About a week ago I blogged about some basic patronage statistics for September – which were pretty spectacular. Auckland Transport has now released the detailed patronage report for September, which confirms the huge numbers (partly due to the Rugby World Cup of course). Here are the highlights:
Auckland public transport patronage totalled 67,682,156 passengers for the 12-months to Sep 2011 an increase of 6,059,096 boardings or +9.8%.
September monthly patronage was 6,634,342 an increase of 1,045,140 boardings or +18.7% on Sep 2010. Record growth is due in part to increased patronage due to Rugby World Cup 2011 matches held in Auckland during September.
Rail monthly patronage for September is 1,178,586 an increase of 285,538 boardings or +32.0% on Sep 2010. This is both a new monthly record and growth due in part to patronage from Rugby World Cup 2011 special event rail services.
Northern Express bus service carried 2,153,830 passenger trips for the 12-months with a growth in Sep 2011 compared to Sep 2010 of +14.5%.
Here are the details:
These were record numbers for the rail system, with the Western Line numbers particularly reflecting the world cup game crowds. Even for services that you wouldn’t think were too impacted by game crowds: like the ferries and the regular buses, there were big increases. This is probably because of the large number of visitors who are using PT to get around. School holidays being shifted into October might have also bumped up the September numbers.
The report also has more detail on the RWC crowds – perhaps most interestingly noting that around 140,000 rail trips were taken on September 9th: surely a daily record for Auckland by miles:
Rail along with the Northern Busway forms the Rapid Transit Network. The month of September saw a huge increase in demand for travel on rail as the Rugby World Cup 2011 swung into action. On the opening day of 9th September 2011 alone final estimates indicate that rail services carried more than 140,000 passengers to and from normal business day activities (compared to an average 43,000 weekday movement), the opening match at Eden Park and the opening night celebrations at the Fan Zone outside Britomart station. The number using rail across the region to travel to or from these activities was more than three times the normal business day demand, concentrated during the early to mid-afternoon and this resulted in crowding on most services from around 1:30pm. On 17th September more than 25,000 fans were carried by rail to Eden Park and the Fan Zone and the following weekend of 24/25th September more than 60,000 supporters were carried over the two days in addition to normal weekend travel demand.
Here are the graphs showing monthly rail patronage over the past few years: 
Looking at details of bus patronage you can see that numbers on the isthmus were up pretty hugely. I guess that might include the shuttle buses to rugby games?
There’s also quite a lot of interesting data on the number of PT trips to and from the games:
What’s good to see is that even after the chaos of September 9th, around 40% of people continued to travel by public transport to the Eden Park games, while the percentage of people travelling by PT to North Harbour Stadium games increased over time.
Processing...
Can I ask what might be a dumb question? Why did prices not fall back down when fuel prices fell back a year and a half ago? We heard fuel prices made the pass price go up, but since then we’ve seen fuel come back down massively and the bus ticket charges have stayed high. It was expensive enough as it was before that malarky started.
Because the bus companies really screw us over when it comes to pricing? The stupidest thing is that it’s monthly passes that have gone up the most over the past 10 years, even though ideally we want more people using them.