How to grow PT patronage

In recent years patronage on public transport across the Auckland region clearly has grown fairly significantly. Boardings in 2009 were the highest for many many years, with rail patronage in particular the highest perhaps ever in Auckland. This is shown in the graph below, which comes from the ARC’s Auckland Regional Land Transport Strategy: Report on Progress 2007/09, which is the document that the interesting article in the NZ Herald last week on how public transport trips are getting longer, was based on. What this graph doesn’t show is the decades of declining patronage before 1990 – right from the 1950s when Auckland had some of the highest per capita usage of public transport in the whole world. Then from the mid-1990s until 2003-2004 patronage grew fairly steadily: both on the bus network and then later on, on the trains. The period between around 2004 and 2007 is quite strange actually, as public transport patronage actually fell. I’m not quite sure what happened there, although I remember that the reduction in numbers of international language students may have had an impact. In any case, over the past few years the worrying 2004-2007 trend has been reversed. The most dramatic growth has been on the rail system, although in 2008 and 2009 bus patronage also grew.

But of course that’s only absolute numbers. Auckland’s population itself is growing – fairly rapidly so for the past couple of decades. So the really interesting question, in many respects, is whether the modeshare for public transport has increased, decreased or remained roughly the same over this time. This data is captured by censuses, and is detailed in the table below:

These numbers are a bit dangerous in isolation (which is probably why Steven Joyce loves to quote them), but what they do show is that the modeshare of public transport – the percentage of people who choose to use public transport to get to work – has actually declined over the past 20 years, from around 7.1% (buses and trains) in 1991 to 6.5% in 2006. Therefore, while patronage has grown, its rate of growth has been outpaced by general population growth, meaning that the percentage of people catching public transport now is lower than it was back in 1991. Things may have changed a bit since 2006 I probably should add.

However, as I noted above the census figures are very crude, and in many cases miss some important points. In terms of public transport offering real congestion relief benefits, what matters is the modeshare it captures along certain routes at certain times of the day, most particularly at peak hour. To provide further information on this, the ARC have undertaken a number of surveys along certain routes during peak hour. This information provides quite a useful insight into how public transport in Auckland really works I think: 

As you can see, in some areas there has been big growth in public transport modeshare over this period – most notably on the Harbour Bridge, from the west and from the eastern isthmus area/Manukau (presumably that includes the Howick/Pakuranga/Botany area). Improvements to the Western Line are the most obvious explanation for that increase, and the Northern Busway could be seen as the reason behind the Harbour Bridge’s increase, although that wouldn’t explain most of the gains that occurred prior to the busway opening in 2008.

Perhaps what is of most note though is the “CBD screenline” figure. This represents the public transport modeshare of all people travelling into the CBD in the morning peak, and shows that this has increase from around a third of all people in 1991 to almost half of all people in 2009. As shown in the graph below, this represents almost 35,000 people arriving in the CBD by public transport during the morning peak each weekday: Now while we can certainly hope to improve this figure further in the future (the CBD Rail Tunnel will play a big role in that), it would appear to me that what really holds back increased public transport patronage in the Auckland region (and all the environmental, social and economic benefits that flows from that) are two issues:

1. The proportion of people working in the CBD is declining.
2. The PT “capture” of people travelling from suburb to suburb is extremely low.

While Auckland’s growth strategies certainly anticipate a concentration of employment in the CBD, as well as various other regional centres (such as Takapuna, Manukau City, New Lynn, Henderson etc.) there hasn’t been particularly much evidence of this “re-centralisation of employment” in recent years. So while that issue may be addressed in the longer term, I tend to think that we need to focus on improving public transport for those who don’t work in the CBD. As I’ve explained previously, the only cost-effective way to do this is by creating “the network effect”, where a network of routes, linked together by easy transfers, make it possible for people to travel from anywhere to anywhere via public transport.

In other words, while further increasing the PT modeshare of trips to the CBD is important (particularly so as these are often the trips which generate the most congestion), if we really want to increase patronage significantly, we need to do better attracting patronage from those who don’t work in the CBD. That’s easier said than done of course, but hopefully integrated ticketing, more bus lanes and the eventual creation of a true public transport network will help that.

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