Auckland’s trains carried more passengers in the first seven days of the City Rail Link than in any week in the network’s history, with 528,007 boardings recorded between Sunday 13 September and Saturday 19 September.
The figure beats the previous seven-day record of 504,380, set in the first week of March 2019, by more than 23,000 trips. It was released on Monday in a joint statement from Transport Minister Chris Bishop and Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown.
The jump from the week before the tunnels opened is the striking part. In the seven days before the City Rail Link started carrying passengers, Auckland’s rail network recorded 325,203 boardings. One week later that had risen by about 62 per cent.
“The CRL is one of the most significant transport investments in New Zealand’s history, and it’s fantastic to see Aucklanders getting on board in such huge numbers after waiting years for its arrival,” Mr Bishop said.
The top of the all-time table had been owned by 2019 for more than seven years. Before the new line opened, the five busiest weeks on Auckland’s trains were all in March 2019, December 2019 or the first week of March 2020, a few weeks before Covid-19 lockdowns emptied public transport across the country. No week since had cracked the top six until now.
The new tunnels turned Waitematā station, formerly Britomart, from a dead end into a through station and added new stops at Te Waihorotiu near Aotea Square, Karanga-a-Hape under Karangahape Road, and Maungawhau in Mount Eden. The 3.45 kilometre twin tunnels run as deep as 42 metres below the central city, a journey Newswire traced in What lies beneath the City Rail Link.
The daily numbers show how interest built across the week. Opening day, Sunday 13 September, drew 56,757 boardings despite an early morning fire at Waitematā station that disrupted the special opening timetable. Early risers had turned up for the first train out of Ōtāhuhu at 4.57am.
Monday brought 78,503 boardings as the first weekday commute tested the new timetable. Tuesday and Wednesday each passed 84,000, and Thursday peaked at 85,289, the busiest single day of the week. Friday carried 77,002 and Saturday 62,063.
Thursday’s figure came within about 1800 boardings of the network’s busiest day before the pandemic, 87,092 on 6 March 2019, 1News reported.
Reliability, a long-standing sore point for Auckland commuters, also held up. Punctuality ranged from 95.4 per cent to 99.3 per cent across the working week, and reliability, the share of scheduled services that actually ran, climbed from 94.8 per cent on Monday to 99.3 per cent on Thursday. Opening day was the exception, with punctuality of 94.4 per cent and reliability of 81.6 per cent after the Waitematā fire knocked out some of the extra services planned for the day.
“A strong performance in the first week was important for building confidence in the CRL as a reliable, genuine public transport alternative for Aucklanders who might otherwise choose to travel by car,” Mr Bishop said.
The statement notes that the new patronage numbers come from Auckland Transport’s official HOP card and contactless payment card data, and differ from the estimated boarding numbers Auckland Transport released during opening week.
Mr Brown said the record was a strong start but the harder work was keeping people on the trains once the novelty wore off.
“Seeing the highest weekly rail patronage ever is a significant milestone. Just as importantly, trains have largely been running on time and delivering the reliability Aucklanders expect,” he said.
“The challenge now is to keep building on this success and continue growing passenger numbers.”
Mr Brown also pointed to changes at Auckland Transport, which he said would become solely focussed on delivering public transport services from next week, as a chance to attract more people onto the network.
The first big-event test for the new line came the day after the record week closed. More than 48,000 people packed Eden Park on Sunday night for the Warriors’ semi-final against the Newcastle Knights, the first NRL final played at the ground. The NZ Herald reported that about 15,720 fans, around 37 per cent of the crowd, arrived by train and 13,295 left by train.
The match was moved from Mount Smart Stadium at short notice, which limited how many trains could be added. An Auckland Transport spokesman told the Herald the agency “did operate extra trains above the baseline of the Sunday timetable, and cleared crowds within a normal timeframe.”
“For the All Blacks match in a few weeks’ time, we’ll have even more trains and expect to clear crowds more quickly,” he said.
The early numbers matter because the City Rail Link has been one of the most expensive and most argued-over infrastructure projects in the country. Its final cost of about $5.5 billion, shared between the Government and Auckland Council, is well above early estimates, and the case for it rested on getting large numbers of Aucklanders out of cars and onto trains.
One record week does not settle that argument. Opening-week crowds are likely to include people riding the line simply to see the new stations, and the real test will be whether weekday commuter numbers hold through summer and beyond. High petrol prices may help. Pump prices have climbed about 30 cents a litre in three weeks, and earlier this year Auckland buses hit a record as petrol passed $3 a litre.
Mr Bishop framed the first week as a beginning rather than a finish line. “For years, the focus was on getting the CRL built. Now the exciting part begins as we see what Auckland can do with it, joining the great modern cities around the world where fast, frequent rapid transit is part of everyday life.”
For a longer view of how New Zealanders have moved from trams and steamers to cars and now back towards rail in the big cities, see How New Zealand moved.
Have you ridden the City Rail Link yet, and has it changed how you get around Auckland? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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