From time to time I have a look around the Auckland Transport website to see if anything new and interesting is added. I decided to do that today and found this graph, it is showing the history of Auckland’s population, the number of PT trips as well as the total number of registered cars in the country as well as the number of new cars registered each year from 1920 through to 2011.
It does show quite clearly we still have a long way to go just to get out total PT usage back to what it was before the tram lines were removed in the 50’s
Also I have noticed that AT have put links on their home page to the latest patronage stats (April) as well as the minutes from the open session of the last board meeting. It is good to see that being made easier to find they both tended to be a bit buried before.
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Great, just the kind of statistic I was looking for. It also reminded me of the reason PT patronage has gone into a decline – trams… I’m writing a post myself of improving Auckland’s PT ecosystem.
Do you have any modal share statistics? Off to have a dig on the AT website…
I only have modal stats back to 2002 however I have seen graphs in the past with some modal stats back to at least the 1950’s. AT have this info but I haven’t seen it published so you might need to request it directly from them (The graphs said the data came from ‘ARTA 2007b’)
Is it just me or is there a pretty serious drop off in new car registrations over the past 2-3 years?
yes there’s a drop off, to be expected during a recession, i don’t think you can put it all down to petrol prices, infact you might expect sales to jump as people purchase newer fuel efficient vehicles – you can get almost 90MPG from a modern diesel small car…
So this shows us Auckland’s PT trips, and New Zealand’s vehicle fleet…. bit nuts isn’t it?…. Are we witnessing peak cars? Maybe we are, or near it in AK, as we build alternatives to car use, much harder of course in the countryside and provincial towns.
Although they are a bonkers comparison I’m picking AK’s PT trips to double to 4mil before the vehicle count gets there…. 2020?
in the top two or three counties in the world for motor vehicles per capita, i believe.
FAIL
The PT stats and the vehicle fleet stats are on a different axis but I’m assuming you mean PT trips will reach 120m before the vehicle fleet gets to 4m
Yes, thanks Matt, that is what I mean. And tochigi, we aren’t surprised are we, what’s the alternative to driving been like? Note in the herald today that the trains to Eden Park were slow and hopeless…. Long way to go. Still there is a lot to work on even before electrification and if only we can get real service improvements the momentum will become unstoppable for the CRL by the time it’s finished.
28 mins to Kingsland, according to the Herald article. that is appalling.
I think we have hit ‘peak cars’ in a way, because the market is saturated at close to one car per adult already. From here it could only drift up with population growth, unless we got super rich like Brunei or something where having multiple cars per person was common.
Yes I think you’re right Nick, the really interesting thing is if we start to see a decline in the numbers per capita, but, a-ha, that’s the whole subtext of this site, as that’s dependent on there being a real alternative to driving being built. Onward.
If the government’s employment stats are accurate we hit peak cars in the 1970’s, since then there has only been a 25% increase in cars per worker, ie less than 1% a year compared with almost 10% a year in the ’50s and ’60s.