April patronage and HOP review

Auckland Transport have their board meeting this week and so have finally release the patronage results for April and there has been some significant changes to how they are doing it. Instead of just some monthly PT figures, AT staff are proposing adding in wider economic indicators which may have impacts on the transport network along with results on other parts of their business, like arterial road performance, I think this is a good move.

I won’t go into each of the indicators n the report as you can read them yourself but the new ones are:

• Auckland Economic Activity
• Auckland Employment
• Auckland Residential Building Activity
• Auckland Airport Passengers
• New vehicle registrations (NZ)
• Heavy Traffic Index (NZ)
• Fuel Prices
• Auckland Fuel Sales
• Monthly traffic volumes
• State Highway Traffic
• Arterial road productivity
• Auckland road crash deaths

Now onto the PT stats.

First the good news is that PT use increased compared to April last year with patronage up 5% although what isn’t mentioned is that there were two extra working days thanks to Easter falling partly in March and there being one less weekend day. This also saw both the Northern Express and other buses increase in patronage (16% and 7% respectively). This is a particularly good result for the Northern Express and is likely a result of AT marketing the service, let’s hope it continues. Ferries were down 1.6% on last April despite having the addition of Hobsonville and Beach Haven, perhaps this was hampered by the weather?

I deliberately left rail out as this is where AT are starting to make some changes to how PT is reported. Overall for the month patronage was down 1.9% on April last year which AT say is partly attributed to the pre-purchasing of tickets to avoid fare changes the previous year. However it appears that they have now recognised that simply reporting monthly numbers doesn’t show the full picture thanks to variances in the calendar, special events and other ticket purchasing. Now included is a graph showing what is the normalised weekday patronage for each month. This removes from the data patronage associated with public holidays and special events (ticketing is taken care of by HOP) to show how normal services are performing which is a fare more useful tool.

Now it shows that average daily patronage was down in April compared to April last year but its usefulness is particularly if you look back at February and March this year. Those months saw total patronage down 8% and 4% respectively on the same months the year before however by looking at the weekday patronage graph, you can see that patronage actually improved. The March numbers are particularly interesting as with the exception of the months through the RWC, March 2011 is still the highest monthly result achieved. March 2013 is 11% down on that mark yet weekday patronage is actually higher.

Another interesting paper going to the AT board this week is on a review of HOP carried out by Deloitte. They have looked at the problems, what is being done, compared it to what is happening in other countries and made some recommendations. I won’t touch on every aspect in the report but there are some very interesting bits.

First up it seems that this report is what is largely responsible for the change in rail patronage reporting. Deloitte went back through the data to remove the anomalies mentioned above. By looking at HOP data they also found that monthly passes had previously been over counted. In the past when a ten trip of monthly pass was sold, AT would amortise the trips on it over a period from when the pass was brought and this is why there were spikes in patronage when fares went up. For monthlies they would assume that the holder would use 43 trips over the month however HOP data is showing that on average people are only using monthly passes for 30 trips a month so they also correcting historical patronage numbers for this. The graph below shows ticket purchases by type and it is interesting to see monthly passes decline so much.

While the next graph shows the impacts the adjustments have had on monthly patronage numbers

Next up we have fare evasion, the report says that previous levels of evasion were reported in the range of 6-10%. I certainly remember from before HOP where huge numbers of people from the inner stations would not get their tickets checked as the staff simply couldn’t get through the trains. While not deliberate on the part of the passenger, it was still a form of fare evasion. The report says that checks before April were finding similarly high levels of evasion but that since April 12 evasion is sitting at around 4.2%

• The report also says that AT are already in the process of:
• Purchasing more hand held devices for ticket inspectors
• Purchasing more ticket machines for platforms
• Working to improve the interface to reduce transaction times.
• Investigating gating more stations, Manukau will happen later this year and they are also considering Grafton, Henderson and New Lynn.
• Working to reduce the time taken for funds to appear on cards.
• As part of the bus roll out, a retail network will be put in place which train users will be able to also use.
• Increasing penalty fares for fare evasion although that relies on legislative changes (which I understand have been delayed further by the MoT)

The report lists a fairly comprehensive list of the issues that still remain. In the interests of space I won’t list them here but it certainly covers the various complaints I have seen raised.

One of the particularly interesting aspects of the report is that it compares the performance of HOP to other roll outs intentionally through a number of case studies (although some of the systems can’t be named for as the information isn’t public.

And where is Auckland

So we seem to be fairly at a fairly similar level to other cities. With HOP rolling out to buses we should hopefully see significant uptake in the coming months. One thing noted by the authors is that the price differential between cash and card fares appears to have been a key contributor to increasing smart-card uptake. Hopefully we will see greater discounts offered in future but at this stage, I’m not holding my breath. Of the two systems for which fare evasion data is available, Myki (7%) and Oyster (1.5%) , HOP seems to be sitting in the middle of them at 4.2%.

The report also shows the measures being taken by AT to increase uptake are similar to those overseas.

And finally here are the conclusions and recommendations that were made to AT

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