Trends in journey to work mode shares in Australian cities to 2016 (second edition)

Tue 24 October, 2017

[Updated 1 December 2017 with reissued Place of Work data]

The ABS has now released all census data for the 2016 journey to work. This post takes a city-level view of mode share trends. It has been expanded and updated from a first edition that only looked at place of work data.

My preferred measure of mode share is by place of enumeration – ie how did you travel to work based on where you were on census night (see appendix for discussion on other measures).

I’m using Greater Capital City Statistical Areas (GCCSA) geography for 2011 and 2016 and Statistical Divisions for earlier years. For Perth, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Hobart the GCCSAs are larger than the Statistical Divisions used for earlier years, but then those cities have also grown over time. See appendix 1 for more discussion.

Some of my data goes back to 1976 – I’ll show as much history as I have for each mode/modal combination.

Public transport mode share

Sydney continues to have the largest public transport mode share, and the largest shift of the big cities. Melbourne also saw significant positive mode shift, but Perth and particularly Brisbane had mode shift away from public transport.

There’s so much to unpack behind these trends, particularly around the changing distribution of jobs in cities that I’m going to save that lengthy discussion for another blog post.

But what about the…

Massive mode shift to “public transport” in Darwin?!?

[this section updated 26 Oct 2017]

Yes, I have triple-checked I downloaded the right data. “Public transport” mode share increased from 4.3% to 10.9%. The number of people reporting bus-only journeys went from 1648 in 2011 to 5661 in 2016, which is growth of 244%. There has also been a spike in the total number of journeys to work in 2011, 30% higher than in 2011, while population growth was 13%.

Initially I thought this might have been a data error, but I’ve since learnt that there is a large LNG gas project just outside Darwin, and up to 180 privately operated buses are being used to transport up to 4700 workers to the site. This massive commuter task is swamping the usage of public buses.

Here’s the percentage growth in selected journey types between 2011 and 2016:

Bus + car as driver grew from 74 to 866 journeys, which reflects the establishment of park and ride sites around Darwin for the special commuter buses. Bus only journeys increased from 1953 to 5744. So it looks like most workers are getting the bus from home and/or forgot to mention the car part of their journey (in previous censuses I’ve seen many people living kilometres from a train station saying they got to work by train and walking only).

So this new project has swamped organic trends, although it is quite plausible that some people have shifted from cycling/walking to local jobs to using buses to commute to the LNG project (which is outside urban Darwin). When I look at workplaces within the Darwin Significant Urban Area (2011 boundary), public transport mode share is 6.0%, in 2016, still an increase from 4.4% in 2011. More on that in a future post.

Train

Sydney saw the fastest train mode share growth, followed by Melbourne, while Brisbane and Perth went backwards.

Bus

Darwin just overtook Sydney for top spot thanks to the LNG project. Otherwise only Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne saw growth in bus mode share. Melbourne’s figure remains very low, however it is important to keep in mind that trams provide most of the on-street inner suburban radial public transport function in Melbourne.

Train and bus

Sydney comes out on top, with a large increase in 2016 (although much of this is still concentrated around Bondi where there are high bus frequencies and no fare penalties for transfers – more on that in an upcoming post). Melbourne is seeing substantial growth (perhaps due to improvements in modal coordination), while Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane had declines in terms of mode share (Brisbane and Adelaide were also declines on raw counts, not just mode share). I’m sure some people will want to comment about degrees of modal integration in different cities.

Train and bicycle

Some cities are also trying to promote the bicycle and train combination as an efficient way to get around (they are the fastest motorised and (mostly)non-motorised surface modes because they can generally sail past congested traffic). The mode shares are still tiny however:

Sydney and Melbourne are growing but the other cities are in decline in terms of mode share.

As this modal combination is coming off an almost zero base, it’s also probably worth looking at the raw counts:

The downturns in Brisbane and Perth are not huge in raw numbers, and probably reflect the general mode shift away from public transport (which is probably more to do with changing job distributions than bicycle facilities at train stations).

Cycling

I have a longer time-series of bicycle-only mode share, compared to “involving bicycle”, so two charts here:

Observations:

  • Darwin lost top placing for cycling to work with a large decline in mode share (refer discussion above about the massive shift to bus).
  • Canberra took the lead with more strong growth.
  • Melbourne increased slightly between 2011 and 2016 (note: rain was forecast on census day which may have suppressed growth, more on that in a moment).
  • Hobart had a big increase in 2016, following rain in 2011.
  • Sydney remains at the bottom of the pack and declined in 2016.

