London’s Uneven Transit Recovery
This chart compares average daily passenger journeys on five Transport for London modes with the same TfL reporting period in 2019–20. It normalizes for unequal reporting-period lengths and uses the actual period dates rather than a mislabeled financial-year field in the source file.
What does it show?
Six years after COVID emptied the city, no London mode has fully recovered. The Overground is closest at 97% of its matched pre-pandemic ridership, the runner-up Underground reaches 92%, and the Tram — London’s smallest mode by far — is still stuck near 74%.
Methodology
Passenger journeys in each TfL reporting period are divided by the number of days in that period, then indexed to the same reporting-period number in financial year 2019–20. The chart displays a trailing 13-period mean of those matched-period indexes to reduce calendar and holiday noise. Actual period-beginning and period-ending dates determine the baseline; the source file's financial-year label is not used because one May 2020 row is mislabeled as 2019–20. Periods 1 and 13 vary in length. DLR counts are based on automatic station counts; London Overground and Tram counts use automatic carriage systems, and reliable Overground data begin in October 2010. Mode counts and collection methods are not perfectly interchangeable.