Latest figures from AT: September 2014
In March this year I wrote a post called 20 by 2020 assessing the Prime Minister’s challenge for rail ridership in Auckland to do be heading to 20 million passengers pa by what I understood to be 2020 to justify a partial investment in the CRL by the report .From a PwC Patronage Report I have found what he said:
“We will consider an earlier start date if it becomes clear that Auckland’s CBD employment and rail patronage growth hit thresholds faster than current rates of growth suggest.
Which is a fairly ambiguous sentence. Here’s how the kind folks at the MoT interpret that:
“MoT interprets the rail patronage target as meaning that “patronage will reach 20 million trips a year around 2018”
PwC then tabulate this as follows:
So where are we at now? Ridership at the end of June 2013 was almost exactly 10 mil: Less than a year later and it is now 11 mil. 3 months to go and already 10% growth. To reach 20 mil by 2020 a rate of 10.4% is sufficient.
Oh how things change. Just six months further on and we’ve already hit 12 million. Rail ridership is running at around 16% – 21% pa [As is the Northern Express- Rapid Transit Investment works]. If this can be sustained over the next few years things will become rather awkward for those relying on this particular hurdle to delay the government’s commitment to Auckland. The magic of compounding growth means that this kind of rate leads to a rough doubling of the figure in just four years. From 10 million in 2013 to 20 million in 2017 or thereabouts.
Is that growth likely to continue, on grounds other than mere extrapolation? Well here’s what I wrote back in March. Events since have not made a fool of me yet:
OK, I can hear the cynics out there saying that you can’t just extrapolate ridership growth from one year out indefinitely and that is indeed true, almost as absurd as assuming traffic growth will leap upwards from a flat line; well almost. So we must ask are there good reasons to believe that ridership growth will continue at this rate? Well no, but there are three good reasons to be confident that it will in fact accelerate from this year even more strongly;
1. The vastly more attractive, higher capacity, and able to be more frequently run New Trains
2. The new integrated ticketing and fares system
3. The New Bus Network that is focussed on coordinating with the Rail Network to help speed and improve many journeys, from new transfer stations like the recently completed Panmure, New Lynn, and coming Mangere and Otahuhu.
We should also remember that rail ridership has grown by some 400% since the opening of Britomart [annualised: 18% pa, so this has been a consistent grower since even simple improvements were added to what was a completely under invested in system. Build it and they will indeed come.
It is also worth noting that no motorway network shows or is required to show anything like a 10% demand growth in order to get even 50% funding from government. In fact the government had to invent an abstract and novel category of road –The Road of National Significance– in order to get around the low traffic demands all over the nation and overcome their often appallingly low business cases. For example traffic demand in and around Wellington is going backwards, actually falling, but NZTA can’t stop drawing lines down every fault-line for new motorways there. How about 10% demand growth hurdles for investment all transport systems?
And because every post needs plenty of images and because this never gets old, here’s the Perth story, the one we are most clearly going to emulate, in fact are emulating, here in Auckland once we can get the tarmac out the eyes of those who control our money:
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Do another review on 4 Nov 2015 and again on 4 Nov 2016 Patrick. That should give you a good feel for whether or not AKL will meet or exceed the 20 by 2017 target you’ve set. The race is too early to call right now.
Why delay 2 years to come up with the same conclusion – that is 20 million will happen in 2017.
As by then you’ll be less than 1 year out from hitting target and too late to avoid the side effects of that growth as CRL will be 4+ years off then.
We don’t make roads do that, so why is rail so special? The cost of rail projects?
Well, the cost of Waterview to the Government is the same as CRL and yet it has none of scrutiny on the “Demand” side other than “of course you have to build roads” type analysis. Yet CRL has been subjected to a lot more analysis by everyone and their dog.
As Patrick points out Britomart has shown consistent 18% year on year growth of rail usage for over 11 years continuously now, so why should it suddenly collapse below that rate when all the evidence points to a further increase in the rate of growth not a downturn. Some might say a 21% growth is a “spurt”, but when its sustained for 11 years you have to call it for what it is – a true paradigm shift.
18% growth in 1 year on the rail is way more growth than what vehicles traffic in Auckland (including the harbour bridge the usual bell-weather for traffic) has done in a decade.
In fact Harbour bridge traffic is down over 10% over the same time frame – and that downturn started well before the oft-blamed “GFC” or “petrol price rises”.
It’s also time to call that “downturn” for what is a paradigm shift.
The reason the rate may slow is of course as the total becomes bigger each percentage increase represents ever bigger actual quantities of trips. However there really is suppressed demand out there and It’s pretty clear that the real world constraints are service supply: Insufficient frequency, sub-optimal hours of operation, poor service [breakdowns, shutdowns etc] and tatty facilities. These are largely ‘soft infra’ and can be fixed without too much money. But then we come up against the ‘hard infra’ constraints of: Train numbers, [not enough six car sets] Britomart and Newmarket constrictions and the need for the Third main/ Westfield junction issues [freight conflicts].
