Skip to main content

Real-time driving data reveals rush hour congestion on London’s road during tube strike

Following the warning by London Underground chiefs of tube strikes until lunchtime Wednesday 8 February, Waze, the real-time crowd-sourced sat nav app, issued data collected during the strike on 9 January to show, for the first time, just how badly London's commuters are affected by strike action. According to Waze, on 9th January, data at the peak-time 8.05am showed that 24 per cent of traffic was bumper to bumper– effectively standstill; at this time on a normal day it is usually around 12 per cent. Th
February 6, 2017 Read time: 2 mins
Following the warning by London Underground chiefs of tube strikes until lunchtime Wednesday 8 February, 6897 Waze, the real-time crowd-sourced sat nav app, issued data collected during the strike on 9 January to show, for the first time, just how badly London's commuters are affected by strike action.

According to Waze, on 9th January, data at the peak-time 8.05am showed that 24 per cent of traffic was bumper to bumper– effectively standstill; at this time on a normal day it is usually around 12 per cent. There was also 34 per cent heavy traffic, so nearly 60 per cent of total traffic at crawling or worse. Trips took on average 1hr 12 minutes longer than usual to get from Uxbridge to East Acton when approaching city from the West.

Waze says the worst routes included Temple to Trafalgar Square (1 mile) which took 40 minutes (34 minutes more than usual). By comparison, this route should take 13 minutes to walk.

On Brecknock Road, Kentish Town, speed was down to 1mph, taking 33 minutes longer than usual to travel from Brecknock Road to Junction Road in North London.

The M4 motorway near Chiswick was jammed, adding 25 minutes to the drive.

Many roads in central London were running slow, adding 20-35 minutes to travel under two miles.

During the evening rush hour period, follow up statistics at 5.30pm showed 25 per cent of London was at a standstill and 35 per cent of the capital was stuck in heavy traffic, travelling at under 5 mph.

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Success of London's Olympic public transport systems
    December 4, 2012
    The Olympic flame has moved on, allowing review of the relative degrees of London’s 2012 transportation success, how it was done and with what lasting effects. Jon Masters reports. This magazine’s international position provides a good vantage point for assessing impressions left by London’s 2012 Olympic Games. On the whole, it has been only praise and congratulations heard since the closing ceremonies of the Olympic Games in August and the Paralympics in September. The events looked great and ran smoothly
  • The UK’s busiest crossing adopts free flow charging
    April 30, 2015
    Colin Sowman looks at the transition to free-flow charging on the Dartford Crossing, a notorious congestion blackspot on the UK motorway network. The Dartford Crossing, where London’s orbital M25 motorway crosses the lower reaches of the River Thames 32km (20 miles) to the east of Central London, has long been a major source of congestion. Now, to alleviate the congestion caused by some 50 million crossings per year, the Highways Agency has adopted a free-flow charging system - but the Crossing’s location a
  • New analysis finds speed cameras may create bad driving behaviour
    October 28, 2015
    Using more than one billion miles of driving behaviour data, collected over three years (2011-2014) and including 8,809 separate journeys in 5,353 vehicles, Wunelli, a LexisNexis company, has revealed the most frequent braking black spots across the UK created by speed cameras, based on motorists braking excessively just before speed cameras to avoid being caught. Eighty per cent of all the UK speed cameras investigated had hard braking activity, with braking increasing six fold on average at these loca
  • Men are more stressed than women when stuck in traffic
    April 23, 2012
    According to new research from TomTom, men's stress levels soar a staggering seven times higher than a woman's when stuck in heavy traffic. Psychologists tested volunteers for the rise in stress chemicals - Immunoglobulin A (IgA - an immune system marker) and alpha-amylase (a stress marker) - in their saliva when caught up in a traffic jam. The levels for women in the study increased by 8.7 per cent while stuck behind the wheel - but for men it shot up by a worrying 60 per cent in the same gridlock scenario