Elizabeth line records busiest ever month again
The Elizabeth line continues to set ridership records in the latest 28 day period of travel.
A total of 16.7 million journeys were taken in Period 4 of this financial year according to Transport for London data, up from 16 million over the prior period. In total there’s 13 periods in each financial year and each measures 28 days.
That’s a decent showing and came as the line had a number of major issues and closures as signal and software faults continued to plague the service.
London Underground saw 94.1 million journeys compared to 81.3 million last year and 111.7m in 2019.
DLR passenger numbers were 7.9 million against 6.5m last year and 9.6 million in 2019. Once again London Overground had a strong month and was around pre-pandemic levels at 14.3 million journeys compared to 14.8m in 2019.
Transport for London will be happy as numbers continue to grow and in some cases are above budgeted expectations for the year. Growth continued after a fare increase in April.
Rail
National Rail and Train Operating Companies do not report figures on such a regular basis broken down by company or type of route such as Metro and long distance.
The Office and Rail and Road do release numbers but on a less frequent basis and lump all types of journey together without clarifying type of route.
For specific London Metro services such as Southern Metro, c2c or Southeastern Metro it’s often only in public meetings and associated reports where limited data comes out.
With what data we have, we can see ridership lags a long way behind recent growth on TfL with rail companies now being ordered to cut services by the Department for Transport.
That is in contrast to restoration of services as seen on TfL modes.
The big question is whether those attempts at short term cuts lose more money than they save as people are driven away from national rail services as services decrease.
