Re: [NSW] Who's got the worst trains

[G.Lambert@unsw.edu.au (Geoff Lambert)]

On Fri, 24 Mar 2000 00:02:02 +1100, Ben <sporologist@yahoo.com> wrote:
>David Johnson wrote:
>> Hubert Lam wrote:
>> > Then it forgets that CityRail does not carry 730,000 passengers per day, but rather it's 730,000
>> > journeys made by all the people per day. I doubt that one fourth of Sydney's population travels on
>> > trains each day!
>> I was under the impression that we carried closer to 900,000 passengers/day.
>730,000 is the average of all days.
>900,000+ is the average for a weekday during school terms, as far as I
>know. i.e. public holidays, weekends and school holidays aren't counted.
>But I'm not completely sure about the school holidays part.
>Ben Munro

In this mornoing's SMH, a set of data and graphs in a side-box says:
Number of customers: 270.5 million
Total passenger journeys: 199.8 million

The first is explicitly a yearly total, it corresponds with what
Citryrail reports as "total passenger journeys" in its annual report.
The latter is equal to "number of customers", if you count a customer
every time a person hops on a train. If I go to work on a train and
come home again on it, I'm two customers.  And another two tomorrow.

The second is (presumably), the same figure reduced to a Monday -
Friday, non holiday basis (199.8/270.5 = 5/7 approx).

The second figure is boken down into
Daily 103.1 million
Weekly 87.9 million
Periodical 8.8 million

The first is likely to be the most accurate, as it can be derived from
ticket sales figures- one single sale, one single trip.  The two
latter have to be estimated from sales figures combined with estimates
of how often people use their multi-trip tickets, plus also, if you're
lucky, some tally figures from the turnstiles. "Weeklies" used to be
"periodicals", nowadays the latter are presumably quarterly/yearly,
etc. (can you buy multi-trips for trains like you can for ferries and
buses?)

Carl Scully is blaming "a big increase in customer numbers", but the
data doesn't support this.  Suburban train passenger journeys are
about what they were in 1950, they were lowest in the late 70s/early
80s.  They have risen from 264.7 million in 96/97 to 270.5 million in
98/99, a 2% increase.  There was a time (early 90s), when figures were
this high, or higher (it was either 268m or 286m, don't have my
spreadsheet with me).  The 1950s figures did not include Blue Mtns,
Newcastle or Wollonongong travel, these account for a few million,
approx 5m?

Geoff Lambert