ARTA have (finally) got around to uploading the August 2010 Monthly Business Report to their website, and the patronage statistics are pretty damn impressive. Here’s a quick overview of what’s in the report:
Some of those numbers are pretty impressive – 7.8% patronage increase overall, 17% increase in rail patronage and a very healthy increase in bus patronage too. This is before the service increases in September and before the opening of the Onehunga Line (and the New Lynn transport centre) – so it will be fascinating to see how the patronage in September stacks up.
Looking at the details of the patronage data, we can see the upswing in the last year or two particularly when you look at the rolling average:
Once again, the rail network and the Northern Express bus lead the way in terms of patronage. The Northern Express patronage is still increasing at around 20% compared to the same month a year ago. One wonders how much longer that can continue before it reaches saturation point.
The massive increases in patronage are also visible when looking at patronage on the rail network:
Interesting to see that this time last year the increases in rail patronage were pretty low, but this year we’ve seen really big increases. This is likely to be a result of having double-tracking completed on the Western Line and having the Newmarket station reopened.
There were relatively few network developments during August, as Project DART works neared completion and electrification is still yet to fully kick into action. Probably what happened most in Auckland were last minute touches to Onehunga and New Lynn – prior to their opening in September:
One last thing to note is that the report says that the CBD Rail Tunnel’s business case and draft concept designs would be completed by September. Umm…. it’s now mid October – what’s going on?
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I have said elsewhere, I hope the government is listening that Aucklanders do actually use rail and that the kind of growth that we are seeing is pretty impressive.
As for the CBD tunnel business case – supposedly it was getting peer reviewed at the moment.
Northern Busway and b-line bus routes: The integrated ticketing is going to give these routes a huge extra boost. Time to look at 100 seat double decker buses for peak times on these high capacity routes. Need to improve travel times from other outlying areas like Botany, Manurewa and Waitakere into the Auckland CBD.
I think we’ve crossed the 5,000,000 a month threshold once and for all (except maybe Jan) and by extension 60,000,000 a year…
Looks like Brown has already rolled over on the Puhoi to Wellsford highway.
Brown accepts ‘holiday highway’
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10680674
Flip……………. Flop…..
Flip……………. Flop…..
Eh? I don’t recall Brown campaigning that he was going to get that particular project canned. Did I miss something?
The only way that particular ROSN is going away is with pressure on central government from the Opposition, highlighting how thoroughly wasteful it is. If Auckland tries, we’ve established that we’ll just get trite responses along the lines of “You’re just being selfish, and this road is about improving Northland’s lot. Fair suck of the sav and all that.”
Rail patronage is growing so fast, at this rate Auckland Rail will have 10 Million passenger trips per annum within 12 months!
Watch out when integrated ticketing hits!
The Southern line is getting close to capacity, we might not be able to fit them in…
The weak ferry patronage numbers are no surprise: August was a particularly bad month operations-wise for Fullers with Quickcat out on survey and Superflyte out of action for mechanical reasons. The patronage fall taken together with the selective discount for September passengers (monthly pass holders only) makes it unsurprising too that Fullers needed to rack up fares in October under the GST increase fig leaf.
Meanwhile Stephen Joyce has his fingers in his ears and his eyes closed.
Josh, have you tried pointing this figures in the direction of Hughes and Norman, with 70-point, bold, red type explaining that 842k/31=27k/day=more people than drive on Joyce’s precious road to Wellsford? Because, damnit, someone needs to call him on that particular lie. And hard.
I imagine ARTA is somewhat busy and dysfunctional what with the transition to the Supercity….why do you think they haven’t loaded up their August report until October?
I already pointed out that discrepancy to Gareth Hughes. I doubt personally Joyce was actively lying – think he was just going off rail patronage figures for some years ago. Not everybody finds these things so exciting that they await ARTA’s latest monthly report with impatience 🙂
Lucy, no, with Joyce I think it’s pretty fair to call it lying. Whether it’s because he genuinely wants to mislead the House (which is very naughty), or just because he’d rather not appraise himself with the true numbers, it’s still a lie. He’s the Minister of Transport, which means he’s meant to at least have a rudimentary understanding of the state of things like Auckland rail patronage.
What’s worse is that Labour and the Greens don’t appear to care enough to call him on it. So he just keeps on saying it, and as the saying goes, if you repeat a lie enough times it eventually becomes the truth.
I think that the numbers that he is using could be correct but that he is not comparing them fairly by comparing the number of people with the number of trips.
He said the number of people using the rail network was about 22k, not the number of trips on the network. That would probably equate to roughly 40k trips which would be about correct during a weekday.
On the highway we also know that about 15k vehicles use the road daily and he said about 25k people were using it. That works out to be an occupancy of about 1.6 people per car which while it seems a bit high isn’t unreasonable. The problem of course is that many of the trips will be people driving from Warkworth to Auckland and then home again later and that he is counting these as two separate journeys while on rail counting them as one.
He may not be lying with the figures but he is definitely misleading.
From what’s been said here in the last couple of days, 15k would be the absolute upper bound, and only as far as Warkworth. I believe Josh said it’s more like 9k vehicles as far as Warkworth. That’s a long way short of more people than Auckland’s rail.
err, that’d be only 9k vehicles as far as Wellsford.
Joyce uses the numbers fed to him by a Government department whose senior staff did their masters in arrogance!
Arrogance or ignorance?
Both… Equally…