With discussion of ticket office closures and rail passenger numbers a political hot potato, it’s easy to forget that firm data on the state of rail in Great Britain does exist. We take a look at the ORR’s latest figures (April – June 2023) and TfL’s recent Crossrail Usage report.
One of the roles of the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) is to provide statistical analysis of UK rail usage. Just as critically it’s to ensure the methodology used is sound, and that (where possible) the data is delivered in a way that allows useful comparisons with previous periods.
This has been something of a challenge in recent years, thanks to a number of factors. The pandemic still casts a long shadow, as does the period of drastically reduced rail usage it created. This reduction was for relatively obvious reasons, with government-mandated lockdowns and managed capacity reduction playing a huge part. It is for this reasons that critics of the railways or railway investment, and the Treasury, like to point to year-on-year (or period-on-period) comparisons that include the pandemic as evidence of overall demand reduction. This has been particularly true within the areas of government pushing for ticket hall closures. The existence of a period of significantly reduced usage is awfully handy if you’re looking to find figures that match your plan, rather than a plan that matches your figures.
This is, ultimately, what makes the work the ORR does so useful, because a considerable amount of work has been put into ensuring that its comparisons are useful and actionable rather than numbers with no context. Doubly useful because the pandemic did create reduced customer willingness to travel by rail, and the true impact of the latter is something that the ORR and other sources have long sought to tease out.
Post-COVID vs Pre-COVID rail levels
As the above remains the elephant in the room, it makes sense to tackle this aspect of the current data release first. The headline figure is that rail usage continues to march firmly back towards pre-pandemic numbers. Between 1st April and 30th June 2023 there were 390 million rail passenger journeys. This represents 89% of the same period of traffic pre-covid at 437 million (April to June 2019).
Just as importantly, this increase has not yet shown signs of tailing off. Indeed one of the noticeable aspects of the current data release is that ORR have made the decision to finally move from using pre-pandemic traffic estimates of the same quarter for comparison, to using the same quarter in the previous year. This is a useful return to “business as usual” as it means we have figures for April to June 2022 as well. From these, we can see there was a 19% increase year-on-year in rail usage in the same period (up from 328 million journeys). Despite all the ongoing issues, rail use has definitely been ‘bouncing back’.
A full breakdown of those increases is provided below. It’s worth bearing in mind when narratives of rail use being in decline, or of the need for managed decline, are mentioned.
Comparing the Elizabeth line
You’ll note that the Elizabeth line lacks a comparison on the graph above. This is because although the Elizabeth line has already cemented itself firmly into London’s collective consciousness, it is still only a year out from the opening of its central section in May 2022, and the through-running that came with that. Indeed the opening of that central section, and the need to now incorporate its figures effectively into national rail figures, has proven something of a headache for ORR.
We’ll explore why this is shortly, but in the meantime it is particularly useful to see where the Elizabeth line currently stands in comparison to its pre-pandemic usage predictions. This is because a lot of TfL’s (and the DfT’s) funding agreements and loans were based on those usage assumptions. For this, we can turn to a TfL Board Paper from July this year, which gives some idea of the general trend. The opening of through-running means they have now begun to evaluate actual vs anticipated Elizabeth line comparative usage themselves.
It’s early days, as TfL themselves caution those reading the paper to bear in mind, but as can be seen from the graph above, current Elizabeth line journeys seem to be trending against the TfL/DfT ‘post-pandemic optimistic scenario’, and may well be exceeding that. To quote TfL:
Were the number of passenger journeys observed since the start of east to west through running continue for a year, then annual passenger journeys would be 170 million per annum. A faster post pandemic recovery and the changes associated with Stage 5c [The current timetable] could see this reach 200m journeys per annum.
TFL rEPORT
To provide some quick markers on what impact through-running has had in real-terms, Tottenham Court Road is now dealing with 175,000 passengers a day (159% of previous numbers), Bond Street 230,000 (131%) and Farringdon 280,000 (280%).