Walking and cycling mode share is likely to be impacted by weather. Here’s a summary of recent census weather conditions for most cities (note: Canberra minimums were -3 in 2001, -7 in 2006, 0 in 2011 and -1 in 2016):

Perth had rain on all of the last four census days, while Adelaide had significant rain only in 2001 and 2011 (and indeed 2006 shows up with higher active transport mode share). Hobart had significant rain in 2011, which appears to have suppressed active transport mode share that year.

But perhaps equally important is the forecast weather as that could set people’s plans the night before. Here was the forecast for the 2016 census day,  from the BOM website the night before:

Note that it didn’t end up raining in Melbourne, Adelaide, or Hobart.

The census is conducted in winter – which is the best time to cycle in Darwin (dry season) and not a great time to cycle in other cities. However the icy weather in Canberra clearly hasn’t stopped it getting the highest and fastest growing cycling mode share of all cities!

Indeed here is a chart from VicRoads showing the seasonality of cycling in Melbourne at their bicycle counters:

And in case you are interested, here are the (small) mode shares of journeys involving bicycle and some other modes (other than walking):

Walking only

Canberra was the only city to have a big increase, while there were declines in Darwin, Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane, and Sydney.

The smaller cities had the highest walking share, perhaps as people are – on average – closer to their workplace, followed by Sydney – the densest city. But city size doesn’t seem to explain cycling mode shares.

Car

The following chart shows the proportion of journeys to work made by car only (either as driver or passenger):

Sydney has the lowest car only mode share and it declined again in 2016. It was followed by Melbourne in 2016. Brisbane and Perth had large increases in car mode share in 2016 (in line with the PT decline mentioned above). Darwin also shows a big shift away from the car to public transport (although the total number of car trips still increased by 24%). Adelaide hit top spot, followed by Hobart and Perth.

Here is car as driver only:

And here is car as passenger only:

Car as passenger declined in all cities again in 2016, but was more common in the smaller cities, and least common in the bigger cities. I’m not sure why car as passenger declines paused for Perth and Sydney in 2006.

We can calculate an implied notional journey to work car occupancy by comparing car driver only and car passenger only journeys. This is not actual car occupancy, because it excludes people not travelling to work and excludes journeys that involved cars and other modes. However it does provide an indication of trends in car pooling for journeys to work.

There were further significant decreases in car commuter occupancy, in line with increasing car ownership and affordability.

Private transport

Here is a chart summing all modal combinations involving cars (driver or passenger), motorcycle/scooter, taxis, and trucks, but excluding any journeys that also include public transport.

The trends mirror what we have seen above, and are very similar to car-only travel.

 

Overall mode split

Here’s an overall split of journeys to work by “main mode” (click to enlarge):

Note: the 2001 data includes estimated splits of aggregated modes based on 2006 data.

I assigned a ‘main mode’ based on a hierarchy as follows:

  • Any journey involving train is counted with the main mode as train
  • Any other journey involving bus is counted with the main mode as bus
  • Any other journey involving tram and/or ferry is counted as “tram/ferry”
  • Any other journey involving car as driver, truck or motorbike/scooter is counted as “vehicle driver”
  • Any other journey involving car as passenger or taxi is counted as “vehicle passenger”
  • Any other journey involving walking or cycling only as “active”

How different are “place of work” and “place of enumeration” mode shares?

[this section updated 1 December 2017 with re-issued Place of Work data. See new Appendix 3 below for analysis of the changes]

The first edition of this post reported only “place of work” data, as place of enumeration data wasn’t released until 11 November 2017. This second edition now focuses on place of enumeration – where people were on census night.

The differences are not huge, as most people who live in a city also work in that city, but there are still a number of people who leave or enter cities’ statistical boundaries to go to work. Here’s an animation showing the main mode split by place of work and enumeration so you can compare the differences (you’ll need to click to enlarge). The animation dwells longer on place of work data.

Public + active transport main mode shares are generally higher for larger cities with place of work data, and smaller for smaller cities.

