ORR Origin-Destination Matrix 2021-22

[fandroid]

Interesting that Stratford to Highbury & Islington is so well placed. Some of us with long memories recall that the whole North London line was once a sad neglected leftover. In London, people are doing orbital journeys in huge numbers. That's something that would have been thought daft in the dark old days, and is still artificially restrained by lack of infrastructure in several places.

 

[RailAleFan]

Hi all,

I've made a top 100 search tool for this dataset combined with current period timetable and operator info by location making it easy to discover for example the #1 non-direct flow from a given station along with national, regional and operator specific queries...

Labs - Flow Statistics

Estimations (symmetrical) of total passenger journeys made between station pairs for the financial year 2022-2023 as published by the Office of Road and Rail

railalefan.co.uk

- i've removed the circular flows e.g. PAD <> PAD post import (see possible reason notes e.g. contactless incompletion in post #16)

- in the raw data the total estimated journeys for the period April 2021 to March 2022 is 894,299,987

- for comparison with more recent periods see ORR notes regarding passenger usage here

 

[PGAT]

Hi all,

I've made a top 100 search tool for this dataset combined with current period timetable and operator info by location making it easy to discover for example the #1 non-direct flow from a given station along with national, regional and operator specific queries...

Labs - Flow Statistics

Estimations (symmetrical) of total passenger journeys made between station pairs for the financial year 2022-2023 as published by the Office of Road and Rail

railalefan.co.uk

- i've removed the circular flows e.g. PAD <> PAD post import (see possible reason notes e.g. contactless incompletion in post #16)

- in the raw data the total estimated journeys for the period April 2021 to March 2022 is 894,299,987

- for comparison with more recent periods see ORR notes regarding passenger usage here

Thanks for this!

 

[FenMan]

Hi all,

I've made a top 100 search tool for this dataset combined with current period timetable and operator info by location making it easy to discover for example the #1 non-direct flow from a given station along with national, regional and operator specific queries...

Labs - Flow Statistics

Estimations (symmetrical) of total passenger journeys made between station pairs for the financial year 2022-2023 as published by the Office of Road and Rail

railalefan.co.uk

- i've removed the circular flows e.g. PAD <> PAD post import (see possible reason notes e.g. contactless incompletion in post #16)

- in the raw data the total estimated journeys for the period April 2021 to March 2022 is 894,299,987

- for comparison with more recent periods see ORR notes regarding passenger usage here

Thanks from me too!

One thing this data has revealed to me is just how popular a particular anomalously-priced ticket can be.

Without providing too many details, it's a "good value" ticket to a suburban station of no particular note more than 100 miles away from the origin, which can only be reached by changing trains en route at a rather larger and more attractive destination.

I'll put it this way, this "good value" ticket is in the top 10 most popular journeys from the origin station - well over 10,000 sold in a year. Remarkable.

I reckon many who buy this ticket will have little idea where the destination actually is, let alone having any intention of going there! Facebook, etc have a lot to answer for.

 

[The exile]

Also I am surprised that Bournemouth to most North London Line stations has only single digit usage, e.g. 5 to Brondesbury, 1 to Hampstead Heath, 2 to Gospel Oak. I didn't make such journeys in 2021-2022 but much more than that in 2022-2023, and I hope to see how the number changed afterwards.

Since you can reach the areas around each of these 3 NLL stations by tube direct from Waterloo, it is surely not that surprising.

 

[DDB]

Hi all,

I've made a top 100 search tool for this dataset combined with current period timetable and operator info by location making it easy to discover for example the #1 non-direct flow from a given station along with national, regional and operator specific queries...

Labs - Flow Statistics

Estimations (symmetrical) of total passenger journeys made between station pairs for the financial year 2022-2023 as published by the Office of Road and Rail

railalefan.co.uk

- i've removed the circular flows e.g. PAD <> PAD post import (see possible reason notes e.g. contactless incompletion in post #16)

- in the raw data the total estimated journeys for the period April 2021 to March 2022 is 894,299,987

- for comparison with more recent periods see ORR notes regarding passenger usage here

I also just wanted to add my thanks for this. It has made the data much more accessible and it is very interesting data which will help settle a lot of debates on here when it is proposed services are split or rearranged about whether large numbers of people really are making end to end journeys.

 

[deltic]

Hi all,

I've made a top 100 search tool for this dataset combined with current period timetable and operator info by location making it easy to discover for example the #1 non-direct flow from a given station along with national, regional and operator specific queries...