It is worth noting that if these figures hold firm, then the Elizabeth line is on course to be revenue-positive for TfL by the end of this year.
How do you solve a problem like the Elizabeth line?
Moving back to the ORR data, it’s the Elizabeth line – and calculating its actual impact on UK rail figures – that forms a considerable part of the release. This release sees some of that usage data refactored, and hints that this relates to technical issues with the LENNON (Latest Earnings Networked Nationally Over Night) ticketing and revenue system managed by the rail industry, which affected Elizabeth line data more than most. This is important, because LENNON forms the basis of the usage figures across the whole UK.
This has, to a certain extent, confirmed some lingering suspicions held within LR Towers for a while. Those suspicions were that something must be up with the LENNON data for the Elizabeth line. It certainly didn’t match TfL’s own figures, which often seemed much lower. Our suspicion was that TfL’s numbers were more accurate, and it certainly seemed that the DfT agreed as it had mostly been using TfL’s numbers where appropriate or necessary.
That this has now been identified and actioned shows the ORR’s commitment (and that of its new chief statistician) to ensuring that the numbers they produce are the best they can be. The short version is that it’s a consequence of LENNON being, ultimately, an accounting tool first and a source of useful transport data second. Combine that with the labyrinthine fare and ticketing system in the UK, and you end up with an output that struggles to report correctly on Contactless and Oyster Pay As You Go journeys as opposed to straight up point-to-point ticket purchases.
Historically, this hasn’t really been an issue in terms of national rail data, as the impact was confined to TfL services – many of which (such as the Tube or DLR) aren’t covered by these releases. So smart card based, flexible travel – in which the passenger can just trust they’ll pay the right fare, and the democratization and increased travel this facilitates – has been something the national data set has been able to quietly ignore. The Elizabeth line is a mainline railway masquerading as a metro. As a result, that issue can no longer be ignored.
One might think that the above paragraph might apply to rest-of-UK ticketing itself. Not just its data. You might think that, reader, but we could not possibly comment.
The net result of all this is that ORR has accepted that TfL’s data is more accurate. And now that it is being generated in sufficient quantities, post-through-running, this will form the basis of future reporting. ORR are working with TfL to ensure that it is suitably comparable and can be integrated with the LENNON data from elsewhere.
Given that the inconsistency between TfL and LENNON data has been clear for a while, in most places where it was important the TfL data was being used already. This will now be reflected in ORR data going forward though. This is good, but it does mean that we’re likely to see a 20 – 40% decrease in the numbers the ORR publish related to the Elizabeth line, as they ‘right-size’ their dataset. This should have little practical impact, and deliver significant benefits to all, but readers are warned to watch for headlines or suggestions that the Elizabeth line has suddenly ‘lost’ passengers. As can be seen from the numbers covered above, and TfL’s own data, this isn’t true. It’s simply bad statistics being corrected. Nonetheless, beer-based bets have been made in LR Towers as to which mainstream media sources will fall into that trap (voluntarily or not) if they spot the difference.
For those interested in the real detail behind the LENNON issues and steps being taken to overcome them, the ORR have published an updated Methodology, which includes a good discussion of them. You can read that Methodology report on their website. We found it fascinating – but then, we would.
Split-ticketing: The rail industry’s dirty secret
One other aspect of British ticketing that the LENNON issues – and the ORR report – have now highlighted is the increasing impact of split-ticketing.
As we’ve already discussed, fares and ticketing in the UK are historically (and horrifically) over-complex outside of London. Not only does the system comprise a variety of peak/off-peak and differentiated price models, but it lacks a simple universal smart card system outside of the area’s of TfL’s control where Oyster and its Contactless replacement/parallel dominate. It’s worth noting, for new readers, that this situation has been worsened, historically, by the DfT’s refusal to allow the adoption of Oyster outside of those areas, even where the operators desired it. Reading is an interesting example of this, where some years back the DfT didn’t just resist plans to see Oyster implemented on the town’s local bus network, but actively blocked them.