Agreed, but it hasn’t so far, and you’d think after 11 years we’d have used up all the spare capacity in the old trains and the rest of the system so growth would start to slow by now, but it hasn’t – a large part being project DART and adding more trains (SA sets and the like) in the interim.
And we’ve added more capacity with the EMUs on the Manukau and Onehunga lines and they’ve leapt ahead of course in the last 3 months.
Which bodes even more likely that the 13m target will be reached in another 8 or so months which is when all the EMUs we have will be all in service.
Then PTOM will hit like a hurricane down south and further drive those numbers skyward.
Any business would love to have 11 years of straight line growth at 18% a year – few could cope well with that growth mind, and even fewer still cope with that rate increasing even further. And in the short term AT will have to cope. Because even if The Government said yes tomorrow, opening CRL is 4-5 years away.
Bollocks – Make it go NOW – before the constraints of Britomart start to impact on the growth figures as they surely will if nothing is done. And why don’t you require the same disciplines for motorway extensions.
The Government should really pay the total cost of the CRL from petrol tax money.
It is the equivalent of a state highway and road users will benefit with less congestion anyway.
It is a chicken and egg flawed logic.
If we don’t have the infrastructure now, we won’t have the growth. No growth means no infrastructure.
Actually, we DO have the “infrastructure” (electrified trains, HOP card and – integrated zoning soon, hopefully) that will make patronage leap up in coming years. That isn’t the problem.
The problem is those chain-draggers who say “hold on, how do you KNOW that those things will actually boost patronage? Lets wait a few years first… (while fast-tracking motorways)”.
Need to update Perth graph. Supposed to have been 70 million last year but only cleared 60, though thats still higher than the graph shows. Shortfall due to collapse in cbd employment and shutting the core trackage twice to put it underground.
New airport line predicted to add 8 million, though that dill Alan Davies contests that http://blogs.crikey.com.au/theurbanist/2014/08/11/should-a-rail-line-to-perth-airport-really-be-the-priority/ forgetting that the line will also serve the whole eastern suburbs and foothills, and will not have a premium fare but will be considerably cheaper than alternative modes.
That PWC table.. why no 2016 (23.5%) target? It’s only the western line keeping growth below that figure today.. no reason to believe the new trains won’t have a similar effect there as the eastern line.
Word is that the Western will get re-deployed diesels early next year first. Which if it does occur will show real endeavour by AT. I fear that the pressure to show farebox improvement immediately may interfere, which would show real short-termism on the part of government.
That’s not quite right. Over the last 12 months the western line has grown 19% compared to the combined southern line routes which have grown 15.4%. They’re reported together as hard to know if growth on EMU services is for to prior shifting their travel to catch one i.e. some papakura services go via GI just like the Manukau ones do
Thanks Matt, I see what you mean, in the +12 months column. I would think eastern / southern could continue to grow at >20%, especially with what I hear will be a much shorter summer shutdown. As Patrick notes, if the diesels can get redeployed on the western line you would expect the growth rate to notch up overall.
Is there any appetite out there to run some services east-west pending CRL? i.e. southern line to western line round the corner at Newmarket? Or for that matter eastern line turn left at Beach Road to Newmarket (it’d be four stops from Panmure.. or five via Parnell)?
I strongly recommend not getting into discussions about running patterns; there are religious disputes that get less heated and intractable. lolz.
With that in mind, I’ll just say it would be insane to build the CRL then avoided it by turning Eastern Line trains south instead of running them though it and the highest concentration of employment in the nation. You wanna go to Parnell station [when it finds some funding…?] from the Eastern? change at Britomart.
LOL.. yes it would be seriously insane to use such running patterns post-CRL!! I’m thinking pre-CRL, with the dreaded Britomart constraint still there, and patronage up to 20 m or even more.. how to get the max possible value out of the network. Customer service (crowded trains, delays) could be heading in the wrong direction in a couple of years’ time.
Again, I have copped flack for suggesting this but a more plausible route is to run some west-south services. But only if W line is able to take more than the 6tph that should keep going to Brito. Much muttering about restrictions there because of level crossings…
How that could work is to have say 6tph running direct Grafton Parnell (skipping Newmarket and its delay) and a smaller number say Hendo-Onehuga or Hendo-Otahuhu.
The NM skip more than makes up for the time stopping at Parnell, in fact speeds the bulk of trips that are Brito focussed and in general the high frequency everywhere makes either waiting a bit for your one seat ride or grabbing a transfer along the way no prob…. Pre-CRL this is.
