Patronage stats for March are out and as usual, are interesting reading. Once again only ferry patronage was up on March last year however AT have finally taken on board a suggestion I have made in the past and reported what is happening with weekday patronage (more on this later in the post). The biggest impact for March is that there were two less business days than March 2013, one of which was thanks to Easter. Here are the Highlights:
Auckland public transport patronage totalled 69,157,661 passenger trips for the 12-months to Mar-2013 a decrease of -1,581,228 trips or -2.2% on the same period to Mar-2012.
Rail patronage totalled 9,951,686 passengers for the 12-months to Mar-2013. Patronage for Mar-2013 was 1,002,967 a decrease of -44,380 boardings or -4.2% on Mar-2012, with two less business days in Mar-2013 (approximately -7% impact). Average daily weekday scheduled service patronage (excluding special event services) increased by +4.5% with increases also in weekend and total average daily figures. Mar-2013 patronage impacts include reduced special event services (negative), continued transition of legacy ticket counts at time of sale to AT HOP at time of travel (positive) and increased network shutdowns (negative).
The Northern Express bus service carried 2,235,202 passenger trips for the 12-months to Mar-2013. Mar-2013 patronage was 231,108, a decrease of -13,877 boardings or -5.7% on Mar-2012, with two less business days in Mar-2013 (approximately -7% impact). Average daily weekday scheduled service patronage (excluding special event services) increased by +2.6%. Patronage impacts include increased utilisation of enhanced alternative Northern Busway services in particular the 881 service (negative), re-branding and launch of the double decker vehicle (positive). AT HOP on bus in 2013 will permit all service boardings and alightings on the Northern Busway to be counted.
Other bus services carried 51,490,203 passenger trips for the 12-months to Mar-2013. Mar-2013 patronage was 5,005,881, a decrease of -346,308 boardings or -6.5% on Mar-2012, with two less business days in Mar-2013 (approximately -7% impact). Average daily weekday scheduled service patronage (excluding special event services) decreased by -1.2%. Patronage impacts include improved capacity on some routes (positive), reliability improvements on some routes (positive) and service changes in February.
Ferry services carried 5,480,570 passenger trips for the 12-months to Mar-2013. Ferry services patronage for March was 555,143, an increase of 45,546 boardings or +8.9% on Mar-2012. Patronage impacts include the launch of new ferry services at Hobsonville and Beach Haven (positive) and additional service trips at Pine Harbour (positive).
Overall patronage was down 5% on March 2012.
As mentioned earlier, for the first time AT have included information around weekday usage. This is something I had raised with them both on the blog and directly so it’s good to see. One of the reasons I have been keen to see this is that every time I catch the train, it doesn’t feel like things are getting quieter. In fact the opposite seems true when the trains are full, especially during the morning peak. Effectively what AT have done is look at the patronage from weekdays and weekends that didn’t have a special event on and compared the averages from March 2012 to March 2013.
Comparing the results this way helps to weed out changes in the number of working day as well as special event services. It shows that weekday patronage in March actually increased over March 2012 although some of the previous months did see drops. Interestingly weekend patronage has been up on the year before for the last few months. Perhaps more importantly it shows just how much greater patronage is during weekdays than on weekends. You may also remember that former transport minister Steven Joyce used to claim that the existing Puhoi to Wellsford route carried more people per day than the Auckland rail network. At ~18,000 vehicles per day on average, even if every single vehicle had two people in it, the road doesn’t even come close.
We are still waiting on the cycling numbers and will post them when they become available.
I also keep an eye on state highway traffic numbers, in particular the Harbour bridge for which the NZTA has the most information. It has continued to see traffic growth however is still down on its peak from 2006.
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As a new cyclist commuter (sometimes) from about December, I think this long long summer has been great for getting people out of cars (and for some probably off PT too) and moving around by bike. Will be interested to see if there is any correlation of decreases with cycling increases when those figures come through. I feel like there have been a lot more people (not just me!) cycling, but it may just be a case of noticing now I am one of them 😉
Cycling numbers are interesting. They come from only a handful of sites around the region so only pick up a fraction of the overall activity. In saying that they are useful as a guide. We only have monthly figures from November 2010 but they show that cycling has been slowly but steadily increasing.
Good point, Julie. I wonder what the figures would look like for rainy vs dry days?
Got to be good for the ferries too.
The odd rainy day doesn’;t seem to matter. But there is an apparent lag effect so extended periods of rain depress numbers, or so I remember from a mention on the caa blog.
I actually just wrote a blog post on the influence of rain on cycling – last Tuesday’s downpour had a rather obvious one…
http://caa.org.nz/general-news/raining-on-your-parade/
How do they do the head count for rail?
Its based on ticket sales and that has been one of the issues. Previously 10 trips and monthlies were counted from when they were brought, not when they were actually used where as with HOP it is based on when the trip takes place. In short numbers are now much more accurate but has created some issues as the old method still needs to work through the stats.
