By Laura Kvigstad, Auckland Council reporter funded by New Zealand on Air
Auckland Transport has denied community speculation that it is running down ferry services in order to discontinue them.
At the Transport and Infrastructure Committee on August 17, Auckland Transport (AT) executives explained the further troubled waters ahead for Auckland ferry services.
Fullers has decided not to renew its contract for the Bayswater, Birkenhead and Northcote ferry services which expire on October 1.
The Gulf Harbour and Half Moon Bay off-peak ferry services are also being reduced or removed while new skippers are trained.
Auckland Transport’s executive general manager Stacey van der Putten confirmed AT was intending to continue the services to Bayswater, Birkenhead and Northcote as soon as a new ferry operator could be contracted.
“We don’t want to over promise and under deliver to these communities so we should have a really, really good indication … what we can do,” van der Putten said.
She said AT was looking at supplementary services like buses where ferry services were reduced or removed. Cr Richard Hills asked for a “categorical promise” that AT’s intention was to keep ferry services.
“There is an assumption that we are making it bad so the numbers look bad and then we pull them,” Hills said. Van der Putten rebuffed the insinuation.
“There is no intention to withhold services to Gulf Harbor or any of these ferry services. Our intention is to get the proper service allocation back to where it needs to be,” she said.
Chair John Watson said Gulf Harbour ferry users had every reason to believe AT was running down the service. “There was a proposal in four years’ time to actually withdraw that service – it is hard to deny that the services are being run down, that the cancellation rate is chronic,” Watson said.
“For this month, [Gulf Harbour ferry services] are running at over 50 per cent cancellation rate. I don’t think anyone in this room or any person in Auckland Transport would be catching any form of public transport if it only turned up one out of two times that it was scheduled.”