Labs - Flow Statistics

Estimations (symmetrical) of total passenger journeys made between station pairs for the financial year 2022-2023 as published by the Office of Road and Rail

railalefan.co.uk

- i've removed the circular flows e.g. PAD <> PAD post import (see possible reason notes e.g. contactless incompletion in post #16)

- in the raw data the total estimated journeys for the period April 2021 to March 2022 is 894,299,987

- for comparison with more recent periods see ORR notes regarding passenger usage here

Me to - very helpful

 

[richardderby]

I think I might have done something slightly wrong in downloading the data from Gaelan's Google Drive as Barking – West Ham isn't first for me, but London King's Cross – Sheffield (188,481) is the highest one I can see without direct services, probably via Doncaster.

2. Windsor & Eton Central – London Paddington (127,331)
3. Nottingham – London King's Cross (124,855) (via Grantham)
4. London Charing Cross – East Croydon (106,571)
5. London Euston – Derby (68,389) (presumably via Tamworth, maybe a small number via Stoke or Crewe)
6. London Paddington – Henley-on-Thames (65,040)
7. London Waterloo – East Croydon (55,465)
8. London Cannon Street – Chatham (53,433) (I may have missed some more common journeys which now need a change at London Bridge)
9. Highbury & Islington – Romford (47,189)
10. London Bridge – Woking (45,781)

The busiest without a direct service with origin and destination outside London as far as I can find is Henley-on-Thames – Reading (39,484), followed by Oxford – Swindon. (32,819); outside the southeast, I think it's Sheffield – Manchester Airport (25,525). If you want to exclude that for having had a direct service recently, it's Penzance – St. Ives (24,834), unless you're massively bothered by the one direct train per day.

Somehow there's 127,183 journeys from London Paddington to... London Paddington and 111,405 for Finsbury Park, similar for Luton Airport Parkway and others. All of the stations I've noticed that for so far are within the contactless PAYG area. There's also cases like 40,896 for Bedford – London King's Cross, so probably an error in deciding which journeys are to / from which London terminal.

wow, so that's about a quarter of a million avoiding East Midlands Trains and their worn out, often overcrowded 5 car Meridians. judging by the fares from Euston (around 50% cheaper) i find that hardly surprising!

 

[A S Leib]

wow, so that's about a quarter of a million avoiding East Midlands Trains and their worn out, often overcrowded 5 car Meridians. judging by the fares from Euston (around 50% cheaper) i find that hardly surprising!

The problem is that whilst I believe that some people might find London Bridge better than Waterloo from Woking, most people would likely get the Jubilee line between the two instead of changing at Waterloo East (unless a Woking – London Terminals season ticket is the same price as to Waterloo and cheaper than a travelcard / PAYG?). I suspect that it's more likely to do with how journeys to each London terminal's counted, with Paddington – Henley-on-Thames and Highbury & Islington – Romford possibly being the most popular journeys with no direct services.

 

[DDB]

wow, so that's about a quarter of a million avoiding East Midlands Trains and their worn out, often overcrowded 5 car Meridians. judging by the fares from Euston (around 50% cheaper) i find that hardly surprising!

I think this has already been suggested to actually be a fault in the data. I belive in general any flow that involves a group of stations. (in this case London Terminals) has had the journeys allocated to each member of the group according to a formula which may or may not be out of date.

A simpler example is the Dorchester stations group. Anyone travelling to/from Dorchester either North or East will use the relevant station as they are 5 mins walk apart but the data shows lots of journeys from the "wrong" station.

 

[g22]

I also want to add my thanks to the OP Gaelan for highlighting this and RailAleFan for the search tool and to Office of Rail and Road for making this available.

 

[A S Leib]

Somebody's made maps displaying how popular flows to each station are. Some look slightly odd due to presuming all passengers go the same route (e.g. a gap on the Crewe–Shrewsbury line for Watford Junction's map when I'd guess that a fair proportion of passengers go there instead of via Birmingham).

 

[pokemonsuper9]

Somebody's made maps displaying how popular flows to each station are. Some look slightly odd due to presuming all passengers go the same route (e.g. a gap on the Crewe–Shrewsbury line for Watford Junction's map when I'd guess that a fair proportion of passengers go there instead of via Birmingham).

