Public Transport Ridership for the start of 2025
By Matt Lowrie
It's been a few months since we last covered public transport usage and we've passed through March Madness so it's time to have a look at how our PT system is performing again.
First up, at a monthly level we can see that there's been a mixed start to the year which suggests that the post-COVID recovery appears to have stalled. Usage in February was down on Feb-2024, though last year was a leap year so did have one extra day in the numbers. March flipped that a bit, in part thanks to an extra working day meaning that by in large, usage was about the same as it was last year.
We don't have April's data yet but based on current indications and the timing of Easter this year, it will likely be lower than last year.
In total over the previous 12-months 89.3 million boardings have been taken on public transport which is just about the same as it was at the end of December and still short of the 103.5 million boardings we achieved just before the pandemic hit. Unless we see some dramatic change in circumstances in the next few months, it means AT will miss it's target of 95.9 million boardings for this financial year.
At a modal level and compared to pre-COVID volumes we're continuing to see a similar trend to the last time we looked. There is a slight dip on rail use which is due to the massive rail shutdown throughout January. Overall, we’re sitting at an average of 86%, with:
buses at 93%
trains at 64%
ferries at 79%
One big change to rail this year is the reopening of Pukekohe and we've heard from Auckland Transport that usage from Pukekohe is almost back to what it was pre-COVID. However, with the overall numbers using the rail network in February and March only at about the same levels as last year, suggesting that without Pukekohe, rail might be looking even worse. This really highlights how big of an impact all the disruption is having and it will take time, plus the attraction of the CRL for Aucklanders to regain faith in the network.
We can also take a bit of a look more deeply at AT's daily data, which is currently updated to the end of the school holidays. With this you can see that with Easter and ANZAC day occurring in the same week along with the rail network shutdown we've seen a much larger than usual drop in weekday boardings.
However, with the school holiday exception, usage in weekends is generally continuing to improve compared previous years. This reflects comments we've heard from Auckland Transport that there are more people using public transport overall but they're taking fewer trips than they did before the pandemic.
While post-COVID recovery in Auckland appears to be stalling a bit, it's worth noting we're not the only ones seeing this trend and the same thing is happening in many of the cities I regularly follow. Of the cities I track, Auckland and Sydney are following each other the closest with near identical results.
You might noticed above that Wellington appears to gone backwards a bit compared to around a year ago. Looking more closely you can see that bus usage in the capital is actually above pre-COVID levels but the overall result is being dragged down by rail usage, which has declined from 78% to 72% and is likely to continue to fall. Like Auckland, Wellington's rail network has been the subject of a lot of disruption for renewal works
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