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Comment by rahimnathwani | Hacker News Reader

  Last year, 183 million passengers traveled on the Overground, averaging at 3.5 million people every week.

This sentence makes name doubt any and all other numbers in the article.

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I choose to interpret this in Heraclitean terms, “No man ever steps on the same train twice, for it’s not the same train and he’s not the same man”

Seems about right? It's not 183M unique people, it's 183M people going to and from places, sometimes multiple times in a day most likely.

If 1 person does 200 journeys in a year, that doesn't mean 200 'passengers traveled on the Overground' in that year.

From the point of view of the network, does it matter if it's 200 unique people or the same person 200 times? The capacity used is the same either way.

The statement that there were 183 million passengers in a single year is false.

Whether 'number of passengers' (the metric used in the relevant part of OP) is a useful metric is a separate question.

183M passengers / 52 weeks = 3.52M passengers per week, does it not?

183M passengers would be approximately three times the population of the UK. I assume the correct statistic is that 183M journeys were made in a year, or 3.5M per week. But the number of unique passengers will be a lot lower.

You added the phrase "unique passenger" yourself. The article doesn't talk about that at all. It does use the phrase "passenger journeys" and "passenger numbers". While this sentence could perhaps be slightly better phrase, in context it's pretty obvious that it's talking about the number of journeys. All of this is a classic extremely pedantic and obnoxious cherry-picking.

I was explaining the parent comment, not defending it.

The sentence which was reproduced in that comment does not talk about "passenger journeys".

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