Rail passenger numbers and crowding on weekdays in major cities in England and Wales: 2023
Rail passenger numbers and crowding on weekdays in major cities in England and Wales for 2023.
Applies to England and Wales
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This publication provides information on the number of passengers travelling by rail into and out of a number of major city centres in England and Wales. Due to high levels of rail passenger demand in Greater London compared to every other major city in England and Wales, further detail is provided on individual stations in central London.
The statistics are based on counts of passengers carried out in England and Wales between 18 September and 12 December 2023. Data is collected from franchised train operators at selected major cities across England and Wales. It does not include Open Access operators such as Heathrow Express and Grand Central.
This publication focuses on passenger numbers during the morning and evening peak hours on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, when rail travel tends to be busiest. The AM peak covers trains arriving into city centres between 07:00 and 09:59, whereas the PM peak reflects trains departing between 16:00 and 18:59. A city centre is defined using a cordon to include the major city centre stations. In some cases, passengers will not alight at the cordon station but are counted there. For crowding statistics, passengers are counted at the busiest station on the route when entering or leaving the city centre.
The loading at the busiest point for the 10 most crowded peak train services in England and Wales during the autumn period is also presented.
Headline figures
In autumn 2023, there were on average 1,774,400 daily passenger arrivals into major cities. This represented an increase of 197,700 passengers (13%) compared to autumn 2022. Of these daily arrivals in autumn 2023, 39% or 684,700 were in the morning peak (07:00 to 09:59).
London had the highest rail passenger numbers arriving into a city across the day (1,137,800), over 10 times that of Birmingham (the second highest at 108,400).
A daily average of 150,100 passengers were standing during the AM peak in autumn 2023. This was 20% of the total daily average number of passengers travelling at this time, and represented an increase of 39% on the equivalent figure in autumn 2022. During the AM peak, train operators ran services with a daily seating capacity of 846,300 into major city centres, 2% higher than autumn 2022.
Accounting for standing capacity, 200 trains a day were ’crowded’ in autumn 2023 during the average AM or PM peak. This was 4.8% of all services travelling at those times, and represented an increase of 50% on autumn 2022. The total daily number of passengers in excess of capacity (PiXC) was on average 14,400 in autumn 2023. This was 59% higher than the equivalent figure in autumn 2022. The average proportion of passengers in excess of capacity was 1.0% across both AM and PM peaks for all cities in 2023, a 0.3 percentage point increase from autumn 2022.
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