One key consequence of the above, however, has been the gap in the market created for websites like The Trainline to offer ‘split ticketing’ options to passengers. Split-ticketing sees the passenger input their full journey, with the site or system then calculating the best way to break down that journey into smaller parts. These smaller parts are calculated to maximise the local and operator variance in ticket pricing to ensure you can stay in the same seat for your full journey, while actually paying less than if you had simply bought a point-to-point ticket between your start and finish points.
That a small industry has started to grow around split-ticketing is arguably the biggest sign of how fundamentally broken, and hostile to passengers, national rail ticketing in the UK is. What is worth noting here, however, is that not only are the general public becoming more aware of the option, but also actively using it.
That this is the case is evidenced through increasing disparities between passenger journeys and passenger kilometres in the ORR dataset. The difference between the two (and the data and insights created by the latter) are too lengthy to get into here, and we will try to look at them in a separate article at a later date. But it’s clear that the ORR have become increasingly worried that split-ticketing – as with TfL’s ticketing – may have a long term impact on how journeys are reported (leading to over-reporting) if ways of tracking and representing it better aren’t made now.
This is interesting in and of itself, but what is more interesting (and worth noting here) is that ORR asked the Rail Delivery Group (the collection of train operating companies responsible for running all UK rail franchises) to give them a genuine estimate of the current level of split ticketing across the network for this release. According to those figures, split-ticketing accounted for 5% of all passenger journeys on the UK rail network between April 2022 and March 2023. This represented an increase on the 3% estimated for the previous year.
Split-ticketing is clearly not something that, as some operators likely hoped, will be quietly going away. If anything, the general public is getting smarter and now that using it can, in many cases, be as simple as checking a box on a website when they buy their ticket, they’re embracing it.
Returning to the Elizabeth line
There is much more we could dig into in this report, and hopefully we will get a chance to do so. But for now the last thing we’d like to note is that the current data set once again highlights the disparity between the London region and the rest of the country in terms of rail provision.
In the public narrative, this continues often to be framed either as an investment issue or one that relies on a grossly insulting and reductive suggestion that somehow ‘the north’ is both a homogeneous entity and also one that wants road infrastructure over rail infrastructure.
The ORR data highlights, yet again, that where rail infrastructure is built – even post-COVID – it is used. The figures show that this is true across the whole country, even where the current provision has gotten considerably worse (TransPennine and Northern, we’re looking at you) as a simple look again at the graph posted towards the head of this article shows.
The Elizabeth line also stands as testament to that. At 51.1m (rightsized) journeys from April to June 2023, it carried 13% of all rail travel in the UK between April and June 2023. Some of that travel is extrapolated from other, existing lines or TfL services but that number has continued to grow significantly since then, as TfL’s own reports are showing, and as yet shows no sign of slowing. As a result it is entirely possible that the next ORR report in December will contain figures in which the Elizabeth line represents 20% or more of all UK rail travel.
There is a reason that those hostile to rail investment are also those who tend to highlight the amount of it that’s spent on it in London and surrounding areas. This is because it allows the false narrative to be pushed that major rail projects are fixed-pot spending. That funding is a zero-sum game where all projects compete for the same budget, and that Peter from Manchester has to be robbed to pay for Paul from London’s trains. This isn’t how funding large infrastructure projects – that run into billions of pounds – works.
In the simplest terms, for those projects funding is always about borrowing. Whether that borrowing is from the private sector or via government lending (local and national). That borrowing is based on the economic potential for the investment to be paid back, regardless of what else might be underway.
In essence, the only barrier to both Peter and Paul receiving better railway services is whether they independently make economic sense.
These ORR figures once again highlight that the level of investment in large scale rail infrastructure projects nationally should be increasing, not decreasing, and that canceling those projects already under way without concrete, detailed alternatives does immeasurable harm to the economic and social improvement of the areas affected.
The desire and need for rail travel, and shifting modes of working, have not diminished demand across the country. The opposite is true.
