What Needs to be Done
We have seen that bus lane regulations, and the enforcement thereof, is necessary to make public transportation in Auckland more efficient. But we have also seen that the enforcement of these bus lane regulations should not come at come at the cost of producing public transport and the Auckland City Council itself. Market failure and government failure analysis provide an important insight into why and how current bus lane measures should be addressed. Market failure analysis described the relationship between motorists and the Auckland City Council in the transportation market. The market failures relating to this relationship presented us with rationales for government action. Yet, our analysis of government failures suggested that government actions are not always popular and successful. Although we established that government action is most likely the best option for dealing with market failures. Not forgetting that market failures, as we have described in this context, come in the form of information asymetries and negative externalities. Information asymetry, in this context, presents itself in the knowledge gap between citizens and the Council, in terms of the Council’s lack of promotion and education about bus lane rules and their lack of transparency in terms of fines and infringement procedures. In addition, negative externalities are experienced in the form of safety risks towards others as a result of unsatisfactory bus lane procedures.
Furthermore, this argument for fairer bus lane regulations would most likely have been strengthened by conducting comparative institutional analysis and implementation analysis, although doing do would have gone beond the scope of this report. Comparative Institutional Analysis (CIA) is useful in developing an effective policy in response to specific problems. Use of this technique, which compares working examples of institutional arrangements, can provide powerful evidence for supporting the development of effective public policies. As such, through CIA we could have looked at bus lane regulations in different cities and also other countries and attempt to compare how lessons learnt in those cases can be applied to the bus lane situation here in Auckland. A brief and local example is the Christchurch where the local council has conducted successful information campaigns (devoted websites, etc) in order to educate citizens about bus priority measure; something which the Auckland City Council is yet to look into. In addition, implementation analysis aims to increase the chances that new policies will perform as intended, that the will not create negative consequences, and that they will not be undermined by opponents. Therefore, implementation analysis would have been useful to justify proposed amendments to the Auckland City Council’s current bus lane policies, and also help us to think about procedures which may help new policies to best succeed in light of problems presented by former policies. Therefore, CIA and implementation analysis would allow us to explore the ideas and concepts presented here in much more detail.
Make your own comparison of bus priority measures in London here.