Hurrah, it's that time of year again when TfL silently updates its spreadsheet of annual passenger entry/exit totals at every tube station.
Actually they haven't, not yet, but what they have done is upload five massive spreadsheets of data from which all the necessary orderings can be calculated. There's a Monday spreadsheet, a Tuesday-Thursday spreadsheet, a Friday spreadsheet, a Saturday spreadsheet and a Sunday spreadsheet (because weekdays no longer have the uniform travel patterns they once did). All of these have been surveyed from a typical week in autumn 2022 (so we're finally past the pandemic data-blip and into the new normal, plus Crossrail is now up and running). I've added all of these spreadsheets together.
So what follows is weekly passenger data not annual passenger data.
(which shouldn't make any overall difference to the rankings because the annual figures have always been 'one typical week multipled by 52' anyway)
London's busiest tube lines (journeys 2022) 1) Northern 5,910,200 2) Victoria 4,523,000 3) Jubilee 4,461,700 4) Central 4,449,900 5) District 4,045,700 6) Piccadilly 3,357,900 7) H&C and Circle 2,272,600 8) Bakerloo 1,841,000 9) Metropolitan 1,546,300 10) Waterloo & City 329,400
The Northern line is comfortably the busiest tube line, but it's a much closer battle for second place between the Victoria, Jubilee and Central lines. A fantastic fact is that the Central line comes second on Mondays, the Victoria line comes second on the other weekdays and the Jubilee line comes second at weekends.
TfL don't distinguish between the Hammersmith & City and Circle lines, they bundle them in together, but we might assume both have just over a million passengers each. So although the bottom 3 are technically the Bakerloo, Metropolitan and Waterloo & City, in reality the bottom 3 are the Hammersmith & City, Circle and Waterloo & City.
If Crossrail were a tube line, which it isn't, it'd slot in between the District and Piccadilly lines with 3,512,000 weekly journeys. The Overground has slightly more passengers (3,723,000) and the DLR rather fewer (2,035,000).
London's ten busiest tube stations (entries/exits 2022) 1) Waterloo 1,668,000 2) King's Cross St Pancras 1,509,000 3) Liverpool Street 1,410,000 4) Victoria 1,265,000 5) London Bridge 1,259,000 6) Paddington 1,195,000 7) Stratford 1,185,000 8) Oxford Circus 1,151,000 9) Tottenham Court Road 1,139,000 10) Bond Street 806,000
Again these are weekly totals, not annual, so Waterloo's figure equates to about 87m passengers a year. The top six are all major rail termini, the same six that topped the list before the pandemic but in a somewhat different order. Oxford Circus is the busiest tube-only station. Stratford is still the busiest tube station outside zone 1. A lot of Elizabeth line stations appear because interchanging with Crossrail counts as a tube entry or exit.
The next 10: Bank/Monument, Farringdon, Canary Wharf, Leicester Square, Green Park, Euston, Piccadilly Circus, Moorgate, South Kensington, Finsbury Park
London's ten busiest tube stations that are only on one line: Canary Wharf, North Greenwich, Vauxhall, Brixton, Wimbledon, Camden Town, Seven Sisters, Old Street, Highbury & Islington, Knightsbridge
The busiest tube station in zone 3 is Wimbledon (396,000), the busiest tube station in zone 4 is Wembley Park (319,000), the busiest tube station in zone 5 is Harrow-on-the-Hill (175,000) and the busiest tube station in zone 6 is Heathrow Terminals 2&3 (129,000).
The least used tube stations in zone 1: Regent's Park (46000), Lambeth North, Bayswater, Nine Elms, Edgware Road (76000)
This is still my favourite list of the year...
London's 10 least busy tube stations (entries/exits 2022) 1) Kensington (Olympia) 2610 2) Roding Valley 5790 3) Chigwell 6890 4) Grange Hill 7990 5) North Ealing 12370 6) Theydon Bois 14950 7) Moor Park 15780 8) Upminster Bridge 15900 9) Ruislip Gardens 16250 10) Croxley 17200
This is exactly the same top 10 as last year except Croxley and Ruislip Gardens have swapped places. Least used stations tend to stay least used stations even when overall travel patterns are disrupted.
Kensington (Olympia) remains least used overall now that TfL have finally split its tube passengers from the vastly more frequent Overground service. The Essex end of the Central line has a very strong showing including all three stops on the Hainault shuttle, as per usual. An interesting statistic is that Kensington Olympia ↔ Earl's Court and Grange Hill ↔ Hainault are the least travelled sections of track anywhere on the Underground.
The next ten least busy stations: Ickenham, Chesham, Fairlop, West Harrow, South Kenton, West Acton, West Ruislip, Barkingside, West Finchley, North Wembley
And while we're here...
DLR Top 5: Canning Town, Bank, Stratford, Canary Wharf, Woolwich Arsenal DLR Bottom 5: Beckton Park (11000), Poplar, Elverson Road, Stratford High Street, Blackwall (26300)
Beckton Park remains Tumbleweed Central after the neighbouring office development stalled. Poplar's a busy station but not many people enter or exit. Pudding Mill Lane used to be in the Bottom 5 but thanks to ABBA it's no longer even in the Bottom 10.
Overground Top 5: Highbury & Islington/Stratford/Whitechapel/Liverpool Street/Clapham Junction (in some order) Overground Bottom 6: Emerson Park (8000), South Hampstead, Penge West, Headstone Lane, Theobalds Grove, Barking Riverside (13400)
I've stretched this to a Bottom Six to show that the Barking Riverside extension is so far a commercial failure. That's fine, it was only built to enable the building of thousands more homes and until they're built it'll never be busy. But even a year after opening it's still averaging only 15 passengers per train, that's enough to half-fill a single decker bus, because such are the costs of sending the trains before the people.
The Top 5 is just taken from stations with a separate gateline. Obviously Tottenham Court Road and several of the central stations are busier but alas these spreadsheets don't allow you to strip out purple and non-purple passengers. Such are the dangers of reading too much into the available data. But the Bottom 5 is pretty definitive, indeed look here's Iver sitting comfortably amidst the least used of all TfL stations.
TfL's 10 least busy stations (entries/exits 2022) 1) Kensington (Olympia) 2610 2) Roding Valley 5790 3) Chigwell 6890 4) Grange Hill 7990 5) Emerson Park 8120 6) Iver 8560 7) Beckton Park 10840 8) South Hampstead 12210 9) North Ealing 12370 10) Penge West 12410
And let's finish with this list because it's always good to learn something new.
The busiest Overground lines (journeys 2022) 1) East London 1,281,000 2) North London 1,271,000 3) West Anglia 694,000 4) Watford-Euston 237,000 5) Gospel Oak-Barking 224,000 6) Romford–Upminster 16,000
The two original Overground lines remain the busiest on the network, with each carrying about one-third of all Overground passengers. Next comes West Anglia, that's the lines out of Liverpool Street, with the Watford branch and Goblin roughly balanced behind. Propping up the lot is the runty Emerson Park line which carries just 0.4% of all Overground traffic, and quite frankly I'm surprised it's that much.
