File talk:GBR rail passenegers by year.gif

Scale

The vertical scale starts at 600, which may deceive inadvertent readers. I believe starting at 0 would be more honest, as it would not suggest traffic dropped to nil in the eighties. 82.171.200.197 (talk) 18:57, 19 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

If the scale started at zero the y-axis would be squished by nearly a factor of two. On the scale that the image is used in articles, that would make it harder to read. I didn't find the axis confusing; it never occurred to me that ridership could have dropped to zero. HLHJ (talk) 17:32, 29 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'm afraid I agree with 82 on this. I saw the graph and assumed that people almost completely stopped riding trains in the early 80s. 210.254.117.186 (talk) 07:03, 25 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Fuel Prices

This is an amazing graph. Ridership levels not seen since WWII! Could you make another one that also plots fuel prices? I bet there's a negative correlation. OK, I should do it, in R or Ploticus, since you've provided the raw data. I'll try and get a roundtooit. HLHJ (talk) 17:32, 29 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I can't really be bothered to do the statstical analysis. It's possible, but unlikely to be significant. The current upward trend started in the 1990s, when oil prices were low, and the very high oil price in the 1970s and 1980s did very little to halt the decline. I'm pretty sure it's got more to do with the ownership; since the nationalisation and privatisation of the railways was far more important, I believe they definitely ought to be depicted here. Bastin 13:26, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

I have added numbers for 2 more years to the list,from thre DfT stats site. needs the graph updating though, anyone have the xls file available? otherwise will have to start a new xls,might be interesting to add a few labels to the graph at privatisation , formation of network rail etc Brianthegiant (talk) 15:28, 30 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

wrt to the fuel price correlation, I think plotting against average ticket prices adjusted for inflation could be quite revealing,not sure if that data is readily available though...Brianthegiant (talk) 19:59, 30 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]