It (probably) uses the most direct route, regardless of services, which does lead to some interesting gaps (such as WCML routes from Central Manchester all via Stoke, even to Birmingham).
It is cool being able to see a line that I know I indirectly caused to exist.

 

[deltic]

Somebody's made maps displaying how popular flows to each station are. Some look slightly odd due to presuming all passengers go the same route (e.g. a gap on the Crewe–Shrewsbury line for Watford Junction's map when I'd guess that a fair proportion of passengers go there instead of via Birmingham).

Thanks for posting this - could spend hours looking at these - shame its taken so long to put them in the public domain.

 

[jayah]

What's the busiest passenger flow between 2 stations that do not have a direct train?

The interesting thing from this data is the incredible effect of adding just one change into a journey. Most 'city' stations, ranked by journeys look like a pub quiz list of stations that are served directly taking the top 20 plus places. Even having good connections doesn't really fix things.

Shrewsbury - Manchester 25k
Shrewsbury - Liverpool 2k

Gatwick Airport - Bedford 5.5k
Gatwick Airport - Milton Keynes 1.1k

Hereford - Cardiff Central 20.5k
Hereford - Bristol Temple Meads 3.1k

Bridgend - Bristol Parkway 2.9k
Bridgend - Bristol Temple Meads 4.6k (the ratio from Birmingham is 3.2x as many to Bristol Temple Meads)

Manchester Airport - Stoke 3.9k
Manchester Airport - Barrow 4.1k

Brighton - Luton Airport Parkway 7.1k (excludes the Airport itself)
Brighton - Stansted Airport 1.3k

 

[43074]

The interesting thing from this data is the incredible effect of adding just one change into a journey. Most 'city' stations, ranked by journeys look like a pub quiz list of stations that are served directly taking the top 20 plus places. Even having good connections doesn't really fix things.

Shrewsbury - Manchester 25k
Shrewsbury - Liverpool 2k

Gatwick Airport - Bedford 5.5k
Gatwick Airport - Milton Keynes 1.1k

Hereford - Cardiff Central 20.5k
Hereford - Bristol Temple Meads 3.1k

Bridgend - Bristol Parkway 2.9k
Bridgend - Bristol Temple Meads 4.6k (the ratio from Birmingham is 3.2x as many to Bristol Temple Meads)

Manchester Airport - Stoke 3.9k
Manchester Airport - Barrow 4.1k

Brighton - Luton Airport Parkway 7.1k (excludes the Airport itself)
Brighton - Stansted Airport 1.3k

It's interesting looking at Leicester and Nottingham. Every now and then someone suggests there should be direct Leicester to Manchester services, usually met with cries of "but you can change at Sheffield!". Both cities are a similar distance from Manchester and have a similar population size, multiple universities etc etc:

Nottingham to Manchester 55k
Leicester to Manchester 16k
(compare also with Shrewsbury above, Leicester is 4x the size...)

It's the same to Leeds:

Nottingham to Leeds 60k
(Derby to Leeds 32k)
Leicester to Leeds 6k

In short, direct trains make a difference!

 

[deltic]

It's interesting looking at Leicester and Nottingham. Every now and then someone suggests there should be direct Leicester to Manchester services, usually met with cries of "but you can change at Sheffield!". Both cities are a similar distance from Manchester and have a similar population size, multiple universities etc etc:

Nottingham to Manchester 55k
Leicester to Manchester 16k
(compare also with Shrewsbury above, Leicester is 4x the size...)

It's the same to Leeds:

Nottingham to Leeds 60k
(Derby to Leeds 32k)
Leicester to Leeds 6k

In short, direct trains make a difference!

They certainly do and the railways have known this for a long time, hence back in the day the large number of through carriages to all sorts of destinations provided on long distance services. When fixed formations became more standard, the approach was to provide a few trains a day to maintain direct links between major cities. Privatisation and the failure of Operation Princess saw the decimation of stations served by cross country services and their concentration on just a few core locations. For example, its taken many years for Liverpool to have through services to Scotland restored and I seem to recall there was a time when there were no through services from Manchester to Scotland. Places like Liverpool, Bradford and Hull have lost direct services to many locations.

Given the large growth in leisure traffic and the decline in business travel post-COVID maybe there is an argument for restoring some of these through services although the present franchised/contracted out nature of services on a regional basis makes it very difficult.