Part of what makes this work is the interesting popularity of Grafton. It seems plenty are bored with the poor speed through NM and the dull trundle round Vector and ‘downhill’ from Grafton, transferring to buses, walking, or riding. Also with uni and the hospital there Grafton is more important than was probably suspected.
One thing to consider, the real capacity crunch is only going to be for about a hour a day at peak times in the peak direction. The other 16-17 hours a weekday and all day weekends, and everything I the counter peak direction, there will be plenty of capacity.
So two points, they can easily keep growing patronage even if there is a peak time capacity pinch, and any variant service patterns are probably only going to be anything close to busy for an hour or two a day.
Auckland isn’t emulating Perth. Perth’s growth has been driven by massive investment in outer urban rail services, a new 40km line to Butler (Joondalup line) and a new 70km line to Mandurah. 70km is the equivalent of Auckland building a new line to Wellsford via Orewa. 120km of new lines outside the city.
Auckland is pretty much polar opposites, with Auckland Transport actually making a determined effort to make sure such outer urban trains never start running here, selling up the trains they own, and dropping plans for northwest rail. Auckland’s plan is to build motorways for those distances outside the city – up to Warkworth, out to Kumeu, and the existing one to Pokeno.
It really is time to drop the Perth comparison, we are not even close to having their vision.
This is a choice you, and your fellow voters have. To emulate
Perth, or not. Don,t pretend it is natural.
Perth is a city with far LESS reason to have good transport compared with Auckland, as this blog often points out. Completely flat, more sprawled, less pedestrian amenity due to the heat.
It is only inspired government, like the great Alannah Mactiernan and great bureaucrats, why Perth succeeded and Auckland has not (yet)
Thankyou Riccardo
I like this bit in particular:
‘It is only inspired government, like the great Alannah Mactiernan and great bureaucrats, why Perth succeeded and Auckland has not (yet)’
And agreed, the Australian cities I have visited all have areas of paper-thin mega sprawl……but they also have healthy built-up core CBD areas that all show signs of care and attention to a greater extent, and over a longer time-frame, than Auckland. And of course the same can be said for their core rapid transit networks.
What this does illustrate, is just how much latent potential Auckland has.
Perth has succeeded in endless suburban sprawl. The northern line and the southern lines are so quick, with stations so far apart, that it makes commuting from the outer northern and outer southern suburbs quicker than those who live much, much closer to the CBD (but simply don’t have access to a train line). I’m not sure this really needs to be worshipped like everyone appears to do, because it is discouraging higher density housing in inner Perth. Id rather see a city take Auckland’s position and potential for increased rail growth
Be inspired
http://youtu.be/B55xCwdjF5Q
Indeed, we are already far ahead of Perth’s vision.
Agree. Perth had no equivalent ofCFN
We are not ahead of Perth’s vision – the comparison ends with Perth’s electrification. Their main growth drivers are outer urban rail, for which Auckland has zero vision (and in fact is cutting back the existing network). Auckland’s outer urban vision is motorway based.
Yeah exactly, instead of wasting time trying to serve the dispersed 50k residents of regional Auckland, the city is targeting the 1,500k residents that live in the urban area. Excellent vision.
Regardless of what other cities do/have done, I think the reality is that Auckland Train services are getting more popular by the day. I have started using the trains again from GI to the City and have noticed a real upswing in numbers since the new trains were introduced. As an example two trains on Saturday one around 11 and one back around 2 were not full but had people standing. Tonight at 7pm the same story. Patronage is rising and I suspect quicker than AT realise.
The main challenge is for AT to get accurate numbers, fare evasion is still (IMHO) higher than they report, just at GI alone you see a significant number of people get off trains without tagging on or off. I bet they don’t all have paper tickets.
As frequency increases and buses feed more people at Panmure I suspect patronage will continue to grow exponentially.
About 20% of all HOP rail journeys are using paper tickets according to AT stats report, and that number is pretty much constant for the last 12+ months.
So yes, a number on each train will not be tagging on or off.
Of course whether they paid the right fare? thats a different kettle, but with a ticket they are counted.
Geoff, I think you’re way off the mark in terms of the drivers for Perths growth. Mandurah is no comparison to Wellsford, and for that matter very few of the ‘outer’ destinations around Auckland are.
Mandurah is getting on for 50 times the size (80,000+ versus less than 2,000), it’s the second city of WA, a major centre in its own right. The logic for putting rail between the two is to link major destinations that already existed, along corridors where growth is happening already, with some incredibly dense TOD development happening at key nodes along the route. A glance at google maps (https://goo.gl/maps/mSF6q) shows how much of this corridor is already urbanised, with very little open land along the coastal corridor between Perth and Mandurah. I’d observe that some of this is only possible because WA actually has a pretty good planning and development system, not withstanding a tendency towards sprawl. What I’m getting at is that several layers work well together – state policy and funding, local planning policy, redevelopment agencies and private development companies. I’ve visited friends who live on this corridor a few times, and the outcome works for them and plenty of other people. One commutes 25km into central Perth every day, and there is an incredible example of TOD developing around his station at present.
