Late last year Auckland Transport provided me with some fantastic data showing how many people travelled from each station to each other station on the network for the 2013/14 financial year. At the time I also published the raw data that I had and thought it would be great to see what visualisations people could come up with. Reader Aaron Schiff took up the challenge and has now published his visualisation which is even interactive.
As expected the data shows that most trips are to or from Britomart, but I was also interested to see the significant amount of local trips (especially up and down the Western line). There’s also a good smattering of cross-town trips involving two or more lines, showing that the rail network is not just used for CBD commuting.
If anyone from Auckland Transport is reading — this would be relatively easy to update for other years if you’d like to provide the data …
Aaron’s broken the data down to trips towards Britomart, trips away from Britomart and cross town trips, which are trips that require a transfer. Here are a few images I’ve taken but head to the site to see it better and it also allows you to select an individual station to see the data just for that.
Towards Britomart
Away from Britomart
Cross-town
Excellent work Aaron and for AT, more data would be great, especially if you could also include the Northern Busway. I for one would love to see how the patterns change over time
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Yep fantastic visualisation.
But I would never have guessed that the number 1 destination for all trips from Britomart is (drum roll please): Glen Innes – at 186K trips, just 3K ahead of #2 Papatoetoe at 183K trips.
Ellerslie is #3 at 157K trips, and Newmarket 4th at 151K trips, then Sylvia Park is #5 at 148K and Panmure rounds out the top 6 at 140K
One thing I cant seem to do is show the trips that ended at a particular station (rather than originated at that station).
But from clicking on these top 6 stations in turn in the “Toward downtown” mode it seems their rankings are similar there too with similar numbers to the “From Downtown” view.
And Orakei station shows about 440 people a day use it each way, which means as the Park and Ride has 200 odd car parks, that 50% of the people using Orakei either car pool, or walk to/from it and/or park off site to use it.
When you consider the state of the Glen Innes station, it’s quite something.
Yeah, and where are they all coming from or going to I wonder?
Thats nearly 1000 people each way each working day using GI – maybe a lot of these are students (both Uni and School age), but even so.
The Park N ride in GI is quite small compared to GI and its 1 stage further out than Orakei, so costs more $$’s to use it.
A lot of school children come and go, going both North and South, although my observation is the Southbound ones only pay when security is around. Numbers have also increased with people coming from Howick and Pakuranga
Some of the Orakei Park and Ride is 240min and so some spaces are used twice per day
Not many – about 8 spaces are like that. The majority are all day parking.
Personally I struggle with these visualisations
Give me cold hard numbers any day
Click on any station to see the numbers.
This is a very elegant way to show what is a very complex diagram of usage patterns.
Then go to the first post I’ve linked to and the data is available in there.
interesting, Glen Eden (my station) is 3nd largest in terms of heading to Britomart. Must be catching lots of pax from Titirangi and surrounding areas. V small park and ride here too. Bring on the new trains!
Going to Aaron’s datamodel and clicking down the stations on the Western Line shows how little of the traffic goes to Newmarket or even Grafton versus Britomart and really shows the value that the CRL is going to be in pulling those stations closer to most travellers’ destination without the backing in and out of Newmarket on every trip. Bring it on!
Hat tip to Aaron. Well done great job.
And many that do (Grafton at least) will continue to the top end of town due to the lengthy Newmarket switch.
I work at the UoA and I actually get out at Kingsland and catch a connecting bus, my wife ( UoA) gets of at Grafton and jogs to work.
In case of CRL we would both get out at Aotea for the short walk up the hill.
Any chance of GWRC/MetLink-sourced Wellington data for similar visualisations… anyone?
Interesting that in the Crosstown view (where you changed lines to complete your journey) just about every single Western Line station had its #1 cross town destination being Ellerslie station.
Yes nowhere near the size of Britomart journeys – presume thats partially work related and also education related?
On that subject is the HOP data broken out by fare class (child fare/Student Fare v Adult fare) so we can see which trips are education related trips?