A random assortment of charts from data that I regularly collect but which don’t often warrant their own post.
That downward spike in fuel prices a few months ago didn’t last too long
Average traffic volumes over the harbour bridge are up slightly – an increase of 0.9% over this time last year – but still below what they were a decade ago. For an explanation on why there is a new and old count see this post.
The road toll is creeping back up. The 12 months to the end of June were up 11% on the same time the year before. Note: back in the mid-late 1980’s it was over 800 in a year so this is an improvement but still way too many people killed and injured on our roads.
Airport passenger volumes continue to increase, now over 15 million passengers a year pass through the airport. Of the 4 million international arrivals, 1.9 million are New Zealanders (I assume a similar number of departures are too).
Wellington patronage data for June is now available and shows modest growth of 2% for the year. The strongest growth is on the rail network at just over a 4% increase in patronage.
On the issue of rail, a year ago the Auckland rail network carried less passengers than the Wellington network however (11.4m vs 11.6m) however the huge growth in Auckland has dramatically turned the tables.
While still on rail, here’s the results for each month shown over a calendar year – highlighting just how much larger patronage is this year compared to previous years.
Lastly on PT, how we’re tracking against the Auckland Plan target of doubling patronage from 70 million in 2012 to 140 million in 2022 (we’re just over 78 million now). After a slow start, patronage now seems to be tracking at a similar level – albeit with a lower number – to the Auckland Plan target. If the current trend continued we’d probably end up with around 130 million trips.
AM peak cycling counts from 9 of ATs automated cycle counters shows numbers continue to rise.
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Meeting the Auckland Plan patronage target will be about step changes e.g. CRL. So there’s no reason to extrapolate current trends.
Yes and no, CRL isn’t likely to be open to affect the result pre-2022 and the other major improvements e.g. electrification, new network, integrated fares etc will see some jumps but effects will be more spread over time
Yes you’re both likely right. Big projects do create big jumps that break the extrapolated trend, but over time the extrapolation will likely be about right as it absorbs these events, as Matt says.
The CRL is of a different order however as it is a truely transformational project; it will completely reinvent Auckland as a Metro city, a magnitude of change we haven’t seen since the Harbour Bridge opened. The curve will accelerate steeply once it is at full operation. As will other metrics.
But don’t underestimate integrated fares and the New Network, and proper joined up bus priority on major arterials…. These, with 10 min freqs on the western line and faster dwells for the trains will continue to add appeal and therefore pax.
I wonder why there is always such a big drop in patronage in April each year. I can understand January being low with people going on holiday and student off. If it is a term break why don’t we see the same type of drop in July?
Is Easter another significant time of year that lots of people take a significant holiday?
Most patronage comes on weekdays. Easter removes two weekdays. Normally easter is when school holidays start too so no students for a few weeks
Also, universities and schools are on break for two weeks in this period. Plus there is Anzac Day, there is one day fewer total, and it starts to rain in April which does effect patronage a little.
I have a theory why some of that drop is, in addition to what Matt said.
Its also due in part I think to daylight savings and the sunrise/sunset times at that time of year.
Start of April corresponds to the end of Daylight saving (ends on the 1st Sunday in April now, used to be the last Sunday in March a few years back), which makes PT use in the AM unattractive in April before Daylight savings end. As the sun doesn’t rise until after about 7:35am (daylight savings time) then. Which makes the mornings in late March/early April seem especially dark. Then at the end of the day once Daylight savings ends it has a similar effect in making it dark sooner (e.g. before 6pm). Both seem to initially put peopl of using PT for a while. But this is temporary because May is nearly as big a month PT-wise as March usually.
Easter does provide a moveable feast – Easter occurs more times in April than March due to the ratio of day in March v April days where Easter Sunday can fall.
From memory there are about 11 days in March where Easter Sunday can fall, and 25 days in April, so for any given year, Easter will fall in April about 70% of the time.
And Easter provides the start of the school holidays, which means for the next 2 weeks PT usage will usually be down as a result.
In part because as the roads are quieter during holidays so more people drive who would usually use PT.
But also because many users of regular PT services are away on holidays too.
All these combined make April PT usage “slump” compared to March – when it was trucking along in March.
Comparing April to February patronage in the above chart which have about the same number of working days once all holidays are removed, the patronage is the similar.
There are a lot of complexities in this area, holidays being a major issue but not the only one.
