The Board Reports ahead of tomorrow’s Auckland Transport board meeting are online, although the normal statistics report seems to not yet have been updated. Helpfully (although in a strangely semi-duplicative way) there’s another report that looks at patronage. Total patronage for May was slightly down on May last year, while rail patronage bucked its downward trend in recent months and actually jumped by almost 10% on the same month last year:
As you can see from the graph above, while rail patronage was up on May last year, it was still significantly below the monthly target that Auckland Transport expected to see happen this year – contributing to the fairly giant gap between actual patronage totals this year and what was in Auckland Transport’s Statement of Intent. I’ll come back to the Statement of Intent later in this post.
More positively, rail patronage in May was even higher than it was in March – somewhat unusual as March is typically the busiest month of the year. Also, average weekday boardings (which in many ways is a better measure as it evens out changes in the number of working days from month to month) noted rail patronage was higher than last year:
Bus patronage, on the other hand, was down by a fairly substantial 6.5%. This represents a change from what’s been going on in the past year or so where bus patronage gains have generally outperformed rail gains – and because bus makes up the majority of PT trips it was the poor performance of bus patronage in May which dragged the total down to a decrease from May 2012:
Once again it seems that Auckland Transport is tracking fairly far behind the Statement of Intent targets (although not to the extent as for rail), which must be a concern given the extremely high priority given to improving public transport use which is highlighted in all of Auckland’s strategic transport documents.
Shifting onto the Statement of Intent, there’s a Board Paper specifically relating to the SOI as it needs to be finalised before the end of AT’s financial year – June 30. The part of this document of most interest relates to the public transport patronage targets – as it has been the huge gap between the SOI targets for 2012/13 which has driven Auckland Transport to finally think about ways of improving their marketing, to finally look at providing better frequencies on the rail network on weekends (the business report hints that we might see half-hourly weekend frequencies on the Western Line later this year at long last).
Unsurprisingly, it seems that Auckland Transport doesn’t like to look bad when it comes to their PT patronage targets and have massively adjusted their targets in the next Statement of Intent so they’re easier to achieve:
With integrated ticketing on the final straight for implementation plus the first of the electric trains coming into service towards the end of the next financial year, both of which should help boost rail patronage significantly, it seems pretty strange for the rail patronage forecast to now be below what was achieved in 2011/12.
Of course the SOI targets need to be in the ballpark of realistic, but in my mind it appears as though Auckland Transport missing the SOI targets for patronage this year by such a wide margin has knocked the complacency out of them about public transport patronage and actually forced quite a bit of clever thinking in the area of marketing, it’s forced a stronger crackdown on rail fare evasion and it’s potentially finally forcing some improvements to weekend frequencies that we’ve been going on about forever.
I’m not sure of the final procedure for approving these targets but I’d be extremely surprised if the Council agrees to such extremely low numbers for rail in particular. These new targets just seem to be a way for Auckland Transport to return to being complacent and put us further and further away from reaching the Auckland Plan target of doubling PT patronage by 2022.
While on the topic of the AT board meeting. Perhaps the most interesting part from the usual business report is the pictures of the interior of the new trains, the first of which it says is due to arrive on September 7th. The second and third trains are due to be shipped in September with them arriving before the end of the year.
The finished interior of a motor car
The finished interior of the centre (trailer) car