Rail passenger usage in Great Britain has continued to recover towards pre-pandemic levels, but the proportion of journeys made using traditional season tickets has collapsed.
A new statistical release from the Office of Rail and Road (ORR), Passenger rail usage January to March 2024, also includes data for the year 1 April 2023 to 31 March 2024, during which a total of 1.61 billion million passenger journeys were made by rail.
This is a 16% increase on the 1.38 billion journeys in the previous year, although the ORR warned that the figures may be overstated because of the impact of split ticketing, where passengers buy more than one ticket for a single journey.
Passenger journeys (millions) in Great Britain from January 1946 to March 2024,
Total passenger revenue was £10.3bn over the year, a 13% increase on the £9.1bn in the previous year, when adjusted for inflation.
The ORR said that in the year before the pandemic (April 2019 to March 2020), there were 1,740 million passenger journeys. ‘Therefore usage in the latest year relative to four years ago (pre-pandemic) was 93%.’
However the proportion of journeys made using season tickets has fallen from 34% in the year to March 2020 to 13% in the most recent year. Seven in eight journeys are now made by ‘ordinary’ ticket types.
The ORR said passenger revenue has been impacted by inflation over the last three years, with the cap for annual regulated fare increases recently set at values below the Retail Price Index (RPI), ‘which means in real terms the costs of tickets has decreased’.
Over the year passenger train kilometres (which does not account for the number of carriages), rose by 8% from 461 million to 496 million passenger train kilometres travelled.
However, passenger vehicle kilometres, which include both the distance covered by locomotives and carriages rose by only 5% from 2.9 billion to 3.0 billion, suggesting that occupancy and potentially overcrowding levels were higher.