“If you build it, they will ride.” Continues to apply nationally, not just in London. These latest data releases highlight that. It is the political will, and the inflexibility of the Treasury’s approach to project sign-off that represent the barriers to infrastructure investment across the whole country. Not a lack of demand or socio-economic benefit.
“That funding is a zero-sum game where all projects compete for the same budget, and that Peter from Manchester has to be robbed to pay for Paul from London’s trains. This isn’t how funding large infrastructure projects – that run into billions of pounds – works.”
I would suggest this is not correct as we have seen with the cancellation of HS2 beyond Birmingham and the supposed “saving” being reallocated to other transport schemes. There is a limit that Treasury will allow to be borrowed and most major projects are very much political and not economic decisions. The business case for the Elizabeth Line depended on the quantification of wider economic benefits that had not been applied to transport schemes before then. The Jubilee line extension had a BCR of less than 1 when originally approved. There were schemes outside London that offered better returns that did not go ahead on the grounds of affordability.
Except the ‘saving’ has not really been allocated to other schemes. It’s been handwaved as future possible investment with no ringfencing attached.
Ultimately, the Treasury’s process for establishing BCR is fundamentally flawed. I don’t think you’d find many within the rail industry who’d disagree with that.
It fails to accommodate macro needs for expanded investment and focuses too heavily on whether individual projects will deliver the most value.
That continually leads to London projects (which can almost always demonstrate that value) getting signed off, when others don’t. Simply because they’re a ‘low risk’ loan option with quick returns (to over simplify).
“Some of that travel is extrapolated from other, existing lines…”
Do you mean “expropriated” or “extracted”, or would all three work?
The Crossrail business case had its cost-benefit ratio calculated at 1.97:1, which increased to 3.1:1 if wider benefits were included. So it did not depend on the wider economic benefits for justification.
And a significant proportion of the cost of Crossrail wasn’t borrowed by central government at all – it was paid for by bonds issued by TfL against future income from business rates and a development levy. So this is money that would never have been available to spend in the North.
See here: https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Crossrail-summary..pdf
Thanks for an excellent article. Am I right in estimating from your figures and from looking at ORR data that over 2/3rds of all journeys are made in London and the South East?
Thanks for an excellent article. Am I right in estimating from your figures and from looking at ORR data that over 2/3rds of all journeys are made in London and the South East?
Yes. Which is why I wanted to emphasise that this isn’t reflective of a demand for rail that exists in the south, but not the north. Simply that when the options exist the demand is there.
From the article itself:
QUOTE:
“…narratives of rail use being in decline, or of the need for managed decline, are mentioned.” – always by commerical & also political special interests with axes to grind, of course.
Can’t let facts get in the way of a good story!
And, immediately afterwards, the bar-graph of the almost-universal increase in usage, wth the real exception being the minus-8% use in Heathrow Express …
And the Cross-Liz line, too.
As some of us predicted, there was significant suppressed demand at the W end, which has now come out of the woodwork, to the delight of the operators & the possible dismay of the naysayers?
And a thank-you for showing up the falsehood of the “robbing Peter to pay for Paul” narrative, that has also dogged HS2.
Great Article.
Split ticketing is an odd one. Is the ticketing system truly “hostile” to passengers if they are increasingly embracing it, supported by the right tools (Apps etc) in place to do this?
If anything, having a system that obsessively prices a through fare for every theoretical combination of journey, even ones that passengers never in practice do (e.g. Roche to Achnashellach) is part of the problem of the complexity, and it is in practice the splitting of tickets (as done on other national networks) that simplify this!
For what it’s worth, I’m of the opinion that railway tickets should be post-charged by distance and speed.
The faster your travel – like on HS1 – the higher the charge.
The slower your trip takes, the less you pay. If you pick a train that is scheduled for fast travel but actually takes ages, you pay the lower rate.
The “crow flies” distance between the start and end stop would be the distance calculated. If you go around the long way or the wrong way around a loop, the distance would be the crow-flies distance at lower rate.
I suspect there should be a “lowest rate” that could encompass the free-travel for those who qualify.
