2017-2018 Estimates of Station Usage

[Andyjs247]

I’ve been doing some analysis of the usage stats at my local stations. The first full year of Chiltern services running through from Oxford to Oxford Parkway, Bicester and Marylebone has seen a big increase in usage at Bicester Village - up by 667,000 to almost 2.0 million. It represents a 50.9% increase in usage compared with the previous year.

Usage at Oxford was also up by 20.4% at 8.0 million. There were big increases at Oxford Parkway (15.9%) and Islip (74.0%) too. However, Marylebone remained flat at 16.7 million.

Elsewhere on the Chiltern line, Banbury, Leamington Spa, Warwick, Warwick Parkway, Solihull and High Wycombe all showed small increases. Meanwhile Bicester North showed a 14.2% drop in usage to 0.8million. Birmingham Moor Street and Birmingham Snow Hill also saw small decreases.

Reflecting the general trend across the south east, on the North Cotswolds line and other routes into Oxford, usage fell. Several years of above average fare increases are clearly having an impact.

Didcot Parkway remains the second busiest station in Oxfordshire, despite a 10.4% drop in usage to 3.2 million. Perhaps surprising since figures include the start of electric services from late 2017.

Banbury was up 5.2% at 2.6 million making it the third busiest in the county. The only other Oxfordshire station which recorded an increase (21.2%) was Culham due to more employment at Culham Science Centre.

While Oxford will have seem some growth from further afield, opening of the new Westgate shopping centre will also be a factor. But most of the 1.35 million increase will be due to commuting on the new Chiltern service, particularly from Bicester. The 14-minute journey is attractive compared with the alternatives via the congested A34.

There has also been some abstraction in usage from Bicester North to Bicester Village from where, despite more limited car parking facilities, the train service to and from Marylebone is preferred. Commuting to Oxford looks set to grow further when the service increases to 5tph from Bicester with EWR2.

 

[jimm]

Reflecting the general trend across the south east, on the North Cotswolds line and other routes into Oxford, usage fell. Several years of above average fare increases are clearly having an impact.

Perhaps go back and look at the figures at stations on the Cotswold Line prior to the opening of Oxford Parkway and since then and where custom has dropped off - notably Hanborough and Charlbury - where a lot of custom was (and still is) car-borne. Once they are in their cars, people can just as easily go to station B as they can to station A.

The big shift from those stations took place in 2016-17. GWR then had terrible problems with reliability and punctuality at the end of 2017 and early last year, which was hardly an incentive to use their trains, unlike the performance Chiltern manage most of the time on their private railway. That GWR unreliability hit hard at the two Wychwoods stations, where the limited service became non-existent at times.

All of these factors have, I am sure, had much more of an impact on custom at the southern end of the Cotswold Line than any changes to GWR's fares and fare structure - and the Cotswold Line still enjoys a number of easements on tickets, has its own local railcard and is in the Network Card zone, so is not exactly hard done by compared with the stations at the other end of the Cotswolds, to take one example. And if you can plan journeys ahead, there are some very low advance fares on offer.

Once you get to Cotswold Line stations that bit further away from Oxford Parkway, so a rather longer drive, passenger traffic at Kingham has been basically the same since 2014 and at Moreton-in-Marsh it is still growing, albeit less slowly than previously.

We will have to wait to see whether GWR's much-improved performance, especially for the past month or so, and a service now almost entirely IET-operated, has an impact on the figures for 2018-19.

 

[didcotdean]

Didcot Parkway remains the second busiest station in Oxfordshire, despite a 10.4% drop in usage to 3.2 million. Perhaps surprising since figures include the start of electric services from late 2017.

One possible factor to depress the Didcot usage figures for the latter part of this period was the more limited parking available than usual, as the multi-storey car park was built. If this was significant it won't work its way fully out of the figures until 2019-20, although alternatives may continue to be used. Also the Didcot to Oxford shuttle service at peak time went through a period of specific poor reliability in the first few months of its introduction; I personally know of some people that switched to bus services because of it, at least for a while.

 

[geoffk]

Still waiting for 18/19 figures? Nothing on ORR website as yet. Anyone have any information? The figures for Northern and TPE stations will not look good.

 

[Killingworth]

Still waiting for 18/19 figures? Nothing on ORR website as yet. Anyone have any information? The figures for Northern and TPE stations will not look good.

Not due until 14th January.