Somewhat unsurprisingly, rising fuel prices over the past few months have led to a fairly substantial reduction in traffic volumes on state highways around the country. NZTA’s April 2010 traffic volumes report (I am amused that the website still calls it the traffic growth section – it’ll take NZTA a long time to adjust to the new reality of stable or declining traffic volumes) confirms the numbers for April 2011 compared to April 2010:
A pretty interesting definition of the word “growth” there.
Perhaps even more useful than the graph above is one that NZTA have put together showing trends in traffic volume change over the past three years – including a 3-month rolling average:
The next time someone says that higher petrol prices don’t have much effect on whether people use their cars or not it might be worth showing them this graph. You can see in mid-2008 the absolutely massive effect that high prices had on all vehicles (the pink line). While traffic levels generally recovered throughout 2009 you can see the trend starting to dip downwards again in late 2010 and early 2011.
For heavy vehicles, I imagine that the state of the economy probably has the biggest influence on their volumes. You can see that mid 2009 was the real nadir for heavy vehicle volumes – probably showing that was the time when the economy was in poorest condition.
All up, this information shows how rather bizarre it is for our transport policy to focus so much on building new state highways, when the demand growth simply isn’t there. I must put together a comparison of this table with a similar one using Auckland’s PT patronage data (or someone else could if they were feeling bored).
As Stephen Joyce is currently working off transport stats from 2006 the government should pick up on this trend sometime around 2016. Look forward to it.
quickly! Somebody tell the Minister…. Oh wait, he already knows
Also don’t forget that the population has grown steadily since 2008, which suggests that per capita travel demands have dropped steadily since then.
Peter Newman has studied vehicle numbers in Australia and globally and concludes that for both the year of Peak Cars per capita was 2004, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2011/3206293.htm. This is despite the Chinese market over taking the the US as number one for car sales.
In NZ it looks like mid 2007 just piped early 2005 as our peak at nearly 0.7 vehicles each. http://www.transport.govt.nz/research/Documents/The-NZ-Vehicle-Fleet-2010-Mar2011(2).pdf The lastest stats will be out in August but we were already down to about 6.8 each by the middle of last year. And falling.
Quick we had better build those four laners everywhere before someone notices that there has been in fact less pressure on the national road infrastructure each year than the preceding one for the last four years.