Here’s a closer look at the 2016 public transport mode shares by the two measures:

See also a detailed comparison in Appendix 1 below for 2011 Melbourne data.

I’d like to acknowledge Dr John Stone for assistance with historical journey to work data.

Appendix 1 – How to measure journey to work mode share

Firstly, I exclude people who did not work, worked at home, or did not state how they worked. The first two categories generate no transport activity, and if the actual results for “not stated” were biased in any way we would have no way of knowing how.

I prefer to use “place of enumeration” data (ie where people were on census night). “Place of usual residence” data is also available, but is unfortunately contaminated by people who were away from home on census day. The other data source is “Place of work”.

Some people might prefer to measure mode shares on Urban Centres which excludes rural areas within the larger blobs that are Greater Capital City Statistical Areas and Statistical Divisions (use this ABS map page to compare boundaries). However, “place of work” data is not readily available for that geography, and this method also excludes satellite urban centres that might be detached from the main urban centre, but are very much part of the economic unit of the city.

Another option is “Significant Urban Area”, which includes more fringe areas, and some more satellite towns, and in Canberra’s case crosses the NSW border to capture Queanbeyan.

What difference does it make?

Here’s a comparison of public transport mode shares for the different methods for 2011.

If you look closely, you’ll notice:

  • The more than you remove non-urban areas, the higher your public transport mode share, which makes sense, as those non-urban areas are mostly not served by public transport.
  • Place of usual residence tends to increase public transport mode shares for smaller cities (people probably visiting larger cities) and depresses public transport mode share in larger cities (people visiting smaller cities and towns).
  • Place of work is only readily available for Greater Capital City Statistical Areas. For the bigger cities it tends to inflate PT mode share where people might be using good inter-urban public transport options, or driving to good public transport options on the edges of cities (eg trains). However it has the opposite impact in Darwin and Canberra, where driving into the city is probably easier.

But I think the main point is that for any time series trend analysis you should use the same measure if possible.

If you want to compare the two, I’ve created a Tableau Public visualisation that has a large number of mode shares by both place of work and place of enumeration.

Appendix 2 – Estimating pre-2006 mode shares from aggregated data

For 2006 onwards, ABS TableBuilder provides counts for every possible combination of up to three modes (other than walking, which is assumed to be part of every journey). For example, in Melbourne in 2006, 36 people went to work by taxi, car as driver, and car as passenger (or so they said!). Unfortunately for years before 2006 data is not readily available with a full breakdown.

The 2001 data includes only aggregated counts for the following categories:

  • train and other (excluding bus)
  • bus and other (excluding train)
  • other two modes (no train or bus)
  • train and two other modes
  • bus and two other modes (excluding train)
  • three other modes (no train or bus)

Together these accounted for 3.7% of journeys in Melbourne and 4.5% of journeys in Sydney.

However all but two of those aggregate categories definitely involve train and/or bus, so can be included in public transport mode share calculations.

Journeys in the aggregate categories “Other two modes” and “Other three modes” might involve tram and/or ferry trips (if such modes exist in a city), but we don’t know for sure.

I’ve used the complete modal data for 2006 to calculate the percentage of 2006 journeys that fit into these two categories that are by public transport. I’ve then assumed these same percentage apply in 2001 to estimate total public transport mode shares for 2001 (for want of a better method).

Here are the 2001 relevant stats for each city:

(note: totals do not add perfectly due to rounding)

The estimates add up to 0.2% to the total public transport mode shares in cities with significant modes beyond train and bus (namely ferry and tram in Sydney, tram in Melbourne, ferry in Brisbane, tram and Adelaide). This almost entirely comes from “other two modes” category while “other three modes” is tiny. For these categories, almost no journeys in Perth, Canberra and Hobart actually involved a public transport mode.

In the past I have knowingly ignored public transport journeys that might be part of these categories, which almost certainly means public transport mode share is underestimated (I suspect most other analysts have too). By including some assumed public transport journeys my estimate should be closer to the true value, which I think is better than an underestimate.

But are these reasonable estimates? Are the 2001 modal breakdowns for these categories likely to be the same as 2006? Maybe not exactly, but because we are multiplying small numbers by small numbers, the impact of slightly inaccurate estimates is unlikely to shift the total by more than 0.1%. I tested the methodology between 2006 and 2011 results (eg using 2011 full breakdown against created 2006 aggregate categories and vice versa) and the estimated total mode shares were almost always exactly the same as the perfectly calculated shares (at worst there was a difference of 0.1% when rounding to one decimal place).

