In March each year the Auckland Regional Council conducts a survey of the number of people entering the CBD via public transport. It’s a pretty crude measurement tool in my opinion – just picking one day a year and seeing what happens on that day – but it shows up some interesting information as the same survey has been conducted on a day in March of every year since 1986. Therefore, it provides us with some interesting information about the trends for public transport use over that time.
The basic graph showing the change in ridership over the past 23 years is shown below:
There are always some slightly strange fluctuations to this survey, simply because it only measures ridership on one particular day of the year. I think the 2007 results were well down on 2006 simply because on the day in 2007 when the survey was done it was raining, and everyone knows that when it rains a lot of people don’t want to walk to the bus stop so therefore they hop into their cars.
Bus patronage increased by 5.7% between the 2009 and 2008 survey – with a total of 24,463 people entering the CBD on public transport between 7am and 9am on the day of the survey (March 30th I think). When you look at how patronage changed on the different bus routes into the city, some interesting figures emerge too:
The most significant arrival points – Symonds Street to the south of the CBD and Fanshawe Street to the north, are not really a surprise given that most of Auckland’s buses seem to enter the city along either of those two routes. I’m not quite sure what to read into the 20% decline of people coming in along Karangahape Road – perhaps the improvements to the Western Rail Line are causing people to shift from catching the bus to the train? These figures also give a useful idea of how future “through-bus-routes” could link up with each other – Fanshawe and Symonds Street being the obvious two to connect somehow.
If we look at ferry patronage, over the course of the last 23 years it is clear that patronage has increased very significantly indeed. I am not sure what the state of the ferry system was back then, but even though ferry patronage has generally been flat this year (according to ARTA monthly reports) it’s clear that the long-term trend is an increase:
I won’t run through the change in patronage for every route, as things have been pretty steady or slightly declining over the past couple of years. Some of the newer routes – to Pine Harbour and West Harbour – continue to show good growth though.
Perhaps what is most interesting are the rail results, which actually show that a pretty big stuff up was made in the 2008 count. I’ll let the report itself explain the situation:
The 2009 survey of rail patronage into Britomart showed a 12.1 per cent reduction in patronage from 2008 levels. This finding was considered by ARTA and ARC staff to be unlikely, so further investigations were carried out. These showed that the 2008 survey had over counted patronage from rail. The over counting was caused by:
• the counting of one incoming train twice,
• the over-estimation of passengers alighting from each carriage.ARTA have carried out work which estimates the likely patronage level that occurred in 2008. This involved comparing 2009 patronage counts with monthly records, and then doing the same for 2008. This analysis showed that patronage from rail in 2009 would have numbered approximately 4,900 passengers (rather than 5,713 as previously reported). This figure has been used for comparative purposes throughout this report. When these figures are used, rail patronage rose by 2.4 per cent in 2009 (119 extra passengers), and total patronage rose by 4.7 per cent. These figures are in line with the longer term trend that has occurred since Britomart was opened.
Oops. But anyway, when you look at the long-term trends of rail use in Auckland it’s obvious how much things have changed in the years since Britomart opened in 2003. It must have really taken some vision to invest a significant chunk of money into Auckland’s railway system when things were at such a low-ebb, so I take my hat off to Christine Fletcher – the mayor of Auckland City who funded Britomart:
If we compare 2009 with 2003 we can see that in the space of six years we have gone from having around 1000 people arrive in the CBD by train within the 7am-9am window, to having around 5000 people arriving in the CBD by train in those two hours. That’s a five-fold increase in the space of six years! It is true that things have tailed off a bit in the last couple of years compared to the incredible growth of the 2003-2007 period, but I think that’s largely due to the huge increases of earlier times coming off such a low base. Furthermore, we haven’t seen too many significant improvements to the rail system in the last year or two – they will be coming online over the course of the next couple of years as New Lynn station is completed, Newmarket station is completed and the Onehunga and Manukau branches become operative.
Overall, the trend is clearly heading up. Furthermore, one must remember that this survey is simply one single day and the data we get from ARTA’s monthly business reports is actually in many ways much more useful. Nevertheless, the longevity of this survey means that it provides some interesting data – and a reminder of how far our rail system has come in the last few years in particular. Let’s not stuff things up now!
Yeah while the whole electrification scope saga may be a bit depressing… It really is nothing compared to how rail fans must have felt in 91… At the start of a long National government, recent talk of closing the network, wouldn’t have been fun..!
