Auckland Transport has (finally) uploaded the public transport patronage report for April 2011. The results are pretty solid, if not quite as spectacular as March’s patronage. Here are the highlights:
The headline figures above are pretty much bang on what would have been expected. Once again growth in rail patronage significantly outpaced any other increase.

Here are the more detailed figures:It’s interesting to break down these figures to see what parts of the network have particularly strong growing demand, and what areas have slower growth. Within the bus network once again the Northern Express has faster growth than the remainder of the bus system – although compared to previous years when the NEX had patronage growing at 20% a year things have slowed down a bit. I guess that’s a reflection of capacity constraints at the park and ride stations, as well as capacity constraints on the buses themselves.

It’s also slightly concerning to see that patronage on the Southern & Eastern Lines was actually down on April 2010 figures. To some extent I think that’s probably the result of many of the Onehunga Line passengers coming from southern line stations (Penrose, Ellerslie, Greenlane and Remuera) – but in general is seems that Southern & Eastern trains are perhaps getting close to passenger capacity.

The graph below shows longer term patronage trends. One thing it clearly highlights is the need for Auckland Transport to introduce additional public transport capacity before March each year: it’s pretty silly for us to now have a pile more buses operating on our roads in April and May when the patronage each March is generally around a million higher overall than any other month of the year. Patronage growth in the Rapid Transit Network (the rail system plus the Northern Express) outpaced growth on the rest of the network – as usual. This highlights the pretty obvious fact that people value their public transport being fast and unaffected by congestion: If we look at the 12 month rolling patronage data for rail, you can see that we’re not too far way from hitting 10 million passengers a year. I suspect that by the time of the rugby world cup we will probably reach that amount – particularly with every game effectively adding a weekday’s worth of patronage to the statistics.

For “normal buses” (ie, not the Northern Express) the patronage increase has been lower than for the RTN, but still pretty acceptable. I generally try to focus on what’s happening with these buses as they do provide the bulk of public transport in Auckland. One thing that has been particularly pleasing about patronage growth over the past few months is that it has extended away from just the RTN to the other bus routes too. That continues in April, although not quite to the extent that we’ve seen in previous months:

I may be sounding a little like a broken record, but if we are to get anywhere near Mayor Len Brown’s target of doubling patronage in the next 10 years, the bulk of that increase will need to be carried by bus, and in particular the bulk will need to be outside the RTN: parts of the PT network that haven’t seen particularly strong growth over the past few years (up until very recently). These parts of the system simply cannot afford to be neglected.

Analysing the bus patronage further, once again the strongest growth is in the north and south. April 2011 bus patronage in the isthmus was lower than the year before’s: which is a bit of a worry:

I must say it is quite interesting to compare this data with the big drop in state highway traffic volumes in recent months.

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6 comments

  1. And yet I still have to read Traffic Impact Assessments (TIA’s) and Integrated Transport Assessments (ITA’s) that predict traffic levels will increase by 30% for new greenfield subdivisions that won’t come on line till about 2016 – 2026. This is when petrol will be priced at ???

    Go figure…

  2. Easter was in April this year, It was in March last year, Being a moveable feast it tends to cock-up annual comparisons around this time of the year. Probably best to just add March and April figures and simply treat them together…

  3. Sounds like exodus from the motorway system and on to buses and trains!
    Once you have good patronage growth, it pretty much forces proper transport improvements, which then feeds off itself to induce even more patronage growth.

    Bring the BUZ to Auckland!
    B-line buses 15 minute frequency or better 6am-11.30 pm, all day every day! 7 days per week.
    Brisbane has added another more BUZ routes to its network recently- and patronage is growing nicely.

  4. The whole doubling of patronage thing is a pretty bold goal, as you have previously discussed.
    If we get down to 9 years and 11 months we could always implement central area private vehicle dissuasion measures.
    They can dramatically alter mode-share, literally overnight!
    Probably won’t get a seat on the Link the next day though.

    But seriously, I really appreciate the continual posting of the stats as soon as they are available, very useful.

    Even more seriously: all future comments will be in Haiku form.

  5. @BrisUrbane
    You are lucky, since the introduction of ‘B-line’ services, the frequency of buses past my stop has halved.

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