It’s also because every single year AT is useless at coping with March madness so people give up on PT.
Road toll increase is interesting. I seem to remember the drink drive rule changes were meant to save 40 lives a year – so either we are having a really bad year or that was just lies. Another unnecessary law change to make everyone’s lives harder due to a NZ herald campaign with no statistical evidence.
“unnecessary law change to make everyone’s lives harder” I can’t see how people’s lives are harder as a result of reducing the alcohol limit
“due to a NZ herald campaign with no statistical evidence” on the contrary the reduction was made (belatedly) on the basis of overwhelming international evidence.. if the Herald had a part to play in highlighting what the National Government pretended for way too long needed yet more years of NZ research confirming the bleeding obvious then good on them
So we are expecting a big drop in the road toll any time soon?
Does it actually make anyone’s life harder? If I choose to drive, I choose not to drink any alcohol. I would expect any other reasonable person to make that same choice.
We play cricket in the summer, we used to hang around afterwards for a few drinks, now everyone just goes home. No one ever drove drunk or caused any problems.
Maybe saying it made life harder was a bit extreme, but it has made life less social.
It might be OK in countries with decent PT…
Yes good point JimboJones. A lot of people can’t be bothered having 1 drink only and 2 is risky for some people. Most people wouldn’t even have any side-effects from alcohol until maybe 3 drinks (women)/4 drinks (men) and even then highly unlikely to affect safety. I think 300mcg would have been a better figure.
Sure there is the potential for a boost to PT from people drinking at taking PT rather than driving but overall I doubt this as people that are actually going for a drinking session would either be taking PT or a taxi anyway.
Yes I think the old limit was too high and it should have been lowered, but the new limit seems a bit over the top. Maybe some research into how driving is affected at various levels would have been good instead of choosing a limit based purely on what other countries have chosen.
Yep, lets waste millions of dollar replicating results that have been replicated dozens of times already instead of just doing something about it.
personally i think it should be zero alcohol limit. cars are machinery at the end of the day.
Overall NZers will end up paying many more millions in taxis, many pubs and clubs will close down, and we have another restriction on our lives, and yet the road toll hasn’t gone down (early days granted). I think they should have done the research…
My understanding is that you are much more likely to cause a crash while using a phone than while driving after three beers – so why is using a phone a $75 slap on the wrist and the other a $200 fine + 50 demerits? Its all just political, not evidence or statistics based.
Sounds like yet another good reason to improve PT and cycling so they are viable options.
There’s something wrong with our culture where it’s harder to be ‘social’ when not impaired with booze. They seem to be pretty social in Muslim countries.
They also go around blowing each other up quite frequently too…
The mulsims don’t’ have a monopoly on blowing each other up, the Irish Catholics used to be quite good at it until recently.
Yes Dan C, 1 country that doesn’t even do that anymore. Compared to: Iraq, Iran, Syria, Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Oman, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Libya, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines etc many of which have this happen on a weekly basis and most on an annual basis at least.
We don’t bother buying explosives, just kill with vehicles, about 1 person every day every year. The USA does even better with vehicle carnage (over 30,000) and then add in the guns as well.
We’re so civilised.
Expected saved lives from the drink limit changes were 3 to 4 per year, I recall the govt delayed the rule change for a couple of years which were spent collecting data to make this estimate, this link confirms:
“3.4 lives a year are expected be saved by the law, and 64 injury-causing crashes avoided.
On average New Zealand adult drivers with readings between 51mg and 80mg are responsible for at least seven deaths, 45 serious injuries, and 102 minor injuries each year.
In 2013, driver alcohol use was a contributing factor in 65 fatal crashes, 297 serious injury crashes and 810 minor injury crashes.
These resulted in 71 deaths, 413 serious injuries and 1158 minor injuries”
From Aug 2014, http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/10335142/Lower-drink-drive-limit-will-save-lives
Great to see the cyclist numbers increasing, alarmingly not as fast as the Auckland Airport numbers, but still very significant.
It is unlikely cycling numbers will jump until whole networks of safer routes are in place, I expect incremental improvement followed by steadier increases after the recent spending boost has been deployed; so about 3 years at the earliest for consistently stronger growth.
Sadly, the all-day numbers have actually been static for the last 6 months or so. Disappointing, but with little investment in recent years… more is coming, but will take a while, as Patrick says.
With 9 “strategic” counters its hardly capturing even the majority of the cyclists.
