June’s results are always some of the more interesting of the year as the month marks the end of the financial year and so the 12-monthly results are the ones AT get their performance marked against – although as I raised in the post about the May numbers, some of their targets are too low to begin with.

First a few things worth noting about June:

There was one less weekday this year compared to 2018

Like the rest of this year so far, rainfall was low with June recording just 55% of the normal amount. This benefits cycling numbers but also PT numbers as people are more prepared to start waiting for a bus/train if it’s not raining.

Ridership

AT the start of last month we celebrated reaching the milestone of 100 million boardings in a 12-month period, a result that occurred much earlier in the year than I had expected. On June-23 we had a day of free PT which was a fantastic success, but it did mean we don’t have proper ridership numbers for that day and so perhaps ironically, it appears to have had the effect of lowering the official ridership numbers. Regardless, usage was strong for the rest of the month resulting in a 10.4% growth in boardings compared to June-18. On a 12-monthly basis that growth.by a still impressive 9.1%.

In total there were 8.3 million PT boardings in June but when combined with the the previous 11 months meant we finished the financial year with 100.75 million boardings, up from 92.36 million. By comparison, the target in the year just finished year was 96.3 million. Within the actual result we have:

Buses, excluding those on the Busway – 65.88 million boardings (+8.5%)

Rapid Transit – 28.57 million boardings (+11.2%). Within that Northern busway – 7.17 million (+31.4%) – although how it was counted changed with the roll-out of the new netowrk. Rail – 21.4 million (+5.8%)

Ferries – 6.3 million (+3.2%)

During the month the trains were the only ones to see a drop in boardings. Some of that will be due to usage not being counted on the free PT day but I wonder if some of it is related to all the track and signalling issues that has been happening recently. Those issues have seen June record the lowest punctuality result since all the lines were electrifed in mid-2015 with just 90.3% of trains arriving at their destination within five minutes. As expected the southern was the worst with just 83.3% on time while the western and eastern were both only in the early 90’s too.

City Centre Access

Unfortunately AT were only able to provide me the numbers up till the end of May but they still tell an interesting story, traffic is indeed disappearing. While the number of people entering the city during the AM peak was broadly similar to May last year, there was a noticeable change in the modal breakdown. In particular the number of people entering by car fell by over 2,000 to about 36.5k or about 46%. The fall in number of people accessing the city by car even more stark when you look back further, for example as little as four years ago that number was over 42k. This trend can quite easily be seen if looking at the figures on 12-month rolling basis.

There is clearly mode-shift occurring and we’d expect to see this trend continue as projects like the Downtown works and CRL continue and hopefully soon changes like Access for Everyone.

Cycling

Despite it being mid-winter, we’re still seeing some very good cycling numbers with usage in the month up 18% on the June-18 – obviously helped along by the relatively dry weather we’ve had. On a 12-Month rolling basis numbers are up over 11%.

For their official results, AT use a measure of only using 26 of the 44 sites (the exact ones are at the bottom of this page). Using just those sites, here are how the numbers have changed over the last few years. As you can see, in just under 3 years the annual count of cycling has increased by over 500k per year.

Once again the NW cycleway at Kingsland stands out which will in part due to the Ian McKinnon cycleway opened in December. One thing you can see from below is that June-August is typically the quietest time of the year for bikes but this year the results are almost the same as the results in summer just over a year ago.

With the Karangahape Rd project finally under construction and up to four more major cycleways due to start by the end of the year, we’re going to continue to see good numbers coming through.

Overall, it’s great to see the good PT and cycling numbers continue to keep coming.

Share this