This is a guest post by Jonn Elledge, from his blog The Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything from the June 11, 2025 edition.
Newlywed friend of the newsletter Ed Jefferson is making the most of married life: he’s made a website on which you can explore London’s busiest bus stops, because of course he has.
In fact you can do it in several different ways. First off, here’s a map of the top 100:
Two related things leapt out to me about this. The more obvious of them is that Brixton station is London’s busiest interchange from tube to bus (“bus-head”?) by a distance: the two stops outside the tube station, from whence buses will carry you south, take both first and third place, over 6.7m passengers a year between them. That to me suggests a huge swathe of south London is dependent on being able to jump on the end of the fast and frequent Victoria line to get to work every day.
The other took longer to see. I might have imagined, sight unseen, that the busiest bus stops would be in areas of London poorly served by the tube: that’s where buses would be all the more important, right? Actually, though, the opposite seems to be true. All the busiest stops are where you can interchange to tube, DLR or Elizabeth line services. To find one where that doesn’t apply, you have to get down to 15th place (Eden Street, in Kingston town centre, and even that’s not far from the rail station). Most of the top 100 are in areas where there are decent rail services to change onto.
The other thing you can do with this tool, if you feel the need, is to look at your favourite bus route and find out which of its stops are busiest. Here’s the 38.
I don’t particularly know why you’d want to do this, but if you do knock yourself out. It’s quite fun, if you’re a London bus passenger.
Jonn Elledge is a writer, journalist, Sunday Times bestselling author, and editor of the late and lamented City Metric website.
Would be interesting to see where bus stations at interchanges as a whole come in as they are split amongst many stops (*although Stratford appears to have a number of entries). The risk I see of that map, although I would have thought London Buses would be on top of it, is if any developers want to redevelop an area and go “See, that area is not that busy after all”.
The fact that the busiest stops are at tube/rail stations doesn’t surprise me; London has an integrated network – not only are buses feeders for rail services, the railheads are often local destinations in their own right (like Brixton) and key bus interchange points too.
Away from railheads buses disperse their traffic across more local, lower density stops. It all makes perfect sense.
One of the interesting things I encounter is folk from other parts of the UK bemoaning how London has such great rail services and that they have to put up with buses “instead” – what they don’t seem to appreciate is how much the bus services underpin London’s integrated transport proposition. Sure, some people live near stations, but most don’t, and the bus network is a key local component in driving traffic to the trains so that people don’t get in their cars.
The tube/bus integration is often good and buses as feeders for rail is a good way of working.
I would say however, that bus integration to national rail stations in the London suburbs would merit improvement in places.
It may be that this will come with “Overgroundisation” of London suburban rail and at the moment the commercial incentives are not there for TFL to encourage bus/national rail interchange rather than tube use but tighter integration has to be an advantage for society as a whole.
What this does show is that if this is the data that bus route changes are based on then for some of the lesser used routes it’s well flawed. I’ve checked a few stops in my area where I use the buses regularly and the daily boarding here figure can sometimes be exceeded by counting just two of a day’s buses.
Can I echo Digusted of Tun-Wells, here?
Walthamstow Central has a very busy bus station & of, course, the stops are separated, but & very large percentage of the people will (of course) be entering / exiting the Viccy-line … Um.
What happened to East Croydon station as a pick up point? No values, so the figures for several Croydon routes are wrong.
Ah. They have arrived. At least for the 64.