 

[The exile]

Bridgend - Bristol Parkway 2.9k
Bridgend - Bristol Temple Meads 4.6k (the ratio from Birmingham is 3.2x as many to Bristol Temple Meads)

Of course, in this particular case there’ll also be plenty of people for whom either will do / neither is particularly convenient, so the one with the through service will be the default.

 

[jayah]

Of course, in this particular case there’ll also be plenty of people for whom either will do / neither is particularly convenient, so the one with the through service will be the default.

You can get between them in ten minutes. While there are people with business around Bristol Parkway, they aren't really substitutes, and the numbers travelling would not be in that proportion if both had direct trains.

 

[snookertam]

There are 103 stations with no journeys to any London Terminal recorded. As well as the usual suspects such as Teeside Airport, Reddish South and Altnabreac, it also includes a lot of Glasgow suburban stations, which seems to be a bug in the data, as I find it hard to believe that of the 103k people who used e.g. Hillington West, not a single one of them was travelling to London.

There are 21 stations with just one journey to London recorded

Alness, Ardgay, Bank Hall, Barrhill, Braystones, Causeland, Cynghordy, Fearn, Golf Street, Hoscar, Kirkhill, Lairg, Llanbedr, Mosspark, Mount Vernon, Penychain, Pilning, Rannoch, St Budeaux Ferry Road, Thorntonhall, Thorpe Culvert.

The stations with more than 2000 different journeys made were
Manchester Piccadilly (2377), Birmingham New Street (2274), Leeds (2224), Manchester Victoria (2182), Liverpool Lime Street (2178), Edinburgh Waverley (2168), Liverpool Central (2151), York (2137), Newcastle (2125), Sheffield (2120), Manchester Oxford Road (2105), Bristol Temple Meads (2089), Nottingham (2079), Glasgow Central (2041), Birmingham Moor Street (2037), Oxford (2001)

Re: the Glasgow suburban stations to London, this isn’t in the least bit surprising as most people travelling from the Glasgow area to London, would buy a ticket from Glasgow to London, and if connecting by train would likely buy a separate ticket for that train to/from Central or Queen Street. This is probably the most cost effective and logical way of doing it.

Argyle Street is probably the starkest case of this – 386,577 tickets were from there, yet just 24 were to destinations outwith Scotland (and most of these were to places like Newcastle, Windermere, or Lancaster which are relatively close to the border). None were to London, or indeed anywhere further south than Birmingham. I suppose this is a little more plausible as it's so close to Glasgow Central that longer distance passengers would just book to there instead (and those travelling from Glasgow would just walk to Central).

With a figure of 99.99%, Argyle Street had the highest percentage of its tickets being to destinations within the region/nation (I excluded a few very quiet stations where no tickets at all were sold to other regions; mostly these were in the Highlands). Other Glasgow suburban stations dominate this list including Ashfield (99.98%), Bridgeton (99.96%), and Anderston (99.96%). As mentioned, Merseyrail also has some stations with similar patterns, like Bootle Oriel Road: out of over quarter of a million tickets, just 130 were to places beyond the North West, and just four Merseyrail stations (Liverpool Central, Southport, Blundellsands & Crosby, Hunts Cross) accounted for half of all tickets. The flipside of this is Kings Sutton - technically this is in Northamptonshire and so the East Midlands, but most passengers were travelling to the South East (Banbury/Oxford), West Midlands (mostly Warwick or Birmingham), or to a lesser extent London. Just 38 out of its 22,766 tickets were to/from other stations in the East Midlands, with Northampton the main destination.

If you understand the passenger flows and the role of the Glasgow suburban network then you’d understand why no tickets from Argyle Street to anywhere outside Scotland are sold. The only reason anyone would join or alight at Argyle Street is if someone planned on shopping, going to work, or going for drinks in that part of Glasgow City centre, and was travelling to/from another location on the Argyle Line or the west side of the North Electric routes. There’s next to no residential spaces that would call that station local, and even if they did, as you pointed out, Glasgow Central is just down the street, Glasgow Queen Street and High Street stations are almost as close by. I’d say the few cases of people buying tickets to Windermere etc are the ones most likely to be inaccuracies.

Likewise, Anderston is walking distance to Glasgow Central, whereas Bridgeton and Ashfield are one stop from the city centre. In Glasgow people tend to see their local stop as a link to the city centre, rather than being part of a wider network. I’d guess that most other large cities with large suburban networks are similar.

I’ve known people who had no idea it was even possible to buy a ticket to go from stations in the Cathcart Circle to Edinburgh.

