London Underground has busiest day on record.

[StateOfPlay]

Wow! That is one busy network!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-34807310

London Underground had its busiest ever day when 4,735,000 people went on the network.
Transport for London (TfL) said the record was set on 9 October, but was likely to be beaten by the end of the year.
The previous record was set on 28 November last year when there were 4,734,000 passengers.
The steady increase in numbers is being put down to economic and population growth.
The last week of October this year was the busiest ever week, with 28,614,000 journeys.

Not surprised that Oxford Circus and St Pancras are the busiest stations, but St Pancras has a few more lines going through it than Oxford Circus. Having to queue to get into the station at Oxford Street is always fascinating.

 

[gswindale]

Wow! That is one busy network!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-34807310



Not surprised that Oxford Circus and St Pancreas are the busiest stations, but St Pancreas has a few more lines going through it than Oxford Circus. Having to queue to get into the station at Oxford Street is always fascinating.

Those numbers don't seem right to me.

I'd be much happier if it read 4,735,341 and 4,733,768 for example.

I'm always a little suspicious of any figure quite as nice round numbers!

 

[Domh245]

I suppose the reason they don't have accurate figures is because there is some element of estimation in how they calculate the figures. They have to go off of oyster data and ticket sales, which can be misleading because of multiple journeys, failing to touch in or out correctly, fare evasion and so on. Therefore, they have to take their raw data and scale it in some way or another to get a value for users, and because of this they can't quote it accurate to the 100s, so they round it off to the nearest 1000

 

[bluegoblin7]

Not surprised that Oxford Circus and St Pancras are the busiest stations, but St Pancras has a few more lines going through it than Oxford Circus.

Bear in mind the official statistics only come from entry and exit data via the gates.

For 2014, King's Cross' results will be somewhat skewed due to the escalator refurbishment work which required lots more inter-gateline interchange. However, these figures will be closer to reality as a usually these people would be interchanging intra-gateline, so won't get recorded.

Similar can be said for many stations across the network, and the same is true of the "big picture" data. A customer may enter at Farringdon via Thameslink and exit at Ealing Broadway via GWR, resulting in them never being counted as they haven't been through an LU gateline.

 

[edwin_m]

Bear in mind the official statistics only come from entry and exit data via the gates.

For 2014, King's Cross' results will be somewhat skewed due to the escalator refurbishment work which required lots more inter-gateline interchange. However, these figures will be closer to reality as a usually these people would be interchanging intra-gateline, so won't get recorded.

Similar can be said for many stations across the network, and the same is true of the "big picture" data. A customer may enter at Farringdon via Thameslink and exit at Ealing Broadway via GWR, resulting in them never being counted as they haven't been through an LU gateline.

Can't they get the software to take the inter-gatelines and OSIs out of the figures?

 

[bluegoblin7]

Can't they get the software to take the inter-gatelines and OSIs out of the figures?

More than likely, but that's *still* not giving an accurate measure of how busy each station is. Entry/exit data really isn't a particularly useful metric in the Grand Scheme of Things (imo).

What we really need is a reliable way of counting every passenger who interchanges, if we want accurate stats - but that's not an easy thing to achieve!

 

[100andthirty]

There are also lots of people who don't have tickets that work gates or have tickets that do work gates but have failed. For these, staff will use their Oyster to let people in and out, but then the system can't differentiate between those uses and the touching in and out when moving around the station. Finally, anyone with a season ticket type Oyster or paper ticket, probably won't touch in or out in the gates are open. Hence the needcto do a bit of estimating.