About this data
What the TransLink patronage dataset measures, what is directly observed versus calculated or inferred, and the current build's own quality figures — sourced live from the deployed dataset rather than repeated as fixed numbers that can drift out of date.
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What the data is
The source is TransLink's published Origin-Destination Trips extract, one file per calendar month, from the Queensland Government open data portal. Two datasets cover it: 2016 to 2021 and 2022 onwards. Both are published on the Queensland Government open data portal under a Creative Commons licence; because they are separate dataset records published years apart, check each dataset's own page for its exact licence version rather than assuming the two are identical — this deployment currently attributes the whole record as CC BY 4.0, credited to the State of Queensland (Department of Transport and Main Roads).
Each row is an aggregated count of ticketing transactions for one combination of operator, route, direction, time band, ticket type, origin stop and destination stop. A recorded trip is one movement on one service between an origin and destination — one boarding of one vehicle by one ticket. It is not a unique passenger and it is not a complete door-to-door journey: someone who catches a bus and then a train contributes two trips. Nothing in the source identifies individuals, so no figure here is a passenger count.
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Limitations worth knowing before reading a chart
- Time of day. Five bands only — four weekday bands and one undifferentiated weekend band. Saturday cannot be separated from Sunday in patronage figures, and the first weekday band fuses early morning with the whole AM peak.
- Ticketing. Paper tickets record a boarding with no tap-off, so origin-destination views and load profiles exclude them — the excluded share varies by month and is quoted against the month being viewed, not as a single dataset-wide average. From April 2026 the source also emits fare-product labels this pipeline does not classify.
- Rail and light rail. Each is filed as a single placeholder route with no stopping pattern in the source, which is why the Rail lines view exists as a separate, clearly-marked model rather than an ordinary route page.
The full detail lives in the methodology document, which this page summarises rather than replaces.
Observed, derived and inferred
Every figure on this site carries one of three evidentiary badges, used consistently:
Badges sit at panel or section level rather than on every number, so a page is not wallpapered in qualifiers — but nothing derived or inferred is left unmarked.
Comparison breaks
Three changes sit close together near the end of the record and are not adjusted away — presented here as context for reading a comparison spanning them, not as explanations for the size of any particular change. In March 2026 recorded trips rose 51% against March 2025, coinciding with the Strait of Hormuz fuel crisis and sharply higher fuel costs; source row counts rose alongside recorded trips, so the increase is present in the underlying published data rather than being solely an aggregation effect, but the dataset cannot establish that the fuel crisis caused it. In April 2026 Queensland Rail industrial action affected train services, several source-data quality measures step at once (no-tap-off, unplaced trips and the unrecognised ticket bucket all rise), and the patronage source expanded to include regional Queensland — a coverage break, which is why the area filter defaults to South East Queensland rather than the whole network. In August 2026 Gold Coast Light Rail Stage 3 opened, extending G:link from Broadbeach South to Burleigh Heads; that month is a transition rather than a full read of the extended line, and G:link patronage from here on represents a larger network with additional stops rather than the same line as before. Any comparison spanning these months is flagged on the page it appears on and should be read with that context, not as a like-for-like change in travel alone.
Current build quality
These figures are read from the deployed dataset's own manifest and QA summary at page load, so they move with the data rather than needing to be kept in sync by hand. The full build audit has the month-by-month detail, including any routes or months the matcher could not place.