 

[The exile]

You can get between them in ten minutes. While there are people with business around Bristol Parkway, they aren't really substitutes, and the numbers travelling would not be in that proportion if both had direct trains.

Maybe I didn’t make it clear. There will be people who just need to be picked up “in Bristol” or intend to take a taxi on to somewhere in a fairly large area where it doesn’t make much difference which of the two you start from. This doesn’t of course apply to anything like the same extent to your other examples.

 

[A S Leib]

You can get between them in ten minutes. While there are people with business around Bristol Parkway, they aren't really substitutes, and the numbers travelling would not be in that proportion if both had direct trains.

Couldn't some of it also be people buying advance tickets to / from Parkway and walk-up tickets (or even PAYG, now) between Parkway and Temple Meads?

 

[jayah]

Maybe I didn’t make it clear. There will be people who just need to be picked up “in Bristol” or intend to take a taxi on to somewhere in a fairly large area where it doesn’t make much difference which of the two you start from. This doesn’t of course apply to anything like the same extent to your other examples.

The comparison here was Birmingham to Bristol and the ratio of journeys being split between the two Bristol stations.

Anyone getting picked up anywhere in North Bristol would find that quicker and easier from Bristol Parkway, as well as being a shorter train journey.

The lack of a direct train to Bristol Temple Meads is having a large effect on the Bridgend market.

 

[Paul Kelly]

Edit: I missed that there is a new thread for this: https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/orr-origin-destination-matrix-2022-23.263200/

Apologies if I've missed it quoted elsewhere, but the latest guidance from ORR shows they have applied an adjustment for split ticketing to the 2022-23 data and indeed says that RDG have developed their own split ticketing algorithm based on LENNON data. I'm curious about how that works!
https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/media/1904/station-usage-steer-methodology-report.pdf

3.32 Split ticketing has been a known limitation of rail industry data for many years. The complexity of the fares system in GB rail has led to opportunities where a combination of shorter-distance tickets can be combined to provide a cheaper fare than the advertised price for the end-to-end journe

3.33 This is known within the industry as ‘split ticketing’ and, whilst there have been such opportunities for a number of years, prevalence increased towards the end of 2019/20. The split tickets are shown within LENNON as the individual journey components, and therefore within the base data indicate a greater number of shorter-distance journeys. This will suggest higher footfall at the intermediate stations where the tickets are ‘split’. For the first time in 2022/23, an adjustment to the ODM has been developed to account for split ticketin

3.34 The Rail Delivery Group (RDG) has developed an algorithm that can identify split ticketing in LENNON data and agreed to share the outputs and data extracts for use in developing this adjustment. The RDG data was used to estimate annual split journeys by flow in 2022/23 and therefore indicate the number of journeys on each flow that should be removed from the ODM due to split ticketin

3.35 The data also enabled the ‘correct’ journey to be reinstated after this removal. For example, for a journey on flow A<>C with a split at B, the first step is to remove the A<>B and B<>C legs, and the second step is to replace with a journey on A<>C. This is because it is only the split at B that is creating artificial demand – LENNON has recorded 2 journeys (1 on each of A<>B and B<>C) but this was 1 journey on A<>

3.36 The split ticketing adjustment results in a net reduction of journeys in the ODM (due to the removal of artificial demand generated by split ticketing) of 18.6m journeys (37.2m entries & exits) which equates to a c. 1.5% reduction in total entries and exits across the ODM.

 

[Killingworth]

Via Doncaster's often not much slower and quite a bit cheaper (especially with Grand Central / Hull Trains), and the same via Grantham from Nottingham.

But that's not the way the majority from Sheffield travel to London. (Leaving aside that quite a few of us use Chesterfield.)

 

[splashoutradio]

There's a number of excellent websites and projects now using the ODM dataset, but just in case another is needed (), I've added the latest data to the www.railwaydata.co.uk/odm website, where various reports can be made, including yearly comparisons between 2018-2023.

 

[Northern158170]

There's a number of excellent websites and projects now using the ODM dataset, but just in case another is needed (), I've added the latest data to the www.railwaydata.co.uk/odm website, where various reports can be made, including yearly comparisons between 2018-2023.

The dataset is excellent. However, some newer stations cannot be accessed directly by the passenger flows section, but can be via the station section itself (Horden, Kirkstall Forge, Apperley Bridge and Low Moor are my examples)