While Tube Week was in full flow, TfL silently published their annual spreadsheet listing the number of passengers using every London bus route and how many kilometres those buses travelled. Data is for April 2021 - March 2022.
This was another year of lockdown-throttled service - nowhere near as bad as 2020/21 but still with social distancing restrictions for the first four months and generally subdued throughout. Overall ridership was roughly 75% of what it had been pre-pandemic, still not 'normal', so I won't go into the heavy detail I usually would. If you want all the rankings, even down to what's the seventh busiest single decker, Green Kitten has kindly posted a full analysis on the London Bus Forum here.
Here then are the key categories and the headline figures (including changes in ranking since the heady days of 2019/20). Normal service should be resumed in next year's data.
London's ten busiest bus routes (2021/22) 1) -- 18 Euston - Sudbury (10.7m) 2) -- 149 London Bridge - Edmonton Green (10.6m) 3) -- 29 Trafalgar Square - Wood Green (9.5m) 4) ↑6 5 Canning Town - Romford (8.8m) 5) ↑1 25 Holborn Circus - Ilford (8.5m) 6) ↑2 86 Stratford - Romford (8.4m) 7) ↑3 36 Queens Park - New Cross Gate (8.4m) 8) ↓4 207 White City - Southall (8.4m) 9) ↓4 243 Waterloo - Wood Green (8.3m) 10) ↑3 279 Manor House - Waltham Cross (8.3m)
The next ten: 109, 55, 35, 53, 141, 43, 38, 254, 183
London's busiest buses remain the 18, 149 and 29, as they were before and during the pandemic. Catching up are three Newham-heavy buses, the 5, 25 and 86. To give you some idea of how passenger numbers have yo-yo-ed, in the year before the pandemic route 18 recorded 16 million passengers, then just 6 million, and last year it rebounded to 11 million.
The next ten: 497, 375, 146, U10, 467, 464, 485, 404, 346, 209
Most of these are the usual suspects, topped off by a pair of brief turns in Barnet connecting daytime residents to the shops. Peripheral infrequent buses don't attract much custom, and during a pandemic especially so. The bus that's fallen out of the Top 10 is the W10 which was extended to North Middlesex Hospital and renumbered 456, and which now sits in the rankings at a much healthier 28th.
London's ten most travelled bus routes: 5, 18, 111, 36, 183, 38, 86, 53, 182, 174
London's ten most crowded bus routes: 330, 238, 149, W7, 104, 29, 41, 98, 35, 109 London's ten emptiest buses: R5, R10, 146, R8, H3, 399, R2, 347, 404, 497
The five routes with the biggest increase in passengers: W10/456, 497, 278, X140, 306
The five routes with the biggest decrease in passengers: 209, 521, 507, A10, 327
The big increases are all for new routes, most of them introduced in December 2019 to serve Crossrail. The big decreases are for a bus neutered by the closure of Hammersmith Bridge (209), two central London commuter-shufflers (507 & 521) and a bus to Heathrow Airport (A10). The 507 and 521 have slumped to 25% of their pre-pandemic ridership.
This is all very interesting and informative, but it'd be unwise to draw too many long-term conclusions from what are still atypical figures. Let's hope that 2022/23 edges back towards a more sustainable pattern of bus travel, although the direction of travel looks to be scrapping routes so anything could happen before the next figures are released.