In the first edition of this post I had to estimate 2016 place of work mode shares in a similar way for public and private transport, but I wasn’t confident enough to estimate mode share of journeys involving cycling.

I now have the final data and I promised to see how I went, so here’s a comparison:

If you round to one decimal place, the estimates were no different for public and private transport and out by up to 0.1% for cycling (which is relatively significant for the small cycling mode shares).

I’ve applied a similar approach to estimate several other mode share types, and these are marked on charts.

Appendix 3 – How different is the re-issued place of work data?

In December 2017, ABS re-issued Place of Work data due to data quality issues. This is how they described it:

**The place of work data for the 2016 Census has been temporarily removed from the ABS website so an issue can be corrected. There was a discrepancy in the process used to transform detailed workplace location information into data suitable for output. The ABS will release the updated information in TableBuilder on December 2. The Working Population Profiles will be updated on December 13.**

I have loaded the new data, and here are differences in public transport and private transport mode shares for capital cities:

You can see differences of up to 0.3% (Melbourne PT mode share), but mostly quite small.


What’s happening with car occupancy?

Sat 20 August, 2011

[updated April 2016]

Is car occupancy trending down as car ownership goes up? What factors influence car occupancy? What is the impact of parents driving kids to school?

Following a suggestion in the comments on my last post about car ownership, this post takes a detailed look at car/vehicle occupancy.

What are the trends in car occupancy? 

This first chart shows average vehicle occupancy from a number of different measures that are more recently updated:

  • Australian passenger vehicles – measured as the ratio of person-kms in passenger vehicles, to total passenger vehicle kms (both estimates, and unfortunately this can only be calculated for all of Australia, using BITRE data).
  • Sydney weekday vehicle occupancy, both per trip and per km, from the Sydney Household Travel Survey (SHHTS). These figures include all private vehicles (not just cars).
  • Melbourne weekday vehicle occupancy per km, from the Victoria Integrated Survey of Travel and Activity (2012/13 data wasn’t available at the unlinked trip level at the time of updating this post). Again, these figures include all private vehicles (not just cars).

The BITRE figures show a fairly smooth and slow downwards trend from 1.62 in 1990 to 1.57 in 2014. The Sydney figures are a little more noisy, but surprisingly quite flat around 1.37 (on a distance measure), and increasing on a trip basis (suggesting occupancy is rising on shorter trips and/or declining on longer trips). Only the BITRE figures are confined to passenger vehicles, which probably explains the differences between the series (the SHHTS and VISTA data will include private vehicles such as motorbikes, trucks and light commuter vehicles).

The census journey to work question gathers data on how people travelled to work, including car drivers and car passengers. While not a clean measure, it is possible to calculate an implied car occupancy as (car drivers + car passengers) / (car drivers). For the purposes of this calculation, I have only taken “car driver only” and “car passenger only” trips (which excludes park-and-ride and kiss-and-ride public transport trips). I do not have data on trip lengths, and average car passenger trips might be different on average to car driver trips.

There’s a pretty clear downwards trend as relatively fewer people travel to work as car passengers. In fact, the data suggests extremely low levels of car pooling, and that over 90% of car journeys to work have no passengers in most cities. But keep in mind that car-only mode share of journeys to work peaked in 1996, so the net change is proportionally less people travelling as car passengers and proportionally more people travelling on non-car modes.

So in summary, there is some evidence of very gradual declines in car occupancy for all travel purposes, and strong evidence of a decline in vehicle occupancy on the journey to work.

Trends in car occupancy by time of day

Many state road agencies make direct and regular measurements of vehicle occupancy in capital cities and their data is collated by AustRoads.

Unfortunately only four cities report such data to AustRoads. Brisbane data has several missing years – and the three most recent years’ figures reported are all identical, so I’m inclined not to plot them. That leaves Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide. Unfortunately the AustRoads website hosting these statistics appears to no longer work, but VicRoads separately publish Melbourne data (but much less for more recent years). What follows is all the data I have been able to collect.

