At the CBT Annual General Meeting yesterday there was a discussion at one point about public transport patronage and in particular, if most of the excellent growth of patronage we have seen over the last few years is the result of more people switching to using PT of if it is mainly due to population growth in the city and that it is those new residents that are the ones that are driving the growth. To judge this we need to know what our per capita usage of PT and this exact question is something I have wondered about before so a few months ago I set about finding out the answer.
I had the patronage data dating back to 2002 which was gleaned from ARTA and now AT reports, I was also able to find annual population estimates for the region so with a few formulas here and there was able to get a rough indication of both our monthly population and with that our per capita usage and here it is up to May 2011.
As you can see, in the last 4 or so years per capita usage has been increasing however that was after a few years of decline. Overall per capita usage is up on what it was almost 10 years ago (40.9 – 44.1) which means people are taking more trips but we do have a way to go to catch up to other cities. Just for comparison, Wellington has just over 72 trips per person per year.
Note for AT: I know you have at least annual data on both population and patronage going back to at least 1920, it would be great if you could make that data set available on your website
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Are you using the regional population as the denominator? Would you not need to factor it does to capture the metropolitan area? Otherwise you’re catching a whole load of people who lives in areas where there is not PT available at all.
Yes it is the regional population as that is the only thing I could find so while it won’t be 100% accurate it does give us a useful trend.
Yes that’s fair enough – it does highlight trends. May be problematic when looking at historical data though, because the definition of Auckland’s boundaries will have change significantly over time right?
The rate for Edinburgh is about 200 trips/cap/year but this is generated only by the core metropolitan part of the city, not rural areas. So we’re probably doing ourselves a disservice if we compare to other places based on regional pop …
Still positive trend in the last 1-2 years suggest per capita trips increasing by about 10% per annum (5 trips per year). That’s solid growth, let’s hope it continues or even accelerates.
Indications are that the urban population is 1.2-1.3 million people in the urban area so that means there are probably about 200k people outside of that. Based on that it gives 51 trips per person per year however remember that some of those will be using services e.g. those from Pukekohe.
There was an earlier thread about existing projects that might act as models to check the wildly varying BCRs there are for the CRL. Wouldn’t the projections versus the actual result of the Onehunga line be a useful comparison? Of course it is nothing like the CRL but it does offer a recent before and check of modeling?
Anyone got the projections versus current pax? Even better to run later, I guess, when it’s been open for a year.
It is natural to expect that as people got wealthier, and levels of provision stayed relatively static and poor (mid 2000s) they would be more likely to drive.
We’re seeing that turn around now.
I think that the results would look even more interesting, and perhaps shocking, if disaggregated by location. I strongly suspect that per capita use has declined seriously with the introduction of car-is-king suburbs in the east and north, and increased in locations where frequency and quality has been improved, namely; proximate to train lines, Dominion Rd, and the Northern Busway.
The cup is still half full. But only half full. The rest has been ignored.
What is perhaps even more interesting is passenger kilometres travelled, which have increased even more dramatically as most patronage growth has been in long RTN trips and bus services in the north, south and southeast.
Out of interest I have had a look to see what our per capita usage will be 5 and 10 years in the future. This is based on the population increasing by 1.6% (stats NZ figure) and our patronage increasing by 5% year on year (I realise this is lower than we have now but even this time last year growth was only just over 3%).
Based on that in 5 years time our per capita usage will be 52 and in 10 years time it would be 61