“To grow from November to February is a good sign. It shows that demand is still growing,” he said. “[The metro line] has been a big success and has clearly changed people’s travel behaviours. More people from the north-west are using it.”

Apartment building developments above Crows Nest and Waterloo stations have yet to be completed, which Hounsell said helped explain why the number of people filing through gates there was below forecast.

Hounsell said completion next year of the metro line between Sydenham and Bankstown was likely to boost patronage on the M1 line. “It will massively increase the number of people using metro because it provides options to get to more places,” he said.

The growth had also occurred during a period when industrial action by rail workers had disrupted Sydney’s double-deck rail network. Despite the metro line operating as normal, Hounsell said the disruption to the heavy rail suburban network had a flow-on effect because commuters became uncomfortable about using public transport.

Sydney Metro said in a statement that it had been seeing patronage close to, if not better than, the forecast figures, which demonstrated that services were “very much performing as expected”.

“The forecast data for 2024 assumes that patronage will have fully ramped up and stabilised at a steady state, which is expected to happen gradually over the first few years of operation. The introduction of services to Bankstown will further increase patronage,” it said.

Despite the strong patronage, the agency said there were no plans to increase frequency of services, noting that how they aligned with passenger demand and usage was “continuously monitored”.

In total, more than 36 million metro trips have been taken on the M1 line since the city section opened in August. The morning peak is typically slightly busier than the evening because start times for school and work in offices coincide in the mornings while passenger demand is more spread out in the evenings.

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During the morning peak, metro services are busiest between Crows Nest and Victoria Cross. The latest data is of people entering and exiting train stations along the line, and not total boardings which include people switching between metro trains and Sydney Trains’ double-deck services.

A trip is counted as a metro train journey if a commuter taps on at the gates of a heavy rail station and later taps off at a metro station gate.

Sydney Metro’s 2024 forecasts for patronage were developed in November 2023, ahead of the opening of the city section last year.