please empty your brain below

That's a scary number you get when you add the Cannon St and Charing Cross numbers into London Bridge, where they all go through. I wonder how many people change trains there?

What's the chances of either undercounting or overcounting? Say Stratford for example. If they're counting exits and entries - is that exit and entries to the station or exits and entries at the barriers? People changing between the Central Line and Jubilee line for example will go through a ticket barrier despite already having passed through one at their starting destination elsewhere.

National Rail publish an accompanying report each year explaining why their figures are almost certainly wrong, but as good as they can get.

2006/7 report (pdf)

Interesting to see a difference of 1.1m between Wimbledon (NR) and Wimbledon (LUL). Is this a discrepency between their statistics collection methods or is the total number of entries/exits over 30 million (can't be)?

Dear Happy,

amuse yeeself with this little clip:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=yB...h?v=yBOcLnyMX-
M


in it, it is claimed 7 million passengers are daily transported by 5,000 buses. (In the year dot, of course)

@Bina. I sort of doubt that much of that film was true but even so, I noticed card and clip tickets were in use, was this before the wind-up machines? Also no zebra crossings, were they a later invention? Surprising to see unsafe practices condoned - like alighting while the bus was moving.

The mark of a true Londoner always used to be the ability to get on and off a moving bus without losing your balance, your dignity or your hat. Zebra crossings - 1934 onwards, if memory serves.

=Geek comment alert=

Of the 10 busiest underground stations not currently served by national rail 2 will be served by Crossrail, 2 more will be extremely close to Crossrail station entrances and five others will be within a short walking distance (equivalent of one stop on the tube).

I always thought Clapham was supposed to be the busiest railway station in the world?

@Bina: Clapham Junction was once claimed to be the busiest station in the world in terms of stopping trains arriving and departing.

I believe this is now disputed which is why the claim is dropped. I suspect the underground station (combined métro and RER) Châtelet Les Halles in central Paris could be argued to be busier. It depends on exactly how you define these things.

Clapham Junction always seems to be very busy in terms of people but of course a lot of them are just changing trains and don't count. I suspect the busy narrow subway helps give this impression. East Croydon which is much better designed and more compact never feels as busy as one would suspect from the numbers. It used to be claimed that in the morning rush hour more people got off there than got on - such was the size of Croydon as an employment centre. I don't know if this is still true - or ever was.

Will be interesting to see what happens to the Waterloo/St Pancras numbers with the change over of Eurostar.

Doesn't surprise me that Angel Road is one of the least busy National Rail stations - it's flippin' horrible.

And I do wonder if the least busy tube stations take into account all the line closures at the weekends, the end of line stations hardly ever seem to get to served by a tube, especially at weekends.

South Greenford and Sudbury & Harrow Road each serve about 40 passengers per day. (Or, if we were to assume only weekday commuters and no passengers on weekends, about 55 per day.) That's not a lot.

I visited Sudbury & Harrow Road back in January. It was indeed empty.

Jayne's right, Angel Road as a station is quite unattractive, being located next to a huge characterless industrial estate and the North Circular. It's also quite difficult to get to, I hear.

I can also see why Crews Hill is quiet. Many Moorgate-bound peak time trains don't stop there, but instead go straight from Cuffley to Gordon Hill, before proceeding to Enfield Chase, and vice versa.

As for tube stations, it is perhaps unsurprising that the busiest are mainly in the City, West End or Docklands. I'm just wondering why most of the quiet tube stations are on the eastern end of the Central line.

North Greenwich is like the gateway onto the tube for the whole of Greenwich, Bexley and Lewisham not suprising it's that busy.

When the woolwich branch of the DLR opens it will nick half of it's customers though

ALthough i've never been, i'm suprised at the surbiton numbers

Angel Road is a pretty bleak station. Not too difficult to get to per se - a couple of minutes walk from the residential streets at the bottom of Montagu Road. But you have to traverse a pretty tortuous labyrinth from the excuse for a street entrance to get to the actual platforms, and it isn't very inviting. National Experss seems happy to run down the service through there (it only gets rush hour trains now), presumably the three-quarters empty local trains just get in the way of the well-loaded (i.e. remunerative) Stansted Airport/Cambridge services - that bit of line's a bit of a bottleneck.

Knowing that bit of Edmonton well, I can say that most people looking to get a train will catch the 192 'hoppa' bus to Tottenham Hale and go from there. That option is becoming increasingly popular - a lot of 192s leave TH with crushed standing loads now at any time of day (impressive for a route that only started a few years ago), and most of the passengers are going well into Edmonton.

Edmonton is the 'new Hackney' in terms of public transport provision, i.e. crap. No tubes, a ropey train service at best, most people just cram onto buses and meet the tube closer in.

@Nico: You can blame the Highways Agency for the crapness at Angel Road.

Prior to the upgrading of the A406 at that point, the entrance to the station was from Angel Road itself, and the station had a half-hourly service of Hertford East trains.

NXEA (formerly 'one' and, before that, WAGN, though all three are/were managed by National Express) proposed opening a new station down by Pickett's Lock, but the NIMBYs put paid to that.

As for the 'ropey' train service, most people use Edmonton Green or Silver Street, due to the crap service at Angel Road, and those get 4tph into Liverpool Street most of the time (2tph on Sundays) and 6tph during the peaks since they replaced the semi-fast (Hackney, Seven Sisters, Edmonton Green, then all stations to Cheshunt) services with stoppers.

@ Pedantic - I am not Bina )

Pedantic of Twickers.

I really must read more carefully. Apologies.

Having looked at the numbers.. I'm sure that TfL and NR measure differently. I moved between Balham and Sutton this year, and there is no way that Balham tube (minus the NR station) has "only" twice the number of people going through it. (Though I can confirm Sutton's pretty busy for a Zone 5 rail station)

To Ivan Drago (if he ever sees this comment): North Greenwich is also the station that serves "The O2" where around 20,000 people go almost every night for some show or another. If it was busy before The O2 it will be even busier now.

Am I being thick??? What's the * for?!?w entry

dg writes: yup, new entry

yeah i know jag, it's my local station, but go to north greenwich bus station and you'll see how busy it has become. The 472 doubled in frequency since the station opened











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