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A new monthly record in Auckland commuter rail travel of 918,000 passengers, an impressive 14.3% higher than the year before.
That’s the encouraging story for March – despite the ongoing issues with service disruptions.
In fact public transport usage in Auckland continues to soar . In fact it’s shaping up to be a great year.
Bus patronage has finally recovered from the wobbles when bus drivers had their industrial dispute in the last quarter of last year causing some people to worry about the reliability of pubic transport.
Passengers taking the bus in March was also up by over 5%, clawing back patronage lost due to 5 months of industrial action.
Bus, rail and ferry patronage for the 9 months to the end of March have increased on last year’s figures. A return to growth over this period for ferry patronage sees an increase of 3.5%.
But it’s the Northern Express bus service that continues to be the golden child of Auckland’s public transport with patronage up by nearly 20% for March and 18.9% on the equivalent nine months last year.
Total bus patronage including the Northern Express increased by 5.3% (259,056 boardings) in March and by 0.6% for the nine months to March.
Aucklanders are pouring onto the trains
Rail’s March figures represents an increase of 14.3% (115,000 passengers) on the same month in 2009, the previous highest month on record. There was one more business day this year compared to March last year, but this was offset by fewer special events
For the year-to-date there have been 6.231 million passenger journeys made on the region’s rail services, an increase of 10.5% on the same nine months last year.
Patronage on the Western Line increased at a lesser rate, in part due to fewer major special events at Eden Park than the comparative month last year. Western line services were also impacted to a greater extent by performance issues during the month, and the two blocks-of-line required to progress the rail upgrades.
In March 312,000 passengers were recorded travelling on Western Line services, an increase of 6.2% on the same month last year. For the year-to-date 2.169 million passengers have travelled on Western Line services, an increase of 8.5% on the same period last year.
Ferry patronage for March is 3.2% lower than last March, and for the financial year to date, patronage is 3.5% higher than the same period in the previous financial year.
10 Comments
You spend money on improving facilities and services, and they use them. How surprising. “City of cars” indeed.
Do the numbers say anything about how high the yearly figure would have been without the bus strikes?
@Max: For the nine months to March 2010 of the 2010/11 financial year, the NZ Bus industrial dispute in September and October 2009 accounts for 2.8% lost passenger boardings. Total patronage growth (and total public transport growth) would beat +3.4% (and +4.3% respectively) for the nine months to March 2010 allowing for lost patronage from the NZ Bus industrial dispute.
Is glad Aucklanders have finally seen the light!
Won’t be long before we’re hitting a high of a million pax a month by the looks of the trend!
The Northern Express might be the golden child, but not for long. They reached their peak capacity. The buses now refuse to board people in the morning, especially from Sunnynook, Smales Farm and Akoranga stations… Also, from the North Shore, there are limited buses to the University, Hospital and Newmarket. They also are plagued by the same problem. And it’s a bus after bus, not just one. It very popular, but too popular for Auckland. ARTA ignores our complaints, and with the way it is, they will start loosing customers. So watch the patronage to decline in the coming months. Once again, stranded on the North Shore.
@ Stranded
Surely the obvious thing for ARTA to do would be to have extra services starting from Constellation (& maybe Smales) in the AM peak. Even if these weren’t Northern Express branded buses – just bog standard ones with NEX destos – it would be better than being left behind.
Or just redeploy buses from other less utilized routes (including those operated by other companies) onto the NEX instead.
NEX buses operate at 4 minute frequencies at peak hour. Pretty impressive patronage if that’s getting packed out. I agree that doing some short runs from Constellation or Smales would be a good idea.
Just imagine how many passengers would use the N Express service if there was more parking at Constellation and Albany plus a car park at Akaranga. The feeder services are useless and one trundles past my house hourly during the day with 3 or 4 passengers in a 40 seat bus.
Richard, the car parks are actually the useless bit. All they do is use up a heap of land to support very few patrons. Between them the two stations there are only 980 parks. Assuming 1.2 people per parked car thats only enough for 10% of the 12,000 people using the busway between 7 and 9am on an average weekday morning. So 90% of busway users take feeder or express buses or walk, cycle or get dropped off.