Every year public transport patronage peaks in March. This is a combination of university returning, an absence of school holidays and a 31 day month with (for the past few years when Easter has fallen in April) no public holidays. Perhaps a few Super rugby games and a large number of tourists in Auckland during March also help boost the numbers. You can see, from looking at the past few years, that March’s patronage really stands out as significantly higher than any other month of the year – even higher than during the Rugby World Cup:
Last year Auckland Transport really got caught with their pants down in March, with significant overcrowding on many services being the results. While the response was pretty quick, with additional peak time services added in April, by that stage the real pressure had passed. For each of the past three years March has had around 1.5 million more public transport trips than April. In 2009 and 2010, March had more than 500,000 trips more than any other month of the year.
So the real question is whether Auckland Transport is ready for the “March madness”? Will Manukau station be open before the start of March? Will the new rail timetable, long promised, be operational? Will efforts be made to speed up boardings on the Northern Express buses? Will extra staff be at the Britomart ticket office during March’s first week when there’s a giant rush for ticket purchases?
I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
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In short – NO!
On the rail network at least we would be about 5 units short to just meet service delivery where we should be for diesel powered units.
Manukau Line – touch and go along with the new timetable which something tells me will not be operational until 31 March – which I hope for everyone’s sake it will be a lot sooner then that.
Will we get train breakdowns or those cursed freight trains getting in the way and will those current speed restrictions really be a pain in the butt
Ah well
Here come’s March Madness alright…
No more trains till mid 2014 when the electric trains come into service.
“No more trains till mid 2014 when the electric trains come into service.” I have been banging on about finding some more passenger carriages to bolster supply in Auckland before the electrics come on line before with no ideas forthcoming. Now the answer has appeared courtesy of THE NZ RAILWAY OBSERVER magazine Feb-Mar p233. The EOs and SE carriages used to supplement services in Wellington have been retired thanks to Matangis coming on line. The magazine’s suggestion is to use the carriages to increase capacity on the Wairarapa line. My suggestion is to bring them to Auckland and arrange a some diesels to top and tail them. Deploy the increased capacity where it is most needed. After all it is Auckland where patronage is at greates risk of being stifled by lack of capacity.
The SE carriages were always intended for use on the Wairarapa line – that was part of the case for buying them. They are owned by GW, who would have a lot of explaining to do to fed up Wairarapa pax if the carriages were sent to Auckland…
I guess that explaining would be made a lot easier if Auckland were paying a high price for them 😉
In saying that I don’t think it would happen, the SE carriages only have end doors which would potentially cause delays at stations.
Matt – Agree on the end door issue. They were less than ideal in Wellington with extended dwell time being part of the problem. Suited to limited stop longer distance services of which there aren’t really any up there. IIRC the door controls are not compatible with the Auckland set up either.
The only way additional capacity is possible is by making the trains longer and/or running direct west-south services. Remember, Britomart’s going to be at capacity once the March timetable comes into effect.
There will be NO NEW CARRIAGES coming on line with the March timetable. Some trains will be shortened to make up some additional trains. As you have pointed out there will be no spare paths left at Britomart after March. Those trains made up by shortening existing trains will use up the spare paths. A guaranteed recipe for disaster. No possible chance to recover from even minor mishaps or breakdowns. This system of more but shorter trains was tried years ago in Sydney. David Hill was called back to State Rail to sort out the ensuing mess. The obvious answer was implemented. Back to less but longer trains. So if the carriages from Wellington could be used then the capacity could be increased in the interim as well. Rail would be able to handle the increasing patronage but the pathing problems would remain. Perhaps the using up of all the pathes is a plot to show how close the system is to full capacity as an argument for the CRL.
Peter in Sydney said:
That’s actually a pretty good idea, but I’m guessing it’s coincidental. We’d never be that strategic.
It’s not so much a plot as the reality that Britomart is now at capacity – and we’re running as many trains as we can to meet demand.
I’m not so sure bringing up trains that are being withdrawn from Wellington because they’re becoming so expensive to keep running is a good idea. The budget is stretched as it is without pushing maintenance costs up further. Better to spend the money on long term improvements to the bus system, and keep pushing the CRL’s case.