You can also see the difference new infrastructure makes in the years when the ex. Perth DMU’s arrived, followed by the increase after Britomart opened, if it were followed by two new routes, full electrification, all new rolling stock and integrated ticketing those stats would continue on such exponential growth… We can only hope..!
Any idea why bus patronage fell for 5 years, before rising again recently?
Public transport in general collapsed in the late 1980s and early 1990s – although rail couldn’t fall very far as it was negligible anyway. This was the culmination of decades of pro-roading policy, while the deregulation of car imports also made travelling by car far cheaper than before.
Another reason is that the 1987 stockmarket crash happened in the middle of a development boom in Auckland, so a lot of buildings were demolished but couldn’t be replaced. Those areas became carparks which made parking in the city really really cheap too.
Other than this survey, and ARTA’s monthly business reports, what other efforts are made to measure public transport (and road transport)? Given that a lot of money is spent on infrastructure and operating costs, does it make any sense to allocate (more?) money to better understand how effective various projects have been/will be? Can you give examples of good/bad analysis, and do you have any ideas for better analysis that currently is not done.
A key reason why public transport patronage dropped in the late 80s, early 90s is called the recession. The economy was in a deep recession from 1988 when the sharemarket crash happened, which didn’t recover until 1995 or so. Jobs disappeared downtown, and much of the new job development was in other locations (North Shore) which are difficult for most commuters to access by bus (and easy by car).
There are similar declines in patronage elsewhere. The long term trend of course has been a decline, due to affluence. The wealthier people are the higher the car ownership and lower the public transport usage.
The removal of tariffs on motor vehicle imports happened in 1999, so that can’t really be factored into this, although over time the price of vehicles has declined in real terms, as tariffs reduced over a long period.
I think Richard’s point is important. There needs to be post project audits about whether they deliver what was expected. Britomart was an exhorbitantly expensive way of achieving the goal of rail in downtown Auckland. There were far cheaper options which would have delivered almost the same level of service, but no, Auckland has the Rolls Royce.
Dare I also suggest that talking about a CBD underground loop when patronage is only 5000 in the morning peak is ludicrous. There needs to be some decent study on capacity, and best options for achieving improved capacity, and whether pricing is needed to spread peak demand. I am not convinced that the best options are grandiose think big projects.
The 5000 passengers in the morning peak seems reasonably close to Britomart’s current capacity though. With longer trains and bi-directional running in the tunnel we might be able to increase that to 8000-10,000 by around 2016. That would be in line with ARTA’s predictions, and would definitely be about the time a CBD tunnel would be critical.
The thing is, if you want to start building the tunnel in 2016 there’s a lot of work to be done before that.
Liberty, you must be the only person in history who has described anything to do with the Auckland rail system as “Rolls Royce”
libertyscott: “The wealthier people are the higher the car ownership and lower the public transport usage.”
Not necessarily. Zurich, Switzerland has wealth *and* a high rate of car ownership, yet people choose to use public transport because it’s such an excellent system!
“ferry patronage has generally been flat this year (according to ARTA monthly reports) it’s clear that the long-term trend is an increase”
Ferry patronage has been flat since 2005 according to that graph. This is no coincidence: when Fullers was sold by Stagecoach to Infratil in 2006 fares consistently ran 20% above CPI inflation, according to our research. Infratil demanded a 20% return on its assets and it had to come from passengers forking out more. Flat numbers may have played a role in the decision to flick Fullers on to Souter Holdings as the ferries have been run down and passengers bled dry.
That late 1980s dip is massive I was actually wondering about the more recent and less pronounced dip, between 2003 and 2008. It stands out from the trend. That seems strange to me, but because I left Auckland in 2003 and have literally caught about two buses in the city since then, have no idea why. Could it be that some people have shifted to rail?
Cam, he must be talking about Rolls Royce before the Germans bought it; ancient technology, supremely inefficient, expensive to use, a nightmare to own, slow, impractical, and less comfortable than advertised.
The 2003-2007 downward trend has been put down to the reducing number of international students studying at private language schools in Auckland’s CBD. There was a HUGE boom of language schools in the early 2000s, and most often they did not have cars so therefore caught the bus (if they didn’t live in the CBD).
New North Road bus services had 10 minute off-peak frequencies until about 2005, when lower patronage knocked it back to 15 minute frequencies. At the height of the student boom in 2002/2003 many people at stops at the top of Symonds Street were struggling to get on a bus at all because they were so full.
Thanks, very interesting.