If there should be a avoid-the-peak system, it could be simple flat supplement like the 50p it is in London.
I would envisage a bands of 125km/h+, 100km/h+, 50km/h and “everything else”. This is the total travel speed including dwell time.
Examples (from the National Rail Enquires planning API).
Stratford International to Dover is 102km at 124km/h and Kettering 106km at 92.7km/h.
Stratford to Ipswich 97km at 94km/h, Colchester 73km at 88kh/h to Reading 67km at 70km/h, to Gatwick 44km at 45km/h, to Surbiton 27km at 26 km/h, White Hart Lane is just 8km at 10km/h
Talk of “marching back” to 89.9% of pre-Covid levels overlooks the impact of the Elizabeth line ridership explosion (build it and they will come). Take out the Elizabeth line ridership and the national railway is at 80%.
This table covers what I term ‘multi-sector’ operators taken from the latest ORR data. These are operators with a bit of everything – long distance/inter-urban, commuting and rural services. The first number is the percentage of passenger journeys in Quarter 1 2023-24 versus Quarter 1 2019-20. The second in the Year-on year growth versus Quarter 1 2022-23. Apologies for the poor layout of the table.
Would anyone care to explore the potential influence of the Elizabeth line on Greater Anglia’s comparative performance?
Meanwhile, of course, comparison with pre-Covid data is of limited value as we are in a new world when it comes to travel patterns, fares and costs (and politics). For example reports of over crowding and trains in store suggests that we may have the right sized fleet, but not necessarily in the right places.
Finally great to have LonRec back with some heavy duty analysis of a current conundrum.
+++
Chiltern 73.6 9.6
East Midlands Railway 107.7 9.4
Great Western 82.5 7.7
Greater Anglia 87.6 14.3
ScotRail 81.6 33.0
.
+++++
re Greg and Captain Deltic,
1. More to come in further articles including the Greater Anglia question (was already being pondered before this article)
2. HEx -6% despite airport passenger numbers up 23% on a comparable basis, HEx is losing market share and this trend appears to be continuing as occasional Heathrow users give Crossrail a try (and don’t go back HEx next time).
3. The early patterns of post Covid recovery (e.g. long distance TOC e.g. LNER and off peak traffic enjoying good growth) are now changing with best growth now being in TOCs with London and South East commuter traffic.
4. Commuter traffic recovery outside London and SE is now much lower than L&SE.
5. Commuter and non-worked related traffic recovery is good. Business travel (typically higher revenue) recovery has been very poor and continued strike actions is impacting recovery there. The unions have pushed people to the roads instead of back on to rail.
6. Still lots of strike related issues impacting the data to varying degrees over time (e.g. Scotrail’s growth rate will suddenly drop as the number of strike days in the previous year baseline period rapidly reduces).
7. Lots of growth is now occurring were TOC made cuts previous, unfortunately some will be difficulty to provide sufficient capacity for. e.g GWR, GTR. TfL will probably help address some of this on the Forest Hill corridor but not many locations/routes have a TfL magic wand option.
8. Some TOC passenger numbers will be less reliable than others as Ticketless travel rates are “interesting” in places. This will be affecting both revenue numbers and assumptions about crowding and service provision.
The whole “robbing Peter to pay for Paul” section raises an interesting question.
Some projects require specialist, but non-bespoke, equipment and/or personel, of which there could be a limited number that can’t be in 2 places at once. (possible examples; there is only one mobile crane in the country big enough for the job, Only 5 people have the expertise to install this equipment, and we all need 5 of them, etc)
Thus doing multiple projects in parallel that require those same resources for extended periods adds additional logistical complexity and potentially costs too (maybe a 2nd crane has to come from Poland, instead of Cambridge).
To what extent does that affect budget estimates and is it factored into the bcr?
Or maybe I’m over estmiating the impact of such thing?
