Friday, October 27, 2006
Tube geek (20) Busiest lines
According to the latest TfL statistics, London's busiest tube line is the Northern line with just over 200 million passenger journeys each year. And the least busy? That's the Waterloo & City line with just under 10 million passenger journeys each year. Or so the headline figures say. I'd like to disagree. Share out each line's passengers equally, station by station, and the tiny Waterloo & City line (with just 2 stations) works out much busier than the Northern (with 50). OK, this may be a fairly meaningless statistic, but it does at least seem to give a fairly sensible rank ordering of busy-ness...
| | Annual journeys
(millions) | Number of
stations | Passengers
per station |
| Victoria | 161 | 16 | 10.1 million |
| W & City | 10 | 2 | 4.8 million |
| Jubilee | 128 | 27 | 4.7 million |
| Northern | 207 | 50 | 4.1 million |
| Bakerloo | 96 | 25 | 3.8 million |
| Central | 184 | 49 | 3.7 million |
| Piccadilly | 176 | 52 | 3.4 million |
| District | 173 | 60 | 2.9 million |
| Circle | 68 | 27 | 2.5 million |
| H & City | 46 | 28 | 1.6 million |
| Metropolitan | 54 | 34 | 1.6 million |
| East London | 10 | 8 | 1.3 million |
The Victoria line rightly comes out as the busiest, with barely a backwater station anywhere along its length, while the "you can always get a seat" East London ends up the quietest. And look, the list splits surprisingly neatly in two, with the deep-level tubes at the top and the cut-and-cover lines at the bottom. Which means that the busiest lines have the narrowest tunnels and the squashedest passengers, while the quietest lines have the broadest tunnels and the most spacious carriages. Typical, eh?
<< click for Newer posts
click for Older Posts >>
click to return to the main page
