2024s Busiest Bus Routes

A few weeks ago I took a look at public transport ridership in 2024. In today’s post I’m going to be looking a bit deeper at bus ridership.

Buses make up the vast majority of ridership in Auckland with 70 million boardings last year out of a total of 89.4 million. That’s about 76 percent of all trips, quite a bit higher than the 65 percent of trips it was prior to COVID thanks to bus usage recovering faster than other modes. Boardings are currently at 93 percent of what they were in February 2020. By comparison, trains are at 65 percent and ferries at 79 percent.

So let’s break these numbers down a bit, which we can helpfully do thanks to Auckland Transport regularly publishing a bus performance report which contains data on all services provided by AT but does not contain data on school services, buses-replace-trains services, special event services, or exempt services. I used this data back in 2020 to look at our busiest bus routes prior to COVID and some of the analysis I did back then has been updated with the latest numbers.

Bus Ridership by the type of service.

Auckland Transport have long broken their services down by layers based on the minimum level of all day/all week frequency a service has. By and large these classifications are a useful high-level way to understand the quality of a service but there are always some exceptions. One good example is the 866 runs from Albany to Newmarket along the Busway and then via Ponsonby and the hospital. In the morning peak, in the peak direction, it runs as frequently as every 7.5 minutes, better than many all-day frequent routes, but it doesn’t run that frequently counter-peak or off-peak and doesn’t run at all on a weekend meaning it’s only classified as a local service.

AT present much of the data using these classifications already but I’ve made a few tweaks to split the NX1, NX2 and WX1 out to the Rapid category. A few of the minor ones, like On-Demand, as well as the figures for services not included in the report, such as school services, have been grouped into the ‘Other’ category.

In total over 60 percent of all trips take place on Rapid or Frequent services and notably on the whole these services are back above their pre-COVID levels. In many ways this is a good advertisement for the power of the frequent network, that people will continue to use public transport where it’s frequent and convenient to do so.

The biggest drop in usage comes from Peak Only services as changes in usage since COVID mean they’re often just not needed as much anymore. In some ways slightly less peak usage can be a good thing as those services were often some of the most expensive to provide due to needing additional buses and drivers just for a few hours a day. The resource freed up by a slight reduction in peak demand likely supports a lot more service elsewhere.

Bus Ridership by Corridor

One of the issues with the data is that it is for each individual route. As an example, instead of just being 25 that runs on Dominion Rd, it has both the 25B and 25L separately, as well as the peak only 252 and 253.

To get a better idea as to our busiest corridors, I’ve grouped the routes together where possible. As a general rule, I’ve grouped any services with the same base number or that share the same corridor for more than 50% of their length. There are a few exceptions to this to this though.

In total there were 188 different routes that ran at some point in 2024, though that includes a few where a change has occurred, for example the 650 was upgraded to the 65 but both get included in the data. I combine those routes down to around 146 different corridors and the top 60 of those are shown below. These top-60 routes represent over 80% of all bus trips.

Here are a few things that stand out to me:

• As with last time, the impact of the busway is huge and accounts for over 10% of all bus ridership. Even if they were separated out, the NX1 is clearly the busiest single route and the NX2 would be the third busiest after the 70.
• The 70 has long been the second busiest corridor and that’s in part because it’s serving a few different trip types, such as a feeder to trains at Panmure and Ellerslie Stations for a faster trip to parts of the city, is used for trips to the University, it serves trips along the Gt South Rd corridor and also shopping trips to Pakuranga and Botany. The route will also be the prime service using the Eastern Busway once it is completed.
• Arguably some parts of the Gt North Rd corridor are even busier than suggested here as some of the key Northwest routes, like the 11T/W also use the section from Waterview to the city.
• The Northwest corridor has been the biggest mover in the order following the changes in November 2023 which saw the WX1 introduced. In this chart it has moved from being the 13th busiest corridor to the 9th – a little bit more on the Northwest later in the post.
• The Pakuranga Rd corridor (the 72 group of routes between Howick to Panmure) is the highest used corridor that doesn’t go to the city centre (assuming most 72X users are also going to Panmure). This is a great example that people are prepared to transfer.
• Likewise, the 83 (Takapuna to Albany via Browns Bay), does well and it too doesn’t touch the city. I suspect most of the usage is flowing to/from the busway stations.
• The 120 (Henderson to Constellation Station via Westgate) is the busiest non-frequent route and outperforms a number of existing frequent routes. It has been on the plans to upgrade for a few years now but looks like it will finally happen in April.
• The 38 is the least used frequent route (that has existed for a full year). This was previously combined with the AirportLink as the 380.

I’ve also taken a look at how these routes have changed since COVID (not all existed prior to COVID). Here you can see that while the busway is still far and away the busiest service, it’s also seen the biggest fall in usage in total terms with 1.2 million fewer trips compared to before COVID. However, while that represents a drop of around 14 percent, the biggest fall percentage wise with the CityLink was down nearly 35 percent on pre-COVID.

The 74 shows the strongest growth. This route, which links Onehunga to Glen Innes via Sylvia Park and Panmure, was upgraded from the 743 to be frequent in March 2023.

Ridership by region and destination

Auckland Transport group routes into different regions and this shows how ridership by region has changed. The West is the standout here with a big change since the WX1 and other Northwest changes were introduced in November 2023.

Compared to pre-COVID, the routes in the North have had the weakest recovery.

I’ve also noticed in other data that ridership seems to be at or above pre-COVID levels on weekends with weekdays holding us back. I wanted to test the hypothesis that it is routes that start and end in the city centre that are not doing as well. So for each route I assigned whether the route travelled to the city centre or not.

It seems the hypothesis is correct. City centre focused routes still carry more people overall with 37 million boardings vs 29.3 million for buses that don’t go to/from the city. However, those buses to other parts of the region are above pre-COVID levels while the city centre ones are only at about 86% compared to Feb-2020.

Comparing the Rapids

Finally, the introduction of the WX1 has clearly had a big impact on the usage of services in the Northwest and I can’t help but see the similarities between it and the Northern Busway when it first opened.

As a quick reminder, the first Northern Express services started operating at the end of 2005 using just the Albany and Constellation stations and running on bus shoulders on the motorway south of Constellation while the proper busway was being built. The proper busway along with the three other stations were opened in February 2008.

The WX1 is somewhat similar, running along the motorway shoulders and only stopping at a few stations (Westgate, Lincoln Rd and Te Atatu) and the stations are of much lower quality than Albany and Constellation were.

As you can see below, the WX1 service is currently running well ahead of where the Northern Express was at the same time. If only the actual busway was already under construction.

Boardings per Service Hour

Looking at pure boardings is important but it’s also useful to compare that to how much resource is being thrown at the route. For example, the Outer Link carries more people than the Inner Link but it also has a much longer route. So AT have included this metric to give an indication of that. The service hours for each route is the scheduled ‘in service’ time of all services on weekdays i.e. if you have a bus that takes 30 minutes to run and it it is run four times a day, that’s two service hours.

The Busway is the best performer in this metric too, averaging over 60 boardings for every service hour it operates. Notably this is about the same as it was pre-COVID which shows that the level of service provided has been scaled down to meet current demand rather than just running all of the same service that used to be run. The same applies for most other services too and in most cases the boardings per service hour remain fairly consistent with what they were before.

There’s so much more that can be gleamed from this data so if there’s any specific analysis from this data that readers really want to see, let me know and I might add it depending on how much work is involved.

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