For instance none of the counters are located in the Eastern Suburbs, except one on Tamaki drive, so its not capturing the vast hinterland of cyclists such as those I see cycling to and from Newmarket.
Use uber
Interesting replies guys, something to think about. thanks.
Bit of a gripe here I’m afraid- Matt, can you PLEASE!!! if you’re going to make a comparison in the comments show it on the graph?? When talking about the road toll you state that the road toll is lower than in the 80s, then produce a graph that goes back to 2005. You do the same thing with the Harbour Bridge data, state traffic is lower ‘than a decade ago’ then only show data going back just over 8 years. Your graph on rail patronage has the opposite problem: the text talks about a 4% rise in patronage for the year, then the graph goes back to 2000, which shows absolutely nothing. It really doesn’t help with clarity!
Also, your road-toll graph as currently produced suggests that about 300-400 people died each MONTH! I assume that line is a rolling total for the previous 12 months?
The first graph with petrol prices is interesting in that it shows how greedy the fuel companies have been since October ’10/April ’11 when they decided to increase their margins significantly from around 18c to around 40c (all in a period of historically low inflation!).
Sure over time inflation would dictate that prices increase but to more than double the margin in 5 years is excessive. Even using a 2% per annum inflation increase the margin should only be at 20c now from 18c not the 40c. This would of course mean fuel would reduce not by 20c but actually 23c once the GST component is also removed from the additional cost. I know most on here would like higher fuel prices to get people out of cars and on to PT (which is understandable and reasonable to a certain extent…. if that increase is due to taxes etc! Not when it goes to petrol companies bank balance!).
The higher prices also impact PT in that diesel for buses, ferries (and some trains) is more expensive too. If fuel costs for operators reduced by 10% then that would have the potential for reduced fares or increased services.
Not sure about that – theres some other factors which may be at play. Historically petrol companies ran very slim margins on fuel and made money on other products. That may be changing. Also, the discounts delivered via fuel vouchers presumably need to be factored into margins in some way (although supermarkets will also kick in). Finally, fuel is only one cost driver (input) into retail petrol prices and margins. Land is a other – and petrol stations require a large physical footprint. So it may be that margins need to be higher in order to cover higher land costs in order to achieve a reasonable return on capital.
You raise some good points. You could also say that petrol stations are more adept at selling other products (larger selections, things like Subway, coffee etc), they have also reduced the number of stations around the country while population densities around the remaining stations have gone up (i.e. more revenue per station and longer hours again increasing revenue). When you look at the graph it is the main factor in price increases over the other factors. It is also interesting to note that overseas prices have fallen a lot further than prices here while margins have been maintained here.
Tha’s when Shell pulled out of the country. It appears they were the only one competing on price. Z came along with their ‘we compete on service not price’ moto and the remaining multinationals took that as a cue to increase prices without fear of being undercut.
Regarding the harbour bridge graph; what accounts for the difference between old and new counts?
Regarding the Road Toll graph…. it just goes to show how the NZ police policy of revenue gathering from speeding tickets is not the right area to focus on rather than unsafe driving. There is no reason why the motorway from Albany to Puhoi shouldn’t have at least a 110km/h limit if not 120km/h! Considering that almost all road fatalities in NZ occur at speeds below 100km/h it would seem that their focus is more about revenue than actual safety (do you see cops on corners or the top of hills? no they are at the end of passing lanes and straights or at the bottom of a hill where speed will naturally be higher). Trucks speeding is however a safety issue as they take up a lot more road, the results are much larger and speeding trucks damage the road anyway.
You don’t see them giving tickets to drivers not giving cyclists space etc
A good way to explain how popular rail has become to those who believe no-one uses it, could be to compare it to airport patronage: “Aucklands rail network is used each day by a similar number of passengers as the international and domestic terminals combined; except usage is strongly skewed towards weekdays, and especially peak hours, when the service is most critical to Aucklands functioning. It would be much busier at these times than the Airport(s) combined ever are, with many of 18 trains per hour carrying the equivalent of two full 747s . On top of that, usage is growing exceptionally fast in comparison”.
Good comment. I was struck by the similar trajectories of both transport systems when writing this post on extending rail through Mangere to the airport:
http://greaterakl.wpengine.com/2015/06/23/mangereairport-rail-2-0/
We really need to link these two growing systems together for both their benefit.
…the equivalent of two 747s *each*!
Good informative post. It will be very helpful for Auckland residents.
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