None of Wellington’s trains would be suitable for Auckland, anyway. The EE EMUs are being retired because of their age, and require 1500v DC overhead. The SE carriage set is earmarked for conversion to cater for growth on the Wairarapa services. The Capital Connection train seems to have survived the extension of Matangi services, but it’s door configuration is unsuited to Auckland’s needs.
In relation to Buses, I know a few of the Auckland bus companies were effected by the Designline insolvency, with buses that were meant to be delivered prior to March 2011, delayed beyond that date becauses supplies stopped providing parts due to non payment.
With Kiwi’s new factory in Tauranga pumping out buses for NZbus and others, and Designline back up and running with new owners and money (having to pay suppliers in advance I understand), bus deliveries are flowing again.
Yeah there are lots of new buses on the road in the past few months, which suggests that there are a lot of bus that have been taken out of service which could be put back into service should March patronage require it.
What does NZBus do with all those old clankers? I assume they’ll have more reserves this year compared to years in past – last year they had CHCh buses in Auckland.
Old buses normally get sold of to rural or schools runs I think. Auckland Transport requires buses that receive a subsidy to be of a high spec which means they constantly have to update (eg. wheelchair access so old buses without have to be replaced).
They must be pretty low standards considering the condition some of the buses are in, not to mention buses like the bendys which must be getting towards 50+ years old.
the first bendy buses used in Auckland were in the early 1980s.
They come to Waiheke to die.
The old clunkers are parked up at the Swanson depot, along with the three hybrids.
Peter in Sydney wrote: “Some trains will be shortened to make up some additional trains”.
I don’t think that is planned, as there are no SD driver cars available to make up more sets. All that is planned is to move some SA6 cars onto some SA4 sets. Same number of trains though, and same number of carriages.
How about putting back the links to the blogs that used to be here.
Are you talking about the links on the left hand side?
Ian, I have kept the ones which directly relate to the content of this site. I realised, in discussion with other bloggers here, that I was probably using the links as my personal bookmarks section – which wasn’t really the best way of using up pretty scarce space.
Fair enough. I found it a handy collection of links. I like Dimpost, Imperatorfish etc. I even checked out our old friend Libertyscott occasionally but he seems obsessed with North Korea at the moment.
Perth grew to about 40m passengers per year on its rail system with only about 100 EMU carriages. These were arranged mostly in a 2-car configuration, and were pretty crowded at peak hour. So with ~135 carriages in Auckland it should be feasible to carry at least 15m passengers per year without exceeding Perth’s level of overcrowding.
I dont get your maths. If we have more carriages, we should be able to do as much, if not more. Obviously it depends on average journey length/time as they could be turning over passengers more frequently.
I’ve just checked up the source websites. Until October 2004 Perth only had 86 A-series carriages, which were arranged as 43 x 2-car sets:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transperth_Trains
However annual rail patronage in 2003/04, just before the new B series cars arrived, was 31,114,975
http://www.pta.wa.gov.au/NewsandMedia/TransperthPatronage/tabid/218/Default.aspx
How could Perth carry 3 times as many passengers as Auckland with a third fewer carriages ?
Here are a few factors:
1. Shorter duty cycle times. The Fremantle and Midland lines are only half an hour each, compared with about 1 hour for Auckland’s routes.
2. More rapid acceleration of EMU’s contribute to the shorter cycle times.
3. Use of short services on the Northern suburbs railway – a short service can carry 2 or 3 loads of passengers in peak direction within a 2-hour peak period, whereas full services to the terminus can only carry one load
4. New EMU’s don’t need to spend as long in the workshops as old diesel stock, so more are available for service
5. More of Perth’s loading may have been off-peak, ie more boardings relative to the peak.
6. EMU’s may hold more passengers than the current Auckland carriages (the new Auckland EMU’s will be about about 50% more)
7. Short dwell times at Perth station because of through operation
8. Perth passengers may have become more tolerant of overcrowding than those in Auckland