Patronage growth – why hide the good news?

One extremely annoying thing about the new “Auckland Transport” is that they have discontinued ARTA’s tradition of publishing a breakdown of monthly public transport patronage data. While at some level this is could be seen as merely an annoyance for public transport nerds like myself, I think there’s a bigger “public relations” reason why we need more patronage data more frequently – and that is we need to sell the success of public transport to both the public and also (perhaps more particularly) to skeptical central government politicians.

It may sound sensible to spend lots of money on roads and hardly any on public transport when you’re spouting numbers like “there are over 3 million car trips a day in Auckland and less than 200,000 public transport trips”; it sounds a whole heap less sensible to have such lop-sided transport policies if you can say “over the past two years traffic numbers haven’t increased in Auckland, while public transport patronage has been increasing by nearly 10% a year over the same time period”. After all, we plan and build new transport infrastructure for the future, not the past – and nobody’s proposing to tear up any roads (except perhaps the Lower Hobson Street viaduct) any time soon.

In order to have good arguments, and Auckland Transport desperately needs to work with Auckland Council to make the argument for public transport, we need the data. NZTA are excellent at providing monthly information on traffic volume trends along state highways (although their assumption that traffic volumes are continually growing is a bit of a lie). Frustrated by Auckland Transport’s inability to make public any PT data since they were formed last year, regular commenter Luke sent in an official information request, with the request also seeking information right back to 2002. The file he received from Auckland Transport can be viewed here. To make it a bit easier to understand, CBT forum member “Scott” has put the data into a graph:

The particularly interesting months to look at are those from October 2010 onwards, because we’ve never seen this data before. They show a great recovery in October from the October 2009 bus lockout, then a particularly excellent result in November 2009 before smaller increases in December and January. It’s good to see that January managed a slight increase from the year before, even though pretty much the whole railway network was closed for most of that month. Patronage in the 12 months to January 2011 was 63.6 million, up 8% on the same previous 12 months. October was up by 21% (recovery from the previous year’s lockout) but most spectacularly November patronage was up by 15% on the year before. December also enjoyed a 6% increase.

What’s frustrating about all this good news is how difficult it has been to get this information out of Auckland Transport. We shouldn’t have to be doing official information requests to find all this out – Auckland Transport should be trumpeting it as a huge success, particularly the November results. I’m sure that Len Brown would have appreciated the opportunity to say, in December when there was a huge debate going on about the CBD Rail Tunnel, that PT patronage had gone up by 15% the previous month compared to the same month last year.  If I were him, or any other Auckland Council member – trying to argue the case for better PT – I’d be damn right annoyed with Auckland Transport that they’ve been so secretive with this information.

Update:

Auckland Transport clearly keep a reasonably close eye on this blog, as merely an hour or so after this post went up I’ve received so more detailed patronage information from them for January 2011:

For the 12 months to 31 January
Total public transport patronage 63,592,200
Bus – 49,807,116
Rail – 9,095,731
Ferry – 4,609,353

For the month of January 2011 (comparisons to Jan 2010)
Total patronage 3,905,984, up 33,025 boardings (0.9%) for the month
RTN total patronage 579,052, up 2296 boardings (0.4%) for the month
· Northern Express 116,417, up 12,935 boardings (12.5%) for the month
· Rail western line 170,601, up 42,371 boardings (33%) for the month
· Rail Southern and Eastern Line 292,034 (includes Onehunga patronage of 35,927) down 53,010 (-15.4%) for the month.

QTN and LCN patronage 2,869,661 (excludes ferry and school bus), up 34,357 (1.2%) for the month

Ferry patronage 457,220 (down 3679 boarding (0.8%) for the month

I’ll be doing my best to get similar data out of them for October to December last year.

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