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Two years of ferry cancellations and confusing communication have left patrons unsure whether they can trust Fullers’ ferry services.
At the Transport and Infrastructure committee meeting on February 16, Cr John Watson, who chairs the committee, put forward a resolution to seek solutions to ferry deficiencies across Auckland after users raised issues with the reliability of service.
Gulf Harbour Ferry Users Group representative Anna Thorburn told the committee that ferry users have a crisis of confidence with Fullers.
“The ferry service from Gulf Harbour has been in place for 26 years and in the last two years we have seen it diminish significantly,” Thorburn said. “We hold Fullers accountable. Communications are appalling, and as a community we rely on each other to collate all of the alert data and bring it together to make sense of it.”
She said the ferry services were not world class public transport and emphasised the importance of keeping Auckland Transport’s “waka floating”.
Auckland Transport, which contracts the ferry service to Fullers, later made its presentation to the committee, citing a 97 percent reliability rating – Metro Services group manager, Darek Koper, said AT did not include cancellations in their reliability rate.
Cr Watson said public transport is in crisis. “We have a crisis within a crisis in respect of the ferry service,” he said.
Cr Watson said he did not believe that the crisis had fully been expressed by the public yet.
He read out a testimony of one Gulf Harbour ferry user who had seen travellers trying to get to the airport by a cancelled ferry, a mother who had to call family for help after she was stranded and a man subject to disciplinary hearings for the continuous issues with his commute.
Cr Watson’s resolution was supported unanimously, and progress will be reported back to the committee this month.
