November patronage statistics

The November 2011 PT patronage statistics report has been (finally) released by Auckland Transport. This is the first post-Rugby World Cup report so should give us a bit more of a ‘realistic’ look at patronage across the network than the September and October reports. Here’s the summary: Perhaps the most unusual feature of the summary above is that general PT patronage growth (7.9%) was higher than rail patronage growth (2.1%) during November. Typically we see the opposite. Let’s delve a bit deeper into the numbers to see what happened: Big increases on the Onehunga Line, on the ferries and (most of all, numbers wise) on general buses. In fact, out of the total monthly increase compared to November 2010 of 441,624, 82% of the increase was on “Quality Transit and Local Bus”. This is quite different to what has generally been the case over the past five or so years, when most of the increase has been on the rapid transit network.

Here are the long-term trends: Looking at the graph above, it is interesting to see that although November’s overall patronage was down by around 400,000 on October (no surprise as it’s a shorter month and the RWC ended), bus patronage for November was actually higher than for October. A useful explanation is given for the perhaps lower than expected rail increase on 2010 figures: it seems this was largely due to different timing of special events:

 And the graph below really highlights what a massive difference the RWC made to rail patronage in September and October. I wonder at what point we will see a ‘normal’ month top October’s rail patronage. March this year or next year is my guess. But as I mentioned earlier, the real story for November was the bus patronage. Let’s take a closer look at those numbers: With close to 80% of our PT trips taken by bus, fluctuations in bus patronage will have the biggest effect on whether overall patronage is going up or down, and at what rate. So it’s very heartening to see a series of months in late 2011 that have put together really strong numbers for growing bus patronage. Looking in more detail at where this increase is happening, it’s also heartening to see the previously under-performing isthmus area starting to show some strong levels of increase: The most recent three months of data (September-November) show really strong growth on the isthmus – corresponding nicely with the timing of when the City Link, Inner Link and Outer Link were introduced. I’d suggest that is no coincidence, and these number indicate that the significant bus change made have been a success. Let’s hope that gives Auckland Transport the confidence to continue with the necessary radical overhaul of our bus system.

Overall, the patronage numbers were fairly solid – with better than expected numbers from the bus network and slightly below (but with good reason) numbers from rail. With the extended shutdown of the rail network over the past few weeks, it seems likely that patronage data for December and January will be rather skewed, and it’s likely to not be until February that we start to see some more typical numbers come through.

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