So Just Who Uses the Underground?

Being of the more liberal persuasion, I have to say that the vast number of surveys and other information gathering undertaken by the tentacle-like arms of the state make me very queasy indeed. I work for the Underground knowing full well that we can track the journeys made by any given Oyster card, but then I suppose I can’t get too hung up on this as a point of principle when I happily carry a location transceiver in my pocket wherever I go which can be tapped into by the security services (otherwise known as a “mobile phone”).

If the state is intent on undertaking these surveys though, and we can’t really stop it, then we may as well use that information for our own interest. Infrequently, London Underground interviews tens of thousands of its customers face-to-face during their journey and records lots of demographic details about them in an exercise imaginatively called the “Underground Users Survey”. The 2008/9 survey involved around 29,000 interviews and, LU staff are informed, will be the last such survey for the foreseeable future. Without wishing to get diverted by another bleeding-heart rant, I’d like to suggest that it be the last ever… please?

Anyway, in the main the survey offers up few surprises. Around 50% of respondents stated that their purpose for travelling that day was “regular work”, with the next largest figure being 11.9% visiting friends or relatives.

Given the price of travelling on the Tube versus bus travel, it is also unsurprising that most respondents were in the “B” or “C1” social group, these being managerial and other ‘white collar’ occupations with some measure of responsibility, though I have to say that I expected these groups to be only just ahead, which is not true according to the UUS – fully 68.2% of the survey’s respondents were in B or C1. Given that “E” is supposed to be “those living at the lowest level of subsistence”, it is amazing that any of them managed to fork out the four quid that a paper single in Zone 1 will cost you, but apparently 3.9% of LU users (extrapolated from the survey) fit this category.

But maybe that is because they weren’t using a paper ticket. Only 29.2% of Tube users do now, you see; the other 70.8% are Oyster converts. The only ticket type which even registers in double figures percentage is the one-day travelcard, beloved of those coming up from the Home Counties for the day, and even that only musters 13.6% of our customers. There was me thinking that the trusty one-dayer was far more popular than that, but then nowadays even infrequent visitors to London have an Oyster, my father being a case in point.

A plurality of these Oyster users pay as they go, the others travel mostly on weekly and monthly season tickets, with only 5.6% of our customers feeling flush enough to fork out for an annual travelcard. I imagine most of that 5.6% come from the north end of the Met, but I digress.

95% of LU users live in the UK, and of them 86.6% live within the M25. The average Tube user is a 25-34 year old white male who is in full time employment who walks to or from the station and who travels in the rush hours five or more times per week.

Could you have guessed that?