Rail ridership stats ahead of the CRL opening

The City Rail Link is being officially opened today – as in, a ribbon-cutting, with trains commencing from Sunday. So with passenger services just two days away, what better time to take a look at look at how the rail network has been performing, to help provide a bit of a benchmark for the transformation the CRL delivers.

To start with, let’s look at the overall numbers before diving deeper.

Just over a century ago, Auckland’s rail network was carrying around 6 million annual trips. But the shifting of the Auckland Station from its original site where Waitematā now is, to The Strand, reduced the use of the network, putting it into decline.

The original iteration of something like the City Rail Link – the Morningside Deviation – was intended to address this by providing better access to the city centre but as we know, it never happened. What followed was, with a couple of exceptions, a slow and steady decline in the use of the network before reaching its nadir in 1993, with the system carrying a touch over one million trips.

That was when Auckland brought Perth’s former diesel trains, which resulted in usage more than doubling. While the diesel trains revived the network, it was the 2003 opening of Britomart Station – now Waitematā – that returned trains to where they originally were over 80 years earlier, which really kickstarted the rail revival in Auckland. It turns out, making the network a lot more useful results in usage shooting up.

Further improvements to the network, such as station upgrades, double-tracking of the Western line, the opening of the Onehunga and Manukau branches, and eventually electrification, saw usage rise even higher – peaking at just over 22 million trips prior to the arrival of COVID.

Since then, a rise in work-from-home has changed travel patterns, and the network has been impacted by six years of disruption (for various works), which has taken a massive toll on ridership. In the 12 months to the end of August 2026, there were just 14.7 million trips, which is about 67% of the pre-COVID peak. The last time usage was at 14.7 million trips was September 2015.

The growth of ridership post-Britomart was driven by numerous improvements to both the rail network and the wider public transport network. The version on the chart below looks just at the modern history a bit more closely, showing many of the improvements that contributed to the growth we’ve seen.

Notably, the years of disruption meant the rail network never recovered at the same rate as buses or ferries, and was stuck in the low-60% for years. It’s only in the last few months that we’ve started to see that change, pushing closer to 80% of pre-COVID levels. This is likely a combination of the reduction in disruptions, plus the impacts of fuel price rises.

Auckland Transport has also kindly provided me with station usage data. There are many possible stories to tell from this – too many for just one post.

To start with, here are the overall boardings. As you’d expect, even though usage overall is down, Waitematā continues to dominate, accounting for over a quarter of all boardings. At the other end of the scale, Te Mahia, at which AT have just built a large pedestrian bridge as part of their efforts to remove level crossings – is the least used station on the network with just 32k trips in the last financial year, not far behind Te Papapa.

And below is how station boardings compare to pre-COVID levels.

Only two stations are above what they were at in 2019: Puhinui and Parnell. The upgrade of Puhinui has clearly made a huge difference to its usage, a trend we’ve seen at other significantly upgraded stations in the past. Meanawhile, Parnell has benefited a lot from efforts to improve access, such as the underpass that was completed at the start of 2024.

The Onehunga line stations are the worst performing here. That will in large part be due to them no longer having direct access to Waitematā, like they had in the pre-COVID era.

Of the main lines, the Western looks to be performing the worst – likely a big part of this would be the ongoing network disruption due to the rail network rebuild works and the upgrade of Henderson station. As such, boardings at many of the stations are still down on even 2024 levels, with the outer stations down by as much as 20%.

However, that is just boardings, which actually accounts for around 52% of all trips on the network – something that will certainly start to change from next week.

If we extend the same logic to other stations, the top five are shown below. Note, a trip from one of these stations to another, e.g. from Panmure to Waitematā, will be counted in both, so the totals don’t add up to 100%.  The results also highlight a few other interesting aspects:

• Panmure and New Lynn have continued to battle for the 3rd and 4th busiest stations. Panmure is now more clearly ahead, but as noted above, New Lynn has been disrupted more recently by network upgrades whereas Panmure saw that disruption more significantly in 2022-24.
• Manukau has continued to rise in popularity, with Middlemore only just behind.

Another interesting story using this method has been in the South. The closure of Pukekohe during electrification and the station upgrade clearly resulted in many users shifting to catching the train from Papakura and Takaanini. With Pukekohe reopened, those trips have shifted back. I imagine this picture will change a lot again with the opening of Drury and Paerātā, plus Ngākōroa next year.

The two stations with the biggest mismatch in boarding and alighting numbers remain Grafton and Waitematā. This suggests the ongoing presence of “down-hilling” – people are getting off the train at Grafton, perhaps catching a bus to areas like the University, then carrying on downhill in the afternoon, to board a homeward train at Waitematā.

If I rank each station by boardings and chart them all, I get what I like to call The Rug, due to its resemblance to a colourful woven rug thanks to all the movement.

For this version I’ve only highlighted the most dramatic changes. As you can see, most of the stations that have had big changes are those that have been through significant upgrades.

The data Auckland Transport provided me also included the rough time of day that trips occurred. Over half of all trips happen in the morning or afternoon peaks. Note: the off-peak figures include weekends and public holidays.

It will be fascinating to see how these numbers change over the coming weeks, months, and years.

For their part, Auckland Transport include their ridership targets – which are based off their modelled predictions – in their Statement of Intent (SOI) documents – the most recent one being signed off by Auckland Council just a few weeks ago and covering 2026-29.

The chart below shows the targets, including those from previous SOIs. It shows that Auckland Transport is expecting to reach 22 million trips again by the middle of 2028 and then only a slight increase to 23.3 million trips a year later.

In an interview with the Herald, KiwiRail CEO Peter Reidy mentioned that they’re preparing for 29 million passengers by the end of 2030. So I’ve added that too. As you can see, it represents a continuation of the trend predicted by Auckland Transport for the next few years, which does feel a bit more realistic.

Personally, these results feel a bit too low to me – but time will tell. It’s certainly something we’ll be watching closely.

What do you think will happen with ridership.

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