@DJL I think it possibly does have some impact at the moment due to the UK being allergic to investing in infrastructure. With a boom and bust funding cycle, those sorts of assets can’t be used most efficiently (which means more expensive individual projects). If there were a more steady conveyor or projects, industry can figure out how to move them between projects and also invest in additional capacity.
TfL’s recent Crossrail Usage report
As TfL are the arbiters of standards it is disappointing for them to issue a usage report on a construction project.
The other elephant in the room is the revenue being collected. Everything I have seen both in media and on other forums suggest that revenue is considerably down with fewer season tickets and business travel still down. Anecdotally my employer (big 4 accountant) is currently insisting on 2 days a week in the office, and the business travel budget is tiny compared to 2019 – that is in line with other similar firms AFAIK
Split ticketing will always exist while there as such crazy anomalies in the pricing. If I go by train to my parents near Gloucester, the difference is about 30% between headline price and a split ticket.
On the subject of passenger numbers and recovery from the pandemic, the Glasgow Subway now has slightly more passengers than previously. Has any other UK rail operator managed a full recovery to pre-pandemic figures?
@ngh & @Herned – HEx & Business travel decline probably related, and mirrored by figures from the airlines, where overall passenger numbers and revenue are booming (with resultant fare hardening) with even the front of the plane stuffed full – but largely with Premium Leisure pax, still keen to spend savings while they can after Covid. Without company expenses insulating them from reality, even those people baulk at being robbed by HEx. This week on my first trip through Heathrow in several years I noticed that the purple-clad HEx muggers had vanished from the Arrivals corridor, the previously HEx-staffed Ticket Desk is now a bank of shared HEX/TfL kiosks and Elizabeth Line / TfL logos are a lot more visible… I’d be very surprised if HEx survives past the end of the 2028 contract period, freeing up some Main paths for better use!
A 10%+ reduction in peak travel is good! Not only for operational costs and infrastructure, but income too. Most off peak passengers (LS&E) pay more than their seasoned companions. In good economic times people flock to the railways. Same trains, same staff- just more punters buying season tickets in advance. Double plus good. However, overcrowding and delays quickly cut in- together demands for more trains and staff. Perhaps to the credit of the railway industry these demands are usually met, but at a cost…
On the “build it and they will come” topic, I must mention the Okehampton line, since I now live down here. Exactly that has happened – a further demonstration that this area is crying out for the “Devon Metro” to become a bit less of a pipe dream. Trouble is, the line is at capacity. Just like the Salisbury line (which counts as Devon Metro out to Axminster).
All very interesting, and useful, but very partial:
Examples:
” … it is entirely possible that the next ORR report in December will contain figures in which the Elizabeth line represents 20% or more of all UK rail travel”: only if you use as the measure journeys rather than pass/km.
The Elizabeth Line has a very large share of rail passenger journeys. But its journeys are, on average, very much shorter than those of, say, Avanti West Coast or LNER. Its share of travel is very much less.
Two other very significant characteristics of the data affect its interpretation and use:
Mere journey counts say nothing about revenue. Money is a much more important measure of any industry’s success than volume. If increases in volume are accompanied by falling prices, the industry is doing more work for less income. That is perhaps adding to the pressure for cost reductions – while overcrowding damages quality. Without revenue data, we can’t say.
The growth in the Elizabeth Line journeys is very largely the result of people switching from the Underground and/or other main line services. Without Underground data, we can’t draw any conclusion on the contribution of Elizabeth Line journeys to the national total, or on the overall growth in railway usage in London.
Caveat Emptor!
Building on James MacKay’s point recent figures for pasenger journeys that include Rail, Metro and Trams show that London Trams carries more passenger journeys than the Lodnon NorthEastern Railway (LNER). This is a very clear example where yield per journey and passenger-km per journey is higher for LNER.
Alternatively
“Half-build it, screw it up & they won’t come”
I’m thinking of a specific example here …
Bristol – Portishead … which is being downgraded to an hourly shuttle rather than a proper half-hourly service.
I’m predicting a small take-up, because such a “service” isn’t really worth having.
We will have to wait & see, I suppose