It’s March Madness Time again

We may still be in February but yesterday marked the start of March Madness, typically the busiest time of the year for transport of all modes. That’s due to a number of factors, such as:

• The summer holiday period is over meaning
  • All schools and now University’s being back – and for the latter when expectations are high, before some eventually lose interest and start to drop out.
  • Most people are have taken leave so are back at work.
• The typical winter sickness haven’t started to spread yet.

COVID has meant that for the last few years, March hasn’t been super busy compared to what it was before 2020, particularly for public transport. For PT, last year was further hampered by bus driver shortages, ferry crew shortages and rail network shutdowns. Furthermore, demand was also lowered by the rise of working and studying from home for many office jobs and office workers in the city historically tended to make up a large proportion of PT trips. It meant that average weekday usage barely made it above 300,000 trips per day compared to over 400,000 in March 2019.

This year things are a bit different. Those bus driver shortages are now gone, the full rail network is operating again – though with some reliability issues recently and for the western line, that’s about to change in a few weeks as reduced services will be operating due to Kiwirail rebuild works. Working from home is also reducing, both through some staff wanting to be in the office more but also as businesses start to require it.

The impact of this can clearly seen in the data with weekday trips exceeding 330k last week, the highest since the pandemic and 91% of pre-pandemic levels. The week before last is the second highest post-pandemic week.

Breaking this down in a bit more detail, ferries are back to pre-pandemic levels and buses are very close to that level, averaging around 96% over the last four weeks. It’s only the rail network that’s really lagging – after the first lockdown, rail initially recovered at about the same rate as buses and ferries but since the first major network repairs started occurring in August 2020 it has lagged behind.

Interestingly, weekend boardings are looking even stronger and are now regularly at or above what they were in 2019 and the Saturday just been was the second highest Saturday on record with 165k trips. The highest Saturday was in February 2019 with 178k trips (an event?) but this most recent Saturday had higher bus and ferry usage.

AT’s official target is to get back to annual boardings of 83.4 million by the end of June. As of the end of January we’re at 80.9 million and if March continues the way it’s shaping up, we’ll reach that in the next few weeks. If the next few months continues this way, we’ll likely end up closer to 90 million. To put the current results a different way, the current numbers put public transport usage back to where it was in about 2018.

This rate of PT recover also keeps us in line with many other cities we tend to look to. For example, Wellington, Vancouver and London are all generally back to over 90% of pre-pandemic levels while Melbourne and Sydney are tracking at similar levels to us.

For their part, AT say they’re doing all they can to manage demand for PT services.

AT is doing what it can to prepare for the increase in public transport demand this March, Mr Harrison says.

“Where available, we’ve deployed bigger buses to increase capacity where there is high demand. Our buses are fully staffed and we’re running extra services on routes we know will be the busiest, so even if a bus is full, it will only be a short wait for the next one.

“To help make sure we are getting the most out of our buses, we’re encouraging passengers to move down the bus and use every seat when it is busy.”

Passengers can see how busy their bus or train is on the AT Mobile App or Passenger Information Displays at train stations and some bus stops.

“We’re monitoring the performance of the public transport system daily and looking at how we can better use the resources we have available to optimise the network’s performance,” Mr Harrison says.

“We’re committed to keeping Auckland moving, but it is already getting busier out on the roads and on public transport. Driving and catching public transport could take a bit longer than normal, particularly in the morning and in the mid-to-late afternoon. We encourage commuters to make use of the AT Mobile App to plan their journey, track it in real-time and check capacity.”

Of course the one thing they don’t mention there is that cycling is a great option, and typically the most reliable when it comes to travel times. And AT’s counters are showing that cycling numbers are also bouncing back from the impacts of COVID.

AT have recently installed a lot more counters on cycleways around the region, bringing the total up to 63 but for their official measures they use just 26 of those for which they have data from late 2015 onwards. Those 26 counters show cycleway numbers in January up 26% on last year, though overall usage is still someway off pre-pandemic levels, in part because there was a huge surge in cycling in the year before the pandemic hit.

However, on the counters that surround the city centre, the rolling annual total is back to what it was just before COVID hit.

There are certainly some positives in the number’s we’re seeing. When it comes to public transport, how high do you think our recovery will get in March. Could we get into the mid-90% range?

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