How did they translate sales of monthly passes into a daily patronage figure? You’d need to know how many times in the month the ticket is used, and guessing “twice per weekday” is going to give a pretty rough figure. The same goes for day passes and things like the Discovery Pass, where you don’t know if they’ve been on the railway at all.
It’s interesting. They’re still not discussing prices (fare enough), which they’ve obviously decided are beyond their discretion.
I’m waiting to see if there’s an April bounceback after the March reduction in business days.
I’m pushing hard for a price split between peak and off peak but I think there are serious practical issues with changing fares in the middle of the HOP roll out. Well that’s what they say anyway. Feet to the fire once HOP is out anyway. No brainer.
Did people have any thoughts on the signal faults this morning. The herald claimed there were quite significant delays?
I have a lot of thoughts about Kiwi Rail’s performance on the AK rail network and not many of them are kind. Now that we give them $25million a year just for the pleasure of using *their* track, plus of course pay them a fortune for their drivers and stinky old locos I think it’s time they lifted their game.
Although a birdy tells me that their freight volumes are seriously up this year so without even one dedicated track to the port it must get tricky. Here we are back to the crazy mode bias of the government that won’t fund necessary infrastructure cos its not a member of their chosen race.
So it goes.
I thought it was some of the brand new signals that failed? Not an old loco or a freight train?
Really, that’s even worse. Any links?
Yep there were signal failures at both Henderson and Papakura this morning. I don’t know what the causes were.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/8560945/Signal-failures-cause-rail-delays
Pretty poor after Novembers fiasco and all the talk of moving control rooms etc.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10847422
They are supposed to have leading signal technology now-does not bode well for the future if the new equipment does not work!
If I had a dollar for every time I was stranded on the London Underground because of a broken signal, I’d be retired and sipping cocktails on a beach somewhere. For some reason, signals just seem to break. I have no idea why… It isn’t as if the technology is immature. However the roading equivalent (traffic lights) seem to run reliably for years at a time, and even when they do break the traffic continues to flow by relying on a pragmatic manual backup method of traffic control.
In London they do seem to have quite frequent outages but also repaired (or whatever they do) pretty quickly – seemed about a max of 10 minutes most times. These cases in Auckland are like a minimum of 30 minutes to over 1 hour which seems pretty poor.
I heard a story from one of my work mates who used to work on maintaining the London underground. Apparently in a number of cases they had to go to a museum to get the spare part they needed as the technology was so old.
In Auckland I’m told they went for the cheapest product they could find so you sort of expect it to fail.
Yes you expect something as old as the LU to have a few fails – not new equipment. Guess it can be added to the Chinese locos and Peruvian sleepers? Maybe accountants shouldn’t do the procurement at KR 😉
The London Underground was neglected for many years, had a number of problematic PPP “quick-fix” ideas thrown onto it (with Metronet in particular going bankrupt) and only finally began to get its act back together in recent history. This is why there were a LOT of outages. Now billions are pumped into TFL to improve things and now results are finally beginning to be seen.
http://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2010/05/11/london-undergrounds-privatization-experiment-dead-as-remaining-ppp-is-bought-out/
See how recent that report is?
The cycling numbers are missing AGAIN? What is this – do they flip a freaking COIN every month to check whether to include them? These are automatic counter results. How HARD can it be to get them included dependably?
Automated results. How hard to get them posted on the website on a daily basis? How cool would that be? It could even encourage people to cycle.
Why don’t AT use the reporting style used in Los Angeles, where each line is itemised for travel per weekday, Saturdays and Sundays ? This gets around explanations of varying numbers of weekdays in a month.
http://www.metro.net/news/ridership-statistics/
PT faces a hostile environment in LA, and transparency such as publishing monthly ridership statistics on their website helps their case for maintaining their tax base.
Yes, that is why I kept pushing them to put this info out to help explain what is happening. I would also love for them to provide a much better web service for the stats.
Wow! How is that Silver Line patronage. What did they do to get that?
That Metro site is great, as is their marketing. Also the results are all good news too, like on Amtrack the nationwide rail passenger service in the US:
http://alankandel.scienceblog.com/2013/03/01/amtrak-ridership-up-road-miles-heads-south-clearer-skies-ahead/
Ummm, so with a large percentage of passengers travelling for free they are working off numbers that are bollocks.
Well it means the numbers under represent the reality.
So presumably April will have more working days than last year and therefore patronage should be up. Or have the Auckland Transport spin doctors already got new excuses ready?
Maybe AT figure that since they have given Cycle Action Auckland access to the counter data, they no longer need to publish counts? Maybe Max will give us a count instead if we ask nicely 🙂
AT put out a press release about them http://www.aucklandtransport.govt.nz/about-us/News/LatestNews/Pages/Record-numbers-of-Aucklanders-are-cycling.aspx
24% in a single month. Hope GB is watching.