London's stations keep a diary: daily taps at 434 sets of Tube, DLR, Overground and Elizabeth line gates, since 2019

How the counts were read

What is counted

For every station and every day, TfL publishes two numbers: taps in and taps out recorded at its gates. We add them. TfL's files give no definition of the count, so it is a count of taps, not of people, and we do not know which tickets, passes or gatelines it leaves out. A dip therefore never means "nobody came": a station can be exit-only, have its gates open, or be closed.

The days covered

2,826 days, 1 January 2019 to 26 September 2026, for 434 series, one for each set of gates TfL lists by name: Tube, DLR, London Overground and Elizabeth line stations, and some National Rail stations inside TfL's gates. A station with two sets of gates (Liverpool Street, Paddington) has two series, and some two dozen series are outside Greater London (for example Reading, Slough, Watford, Shenfield). TfL publishes the years in overlapping files; where two files carry the same day, the later file is used (66 rows differ, all by less than half a percent). Three Elizabeth line stations renamed in May 2025 and one name with a stray trailing space (Cannon Street) are joined to their earlier series, 1,039 rows labelled "Unknown" are dropped, and a station with no row on a day is drawn empty. A series that begins later (a new station, or one added to TfL's counts) starts later.

A normal day

For a station on a given day we take two medians of the same weekday: the four weeks before and the four weeks after. A normal day is that day's own count held inside the range between the two medians. A day therefore counts as unusual only when it is out of line with both sides, which keeps the first lockdown weekend, a reopening or a new station from looking like a spike. Where one side has no data (the first and last weeks of the file, a long closure), the other side's median is used if it has at least three days. Ratios are shown only where the larger median is at least 300 taps.

Closed or no counts

A day with fewer than 5% of a normal day's taps is drawn dark and called closed or silent. Often that is a closure or exit-only working that TfL announced; where our calendar has no notice we say so.

The same time in 2019

The second view compares each day with the median of the same weekday over the seven weeks around the same date in 2019. It shows lockdown and recovery. It is empty for series that start after 2019.

The calendar of events

We gathered 1,642 dated events on 973 days from TfL notices, the Government's bank-holiday list, venue and organiser pages, Wikipedia lists and football-data.co.uk, each with its links. Strikes, closures, openings and royal events are network-wide; concerts and matches are tied to the nearest station. The page says "coincides with": a date that matches shows when something happened, not what moved the crowd. Premier League home matches are tied to a station only where the counts themselves show the effect (Arsenal, Chelsea, Tottenham, Fulham and West Ham stations); matches played without spectators or with very few between 17 June 2020 and 16 May 2021 are left out. Cup, European and international matches are not in that file, so a spike with no match listed is not proof there was none.

Tube and bus journeys

"All stations together" is the sum of every station's taps, and so rises when a station opens. TfL also publishes network totals of Tube journeys and bus journeys, rounded to the nearest thousand; the Tube total counts zero on Christmas Day.

What the files cannot show

Daily totals carry no hour of the day, no direction of travel and no reason. Everything labelled a cause is a date match, and the rest is blank on purpose. Figures are shown as published: a few days, such as Friday 18 January 2019 and Friday 25 January 2019, look strange in both the station counts and the network totals, and we found no notice explaining either.

Licence

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