Auckland lacks most of the coordination and integration that delivers this at present – and it’s more than just a question of transport policy/funding.
As a specific example, dreaming about TOD in Kumeu is just that in my opinion; the list of missing ingredients to make this happen is very long compared to a successful system as is operating in Perth. Council lacks an integrated policy vision and spatial plan for the area (no, simply zoning for ‘future urban’ and letting the market put together its own development plans is not ‘vision’ nor ‘spatial planning’), basic interventions to create connectivity around the station are not supported by AT, NZTA is certainly not capable of enabling a decent urban street environment along SH16, land ownership is fragmented and only partially cooperating, and there is a highly incoherent town centre and retail context. If these barriers are not addressed, investing in rail in a corridor like this is just supervising rural lifestyle sprawl; no-one will seriously contemplate moving here for a low-car lifestyle when nothing works together and there is no mechanism forming to enable the essential ingredients to work together.
Our closest comparison to the Mandurah line is clearly Auckland to Hamilton, and this blog has pretty much supported and discussed in detail what this could achieve and what it would require. This is a corridor that is going to grow, has some logical nodes that could and will grow into more urban places, and is part of the economic triangle with Tauranga. These factors alone create market pressure which align with outer area rail demand; what is needed to realise that corridor is still the integration of vision, policy and implementation tools to see any benefit for areas along the route.
For now, focussing on making the most of the urban tools and opportunities that we have must surely be the focus. Perth also shows how motorway corridors can be repurposed in the future as rail – yes, I’m skipping details deliberately there, but hey, once oil gets really expensive ratepayers will be screaming to convert underused private vehicle lanes to something else.
Tim, I’m not comparing WA to Wellsford, I used Wellsford as an example of distance, to highlight that we have no comparable projects to the Mandurah and Joondalup line. My point is that Perth and Auckland have very different drivers of patronage, and are not comparable rail systems. Auckland is focussing on the inner core of the region only, with no plans for anything anywhere near the scale of Mandurah or Joondalup.
AT want Auckland to have a regional motorway network, and a small, contained, rail network in the core of the region, rather than a regional rail network like Perth and most other rail cities around the world.
Wellsford; yup, I got that you used it for distance.
My points suggested that AT is not against outer rail where the destination in outer areas is suitable for that – i.e. Pukekohe and the Hamilton corridor, which is much more comparable to the drivers for the Mandurah line. Notable ‘anchor’ destinations in that trajectory, direct alignment which can be competitive against road, substantial growth patterns and good bones of a town centre in Pukekohe. Conversely, the western line is up against a more direct corridor, a development opportunity gap between Swanson and Kumeu, and weak urban bones at Kumeu/Huapai that are pretty intractable.
Your claim that AT are not interested in outer rail is clearly not correct, but they are interested in the same logic that sustains lines like Joondalup and Mandurah.
“Your claim that AT are not interested in outer rail is clearly not correct”
I’m not at all convinced of that, or they would have plans for the refurbished carriages they own, which are about to become surplus. Remember, ARTA did have such plans, of using the SA cars post-electrification, to expand the network. AT have made a conscious decision to abandon those plans and contain the network at Swanson and Pukekohe.
There is a significant opportunity to start such services using the stock they already own. It will never be as cheap or easy again, yet they choose not to do it. I think that is a reflection of AT aligning its transport policy with that of central government, who very much wish to prevent rail service expansion beyond the core network.
“once oil gets really expensive ratepayers will be screaming to convert underused private vehicle lanes to something else”
On the money there TimR.. and it will get really expensive (and/or scarce) and not many decades away.. long before those private vehicle lanes have reached the end of their useful lives.
Interesting times coming.
Good news
Perth rail still marching up. Rail sept and oct figures back to record breaking.
http://www.pta.wa.gov.au/NewsandMedia/TransperthPatronage/tabid/218/language/en-AU/Default.aspx
Ta Riccardo, and London is breaking records too: http://www.standard.co.uk/news/transport/tube-marks-busiest-day-ever-with-more-than-45-million-passengers-9873892.html
So the Jan 2015 figures have been released and rail numbers are now up to 12,790,306 (which is a 20% annual increase). If this rate continues it will be 15,348,367 Jan 2016. 18,418,040 in Jan 2017 and 22,101,648 in Jan 2018. So the 20mil figure would be reached around May 2017 so late 2017 should be the latest start date for main construction of CRL at this rate.