I was thinking about the targets being set for PT by the council and the graph I posted yesterday and showing what patronage would look like if we to reach the target of 100 trips per person across the region by 2040.
As you can see it will require a huge increase in patronage to achieve that target and that is because we are wanting to more than double our per capita usage while also dealing with an ever increasing population. As a starting point we have about 1.5 million people and 70 million which equates to about 46 trips per person per year or less than 1 per person per week. If we were achieving 100 trips per person today we would have 150m PT trips per year.
Going from 70m trips per year to 250m trips per year sounds like a tough ask but doing some quick calculations it seems that to achieve our target it might not be that hard. The population in the region is increasing at about 1.6% per year so taking that into account it works out that we would need an average increase of about 4.5% per year. By comparison the last for or years have averaged around the 7-8%, of course it will get harder and harder to keep getting these big increases in patronage but we also have to remember that there are some big projects planned that should really give things a boost. I am thinking primarily about things like Integrated ticketing, Electrification, the AMETI busway, the CRL as well as big improvements to buses among other things.
But what does 100m trips per person actually look like, it is easy to say about 2 trips per person per week but I always find that overly simplistic. Instead I want to look at it a different way so consider this, I think that the majority of people who use public transport do so quite a bit. If you are using it to get to and from work or school every day you will take about 10 trips per week. People generally 46 weeks per year (taking into account annual leave, public holidays etc.) while kids go to school for about 38 weeks a year so splitting the difference lets say that the average regular PT user does so for about 42 weeks per year. From that could say that the regular PT users take around 420 trips per year on PT. If we divide that figure by our target of about 250m trips all up by 2040 we get an interesting result, we would only need about 600,000 people to across the region to use PT on a regular basis to meet our target. That might sound like a lot but put another way, it would equate to less than 25% of our population.
With some of the projects mentioned above the idea of getting about 25% of our population using PT regularly seems pretty achievable.
Also as a side note, I found a few estimates of the population back in the 40s and 50s. Looking at the patronage in the graph above we can see that while it declined in the post war period it did rise again through to the mid to late 50s when the tram network was pulled out. Some quick calculations show that just before that happened there were about 380,000 people in the metropolitan area which equates to about 260 trips per person. It should be mentioned thought that there is likely to be quite a difference between boundaries and the population of the metropolitan area and region and the current calculations are done on a regional level.
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Trams?
Hmmm, not a bad idea
How are trips calculated? Especially when we get integrated tickets, so if I catch a bus then a train at a transfer station. Will this equate to two trips on my way to work, thus 4 trips for the day?
I live in Edinburgh, a city of something less than half a million, over roughly the same physical area as the Isthmus. Its bus system manages to carry 110m passengers per year (>230 pax/person), despite a trams project which has gone horribly pear-shaped.
Now, I mention that because it might be of more use to break up the targets you’ve mentioned by market sector, so:
* Bus services on the Isthmus proper (likely to be the single largest market)
* North Shore to Isthmus, all modes
* Short bus journeys, within the other catchments (northern, western, eastern, southern)
* Bus journeys from the other catchments into the Isthmus (these will decline over time with the rail investment)
* Rail journeys into the CBD
* Rail journeys outwith the CBD.
The reason for breaking up the traffics like this is because some markets will be much stronger than others. If anyone is interested I’ll have a go with the current numbers and see what they tell us.
One thing to consider is that once we move to a more mature system number of trips per core user will skyrocket.
Currently a student or workaday type will do perhaps ten trips a week, once you have a system where people can travel freely any time or day you might see core users doing twenty or thirty a week.
Living in Melbourne with a weekly pass I would have made around four trips on an average weekday, and often eight or more on weekend days.
Adding to Nick’s point above we are also likely to see many more off peak and weekend trips with a better system. That means much more patronage without having to get 20% + modeshare. Vancouver has 133 trips per capita with a 16% modeshare.
Near term capacity is a big issue; rail is banging on a ceiling until the EMUs are all functioning routinely, but even that will be seriously constrained by the need of the CRL… Much will depend on the reorganisation of the bus network…