Solid January patronage stats

Auckland Transport have released the public transport patronage statistics for January, and they’re pretty nicely solid for what’s usually a pretty quiet month. Here are the highlights: The statistics are fairly impressive because quite a lot of the rail network was closed for a fairly significant chunk of January (although this happened last year too). Here are the details: One interesting statistic to note is that the 12 month rolling total for patronage is very very close to 70 million trips now, just around 250,000 trips away from this figure. As is shown in the figure below, it was only April 2010 when we passed 60 million trips as the 12 month rolling total, so in less than two years we’ve added another 10 million PT trips a year – getting from 50 million to 60 million trips took a lot longer! And the graph below shows our longer term data – don’t stress about the recent drop-off, it happens every year in December and January! One of the reasons why patronage in December and January is often so low (along with the holiday period) is because the rail network gets closed down for infrastructure works – the one chance every year we have to really advance large-scale projects like electrification (and Project DART before it). This year parts of the rail network re-opened earlier but had bus replacements between Grafton and Britomart, the impact of these bus replacements is listed below and it’s interesting to then see that despite the extensive closures and replacement buses, rail patronage was up on last year: One particularly interesting table is the one which looks at bus patronage changes across the various sectors of the bus network. We see once again what a huge impact the introduction of the LINK bus service changes from August onwards has had on isthmus bus patronage: It’s also easy to forget about ferry patronage, but in January we probably saw an all time (at least since the harbour bridge was opened) patronage record for ferries in Auckland, this is partly due to AT trialling extra services which definitely seem to be a success: Finally as mentioned the other day, surely the proposed 15 minute frequency of Howick and Eastern bus services between Panmure and the city, seven days a week, could this be the long-awaited next b-line service? I’m really looking forward to seeing what March’s patronage statistics will be.

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