please empty your brain below

Looking forward to Anorak Corner [Dangleway Edition] which is presumably due tomorrow...
Also uncounted are Freedom Pass holders but, as you say, your list is about ordering, not absolutes.

dg writes: The Automatic Passenger Counting System counts every passenger boarding the tram, it does not discriminate by age.
Ditto, but for travelcard and other pass holders.
@ Rotherhithe, surely the Dangleway will be saved till the last, it'll be River Buses tomorrow.
The Dangleway's busiest terminals (2018)
1) -- Dangleway South (730,000)
2) -- Dangleway North (570,000)

The Dangleway's least busy terminals (2018)
1) -- Dangleway North (570,000)
2) -- Dangleway South (730,000)

Figures are for passenger entries. Disparity in ridership is due to passengers taking return trips, predominantly from the Greenwich side.
"Automatic Passenger Counting System" is new to me and appears not to be a joke.

Any more information? I fail to conceive of equipment that can distinguish between people boarding, alighting or just stamping around the door areas of a tram.

I assume the previous commenters thought that counts were done by card reader taps. Well I can say that plenty of passengers think they need to tap out (it doesn't charge you again nowadays, unless you've been riding for more than 70 minutes), or perhaps they are like me and just want to mess with Sadiq Khan and his fares.

If passengers are really counted by a machine as they board trams, this would skew the numbers towards the top 5 stops as they are the points of interchange between tram routes. I guess they would still be the top 5 regardless. Therapia Lane may have extra boardings recorded as trams terminate there when returning to depot, after the peaks. Trams also terminate at East Croydon and reverse during disruption (traffic/accidents), further inflating the number of boardings there.
Here's a press release about TfL's trial of automatic passenger counting on seven bus routes last summer.
Counts of passengers boarding different transport modes vary in whether they count interchanges. Mostly they do, except that many train to train changes are excluded - though not all. The only way to exclude them is to do a sample origin destination survey. This is expensive.
I wonder if there's a general geographic reason why penultimate stops should be expected to be little used. Or perhaps it's just a coincidence.
Penultimate stop Dundonald Road is only a few minutes walk from Wimbledon Main line station, so many local people just walk instead of waiting for a tram.
I suspect almost all passenger counts are inaccurate. Many holders of season tickets and passes are missed because they don't bother to touch in and out on trams, buses with multiple doorways, trams, and at ungated stations (DLR and minor NR) or when unstaffed gatelines are left open.

Rather than checking tickets, staff at busy NR stations often prefer to hold the manual gate wide open for all and sundry. That's something which is no doubt much appreciated by fare dodgers but rather less so by honest passengers.

WiFi detectors can't be accurate: I always switch WiFi off when not using it, and many people have non-smart phones or no mobile phone at all. Conversely, some people could be counted up to three times if they have a tablet, a personal phone and a business phone.

Some years ago TfL proposed to make touching in on buses compulsory even for holders of season tickets and passes, but this seems not to have been implemented.
Automatic Passenger Counting on trams is not based on any of the systems Gerry mentions.
Little-used penultimate stops do seem to be a thing - see Geofftech's series of least-used stations on each Tube line. Probably a factor is that the traffic tends to be one-way, as for a one stop trip there are often more convenient and cheaper methods which will get you closer to your actual destination. Termini also have one-way traffic of course, but tend to have bigger catchment areas - and they tend to be in large centres of population or other sources of passengers, as will be a reason the line was built that far and no further.have even more are also - ew people
Tram stops are also much closer together than on tube or train. You'd have to be pretty idle to catch the tram one stop.
@Eric I did exactly that on my only London tram trip, because I found Wellesley Road rather unsafe after dark, and it's a bit cool albeit it's already late May.
Eric, I assume you've never been on the trams between 3.30-4pm, I've observed numerous teenagers make one-stop journeys during that period!










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