The September ARTA monthly business report has been uploaded to Auckland Transport’s website, and the patronage statistics in particular make for spectacular reading. Here’s a summary of the report:
Two things in particular stand out: the 27% increase in rail patronage from September 2009 and the (obviously somewhat related) 25,000 passengers who took advantage of free trains on the weekend when the Newmarket viaduct was closed. Let’s hope that the powers to be remember how rail saved Auckland’s butt on this occasion, and consider similar ideas in the future when major road shutdowns are necessary. It’s also useful seeing that the Onehunga train station is performing as expected – one would imagine over time its patronage will grow and grow.
The rail patronage statistics are shown in the graph below – which clearly indicate exactly how spectacular September’s numbers are:
September 2010 was quite possibly (I don’t know the stats from decades ago) the second highest month ever for rail patronage in Auckland, after March this year.
Bus patronage growth was less spectacular, but still pretty solid. The statistics for October will look incredible as it will have been a year since the bus lockout of October 2009, so the year to date growth will go up enormously from October onwards I imagine:
While ARTA do break down bus patronage information by north, south, isthmus and west sectors, I really wish that they gave us more information on how the different routes perform. For example, it would be really interesting to know what difference the b.line branding exercise has made to patronage on Mt Eden and Dominion Road bus services. Surely this information is known?
In terms of infrastructure developments, things have been a bit quieter compared to the last year or so as many of the Project DART components are now completed. However, one of the most interesting things to see is progress being made on real time information signs – particularly for the rail network:
It would seem that this means all railway stations should have real time information signs by the end of June 2011. This will be fantastic.
Interestingly, there’s little mentioned about the CBD Rail Tunnel business case – just that the business case and concept designs will be “completed in October”. Well, um, it’s November now.
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Patronage keeps going up and up and the government needs to be reminded of this. I’m looking forward to Octobers results, my observations are that it was much busier than September and traditionally it has been a strong month overall, could we see another month over 900k on rail? I really wish the main stream media would pick up on this more than they do, we really need to dispel the myth that no one uses PT in Auckland.
Indeed Matt. Where is ARTA/Auckland Transport trumpeting this with media releases? All we get are stupid puff-piece media stories about free tickets to rugby games, a reassurance that IT login problems are about as bad as the transition is getting, or some other silly promotion.
I hope there is a big story about how rail has become since Britomart when the monthly patronage crosses one million. (march next year? -looks possible). Some nice pictures. And a plot of annual ridership should paint a nice picture.
Beyond that I expect to see opinion pieces / articles / letters complaining about crush loadings. Hopefully by then the successful tenderer will have some nice renders of the EMU’s ready to provide some light on the horizon.
I meant: about how “popular” rail has become
maybe AT (is that the right acronym?) staff are too busy redesigning PT services to feed Henderson.
Seriously for any AT staff who live in most parts of Auckland, PT will not be an option for if they live outside the rail corridor. network effect anyone?
That is pretty impressive — particularly if you look over the six year period shown in the graphs. There has been a better than 300% increase in rail patronage since September 2004. Go the trains!
Where are the extra rail passengers coming from: either former car drivers, or former car passengers (the distinction is important), former bus passengers, or natural growth?
One good sign is the growth on the Busway and the Northern Express – this is an excellent reminder that you can invest in bus services and see some significant differences.
In the earlier days of the “rail revival” I think many of the new passengers came from buses. That shows in the stats, where bus patronage fell quite a lot in that 2003-2006 period.
However, in recent years bus patronage (even outside the Northern Express) has continued to increase – if not at the spectacular levels of the RTN. That shows me that probably most new rail passengers come from cars (or at least the ones from buses are replaced by new bus passengers).
I’m not sure about car passenger statistics.
Of the 8.5m people per year now using the railway system, how many go through Britomart?
My assumption, and if people have the right numbers if they could confirm it please, is that about 4m of the 8.5m go through Britomart. This stands in some contrast to Wellington, where 90 percent of the 11m passengers per year are going through Wellington station proper.
Ross, why assuming only 50%? Britomart is the change point for Western-Eastern passengers, and seems to be the primary destination for passengers generally. Even accounting for the geographical diversity of employment in Auckland, the concentration of employment and education in still at Britomart: two major tertiary institutions (and AGGS), plus all the businesses in the CBD.
It’ll never get to the kind of primacy of Wellington Station, for the geographic diversity reasons, but I doubt it’ll handle less than a majority of passengers until we have a fully-functional CBD loop.
I think I remember reading 2/3rds of people went through Britomart. This will help Aucklands network pay its way as the patronage will be more spread out than Wellington, so the peak period is effectively longer.
@admin What also needs to be looked at is how many people are using 2 modes for regular trips
It is certain that the busway and train are displacing car journeys, but it would be interesting to know how much of the rail patronage is displaced “long distance” bus passengers, who may now be using a more local “feeder” bus and then the train for the bulk of their journey?, ( thus they are recorded as rail growth, but are still seen also in bus stats)
I suspect that an actual survey of rail passengers asking them what modes they used before switching to the train is probably the only way to discover this.
I think it will only be a matter of time before we surpass Wellington’s 11m, which is about time! That will be a milestone in itself. 12m trips per year will be a good one too cause that will mean an ‘average’ of 1million trips per month.
On a side note, it would be good to see more of a breakdown of the bus routes. I have noticed in the last couple of years of being a regular LINK user, it’s considerably more busier than what it used to be. Every morning I catch it from city to Newmarket, it’s always way overcrowded with about 10-20 standees. Would also be good to see b-line stats too.
I have to say that at the moment when I use the trains they seem to be pretty full.
The Southern 8:22 this morning heading to Britomart had quite a few exit at Newmarket and was borderline standing room and the Western heading for Britomart pulling in as we left was rammed to the gills.
Thats because the 7:21 6 car train from Swanswon was cancelled meaning there were 10 cars of patronage to fit into a 4 car train that usually gets overloaded on its own. People were left at stations as they couldn’t physically fit on the train, also while it was busy at Newmarket it was considerably less than was a few mins earlier at Grafton.