Monday 22 May 2017

"The number of passenger journeys has doubled since rail privatisation"

From The Guardian:

The number of train journeys made each year has more than doubled since the late 1990s, according to a new report.

About 1.65bn passenger rail journeys were made in the past 12 months, compared with 801m in 1997. The figures come from analysis by the Rail Delivery Group, which represents train operators and Network Rail, and is based on data from the auditors KPMG.


Sounds impressive, but so what?

The number of passenger journeys on the government-run, state-owned London Underground in 1997-98 was 832 million; the number of passenger journeys on the London Unddergound and the DLR in 2015 was 1.44 billion.

5 comments:

Lola said...

Eh? Don't you mean 1.44 bn?

Mark Wadsworth said...

L, yes😉

Ben F said...

Presumably rail travel has increased as people have been forced to live ever further outside major urban areas due to rentiers.

Mark Wadsworth said...

BF, good point.

Bayard said...

BF, how does that work? If commuters are living further out in order to pay lower rents, who is now living in the houses they used to live in, closer in? If it's more commuters, doesn't that just mean that the ridership has gone up because there are more people commuting?