Firstly, all day (weekday) average occupancy:

There doesn’t appear to be much in the way of clear trends as the data seems quite noisy (I’m not sure anyone could explain the year by year variations). Perhaps Melbourne average all day occupancy was trending down.

Data is available for three sub-periods:

Again lots of noise, and no clear trends.

Noisy again. It’s looks like Melbourne is no longer trending down.

This data is remarkably flat for Sydney, while Melbourne appears to still be trending down.

It’s little surprise that AM peak has the lowest occupancy, as it is dominated by journeys to work. More on that soon.

 

Notes on the AustRoads/VicRoads data:

Along with the noise in the data, there is some ambiguity in the methodology. The AustRoads website reports “car” occupancy, but the methodology doesn’t seem to filter for cars. Are buses included or not? It says the survey should be undertaken in March/April to avoid school and public holidays. But March and April have heaps of holidays (Easter, Anzac Day, and Labour Day in many states).

But the AustRoads data is certainly collected on representative arterial roads, where you might expect lower occupancy because of longer trips that are more likely to be work-related.

What’s the relationship between car ownership and car occupancy?

You might expect car occupancy to go down as car ownership goes up. In other words: we have more cars and need to share them less.

Here’s what the relationship looks like for Australia as a whole (using car occupancy derived from BITRE data):

There are five quite different periods:

  • From 1993 to 1999 (bottom right) car occupancy declined as car ownership increased. As you might expect.
  • From 1999 to 2001 car ownership stalled, but car occupancy continued to decline.
  • From 2001 to 2005 car ownership rose again, but car occupancy declined more slowly.
  • From 2005 to 2010 car occupancy increased slightly, while car ownership had slow growth. This is the period when public transport mode shift took hold in most Australian cities.
  • From 2010 to 2014 car occupancy dropped more quickly, while car ownership had slow growth. In this period there was much less mode shift to public transport in most Australian cities.

The relationship is changing, probably influenced by other factors. BUT it could also be that I’m reading too much into the precision of the car occupancy figures – we are talking about variations in the fourth significant figure only for the last few years. The BITRE figures are estimates themselves. Maybe someone from BITRE would care to comment on the precision?

What about different road types?

Looking at Melbourne data in more detail, car occupancy appears to have declined most on freeways and divided arterials:

On freeways, the decline is most evident during business hours:

Here is a chart comparing car occupancy figures for arterial roads in Melbourne (2009/10):

You can see car occupancy lowest on freeways, and highest on undivided arterials with trams (all in the inner suburbs). Otherwise very little difference (in 2009/10 at least).

How do Australian cities compare?

To try to take out some of the noise, I’ll take the average of the last four years for the AustRoads data and Sydney and Melbourne household travel survey data:

Melbourne appears to have the lowest occupancy, and Sydney the highest – except when it comes to household travel survey data where Melbourne is much higher. But this might just be differences in methodologies between states.

Factors influencing car/vehicle occupancy (in Melbourne)

Having access to the 2007-08 VISTA data, it’s possible to disaggregate vehicle occupancy on almost any dimension you can imagine. I’ll try to restrict myself to the more interesting dimensions!

For most charts I have used vehicle occupancy rather than car occupancy. Cars and 4WD/SUVs combined accounted for 88% of vehicle kms in the dataset so there shouldn’t be a lot of difference. But I’ll start with looking at..

Vehicle type

Now that’s a surprise: 4WD/SUVs have a much higher average occupancy than cars. Why is that?

Are they used for different purposes?

Not a great deal of difference between cars and 4WD/SUVs, although 4WD/SUVs are slightly more commonly used to pick up or drop off someone.

More likely explanations (from the data) are:

  • 4WD/SUV come from larger households on average (3.5 people v 3.1 for cars).
  • 4WD/SUVs are also more likely than cars to belong to households that are couples with kids.
More on both of these point soon.

Day of the week

Probably not a huge surprise that cars have less occupants on weekdays than weekends. Male drivers are much more likely to have no passengers on weekdays, but an average of one passenger on weekends. Whereas there is much less variation for females.

Is this traditional gender roles in the family? (There is a chart to answer almost any question you know..)

There you go: dads much more likely to drive the family around on weekends, and mums more likely to drive them around on weekdays. And while on the subject…

Household types and sizes

Little surprise that car occupancy increases with household size. It is easier to car pool when you have the same origin.

