber Share, rather than just a cheaper taxi.

Like all innovations, the on-demand service has thrown up surprises. Commuters, expected to make up the majority of users, in fact hail just one-third of all rides.

Other major patrons include schoolkids and – more strikingly – the socially isolated. During lunch at the Tawa café where the minivan deposited us, Nash told me most users “are actually older people and people who otherwise would have struggled to get around”.

They may not be able to drive, or cannot afford to, or cannot physically manage the walk to a bus stop. Nash had heard “really touching stories” of people who wouldn’t otherwise leave the house “being way more socially active” thanks to the service.

Given the immense social cost of loneliness, which can be as bad for your health as smoking, this is good news not just for the individuals concerned but also the public purse – and society as a whole. “Public transport shouldn’t just be about people who work Monday to Friday going to their jobs,” Nash said. “It should be about connecting people.”

It’s not cheap, of course: the on-demand service costs $12-$13 per trip, as opposed to $9.90 for standard bus trips. But the regional council hopes to bring that figure down.

Delighted by the trial’s results, the council has extended the service for another year, and rolled it out to parts of Porirua. A “game-changer”, Nash added, is that Labour, before it lost power, made on-demand services eligible for the same central-government subsidies as conventional buses.

The service will have to keep evolving: I was told, anecdotally, that the app doesn’t perfectly fit together the jigsaw puzzle of multiple journey requests, and sometimes drivers have to override it to make sure everyone gets to their destination in time.

But innovation is almost always incremental. Users like Nat Fraser say they “just love” the service. And it’s a signpost towards a world where public bodies rapidly innovate, and, far from being helplessly buffetted by global forces or retreating to conventional answers, they find new ways to solve the public problems that life constantly throws at us.