A London Assembly report has looked at tube delays for 2010/11 and worked out passengers spent an unnecessary 6.5 million hours travelling on the network. What else could you have done with that time?
Presumably using the data that used to be available to everyone on TfL's website, the Transport Committee found a 20% increase in delays recently, with the biggest culprits being the Victoria, District, Metropolitan and - no surprise here - the Jubilee lines.
Industrial action accounted for about half of the delays (cheers, guys) but, and this is where we don't know if we should be worried or blithely write last year off as a blip, the tube has been improving each year since upgrades began in 2003/2004, with the exception of last year's dip. We'll pick this choice sentence out of the report's executive summary:
the period between August 2010 and January 2011 saw the longest sustained period of poor reliability since the start of the upgrades
Oops.
TfL say they've "learned lessons" from the almighty Jubilee line balls-up and have plans in place to improve matters. The London Assembly say that in 2011/2012 they want to see lines matching their best performance year since upgrades began. We shall see...
Photo by FJC37 from the Londonist Flickr pool