Note that the sample size of one parent households of size 5 are small (especially for male drivers). But curiously single mothers have much higher occupancies than single fathers.

There is also a small sample of other household structures with 5 people.

Unsurprisingly, people living alone are likely to have the lowest car occupancies. With increasingly prevalence of sole person households, you might expect continuing declines in average car occupancy.

Trip purpose

Again work trips are the least likely to involve passengers, particularly on weekdays (average occupancy 1.07). Driven trips to education are not far behind. Little surprise that accompanying someone, or picking up or dropping off someone averages around 2 or more. Occupancies for personal business, shopping, recreational and social trips are in the middle, but much higher on weekends when householders are probably more likely to travel together to common destinations.

Many people would argue that demand for public transport is lower on the weekend. These figures would support that argument, but lower weekend patronage would also reflect lower service levels.

Note: the sample sizes of weekend education and accompanying someone trips were too small to be meaningful so I left them off.

Time of day

There you go, car occupancy peaks between 8 and 9am and between 3 and 4 pm on school days: parents driving kids to/from school.

But vehicle occupancy is highest on Saturday nights when people are socialising, and interestingly Sundays are well above Saturdays (less personal business on Sundays perhaps?). Non-school weekdays have higher occupancies than school weekdays, possibly with parents also taking time off work and spending time with kids.

Just looking at the school peak more closely, here is a chart showing car driver trip purposes by hour of the day on school weekdays. You’ll almost certainly have to click on this one to read the detail.

The most frightening statistics are in the school peaks. A staggering 40% of car trips between 8 and 9am, and 42% of car trips between 3 and 4pm are to pick up or drop off someone (suggesting a fault in the reported vehicle occupancy for trips picking up somebody). This will almost certainly be dominated by school children. No wonder traffic congestion eases so much in school holidays.

That said, car trips to/from school are shorter than other trip types (as we saw in an earlier post). The data suggests 19% of car kilometres of trips starting between 8-9am are to pick-up/drop-off someone, and for 3-4pm the figure is 24%. That’s still a sizeable chunk of total road traffic. It suggests there are huge congestion relief benefits to be had in getting kids to walk, ride or use public transport to/from school.

Geography

There’s not a lot of difference other than for the inner city, where school day occupancies are lower. For someone in the inner city to drive a car, they are probably heading out of the city and any other members of their household might be less likely to have the same destination and/or would have good public transport options for their travel.

The non-school weekday figures show some variation, and while the sample sizes are all over 250, there are some vehicles with an occupancy of 14 recorded. unfortunately because the underlying data is discrete, medians aren’t an easy way around this issue.

Age

This would suggest traditional gender roles are in play: Average car occupancy is highest for drivers aged 30-45, the most common age groups for parents of pre-driving aged children. And women seem to be doing more ferrying of the kids than men.  In the older age groups men are more likely to be driving with passengers.

Income

Vehicle occupancy seems to go down as we have higher incomes (moreso for females), but there seems to be some noise in the data (eg the spike at 3000 is due to one vehicle with 12 occupants). Females with lower household incomes have higher vehicle occupancies (maybe those without an income but looking after a family).

This trend reflects the fact that car/vehicle ownership goes up as wealth goes up:

The threshold for car ownership is around $1250 per week (equivalised to a single occupant household). As Australians have become increasingly wealthy in real terms, we can afford to own more cars.

Trip distance

While there is probably a little noise in this data, there is a fairly clear pattern. Very short trips and very long trips are likely to have higher occupancies. The median trip distance for non-work trips is around 4kms, while work trips are much longer, which fits with the average occupancies for different trip purposes.

In fact, here is a mode share breakdown by trip distance (for trip legs):

You can see car passenger becomes more common for very long trips (note the X axis scale is not uniform). (Don’t ask me why driving is so popular for distances of 16-16.9 kms! It’s probably a bit of noise)

And if you look at the trip purposes of these very long trips, you’ll longer trips are more likely to be social or personal business:

(note: this chart is by trips, and not trip legs)

Main Activity

Probably little surprise that those “keeping house” have the highest occupancy in general, but that full-time workers have very low occupancy on weekdays, but very high occupancy on weekends.

There you go, possibly more than you ever wanted or needed to know about vehicle occupancy!