Tim Welch

A lot of it feels like last-minute, campaign-oriented promises rather than deep public transport and transport in general thought.

Well, it really depends on your perspective.

So in terms of providing a broad benefit to everybody who uses public transport, there is a pretty good potential that quite a few people could benefit.

Like this would actually reduce the cost of living for a large number of people.

What is going to draw criticism and already has some of those scratching our head is that

What does this mean for the regions that already have the cap in place in terms of their costs?

Who benefits the most?

We're likely to see big benefits going to the most expensive transport services.

And whether we should have maybe targeted those who are really struggling to pay for their transportation when there's already mechanisms in place that can more easily and maybe even more cheaply target those individuals.

We certainly are a car loving nation.

We hold, we kind of go back and forth between the first and third in the world for the number of vehicles we personally own.

So we have a lot of cars, we drive them quite a bit, and we've built a lot of our cities or rebuilt them really around the idea that most people will drive.

And as a result, that's what's happened.

But we also have quite a bit of evidence over the years from our own kind of national experiments of half price fares and free fares and things like that, that show people do respond to changes in price of public transportation.

We don't have to get into kind of the economic terms, but the idea is generally that there's an elasticity.

So as the fare changes, people do react.

And that's about...

what we call 0.4 elasticity.

So for every 10% increase or decrease in the cost of a fare, there's a 4% change in the number of people that will ride public transportation.

Yeah, so some of the issues will likely crop up if this goes through in our busiest lines, and particularly for bus lines in Auckland.