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

  • Roads revolution adds 900 miles of extra capacity
    August 27, 2014
    Road users in the UK will see around 900 extra lane miles of road capacity added to England’s strategic highway network by 2021, a third more than was provided in the previous decade. The boost is thanks to a huge US£39.7 billion investment, the biggest since the 1970s, which will see annual funding for enhancements to motorways and major A roads triple over the next six years. Investment includes more than US$15 billion on maintenance, US$10 billion of which will be spent on resurfacing 3,000 miles of t
  • Congestion costs US trucking industry US$9.2 billion in 2013
    May 1, 2014
    Congestion on US Interstate highways added over US $9.2 billion in operational costs to the trucking industry in 2013, according to research released by the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI). ATRI, the trucking industry’s not-for-profit research institute, utilised motor carrier financial data along with billions of anonymous truck GPS data points to calculate congestion delays and costs on each mile of Interstate roadway. Delay totalled over 141 million hours of lost productivity, which equ
  • Developing new detection and monitoring technologies
    November 21, 2012
    Established detection and monitoring technologies continue to evolve, but is it time to challenge their supremacy and take a serious look at less conventional ITS? Andy Graham considers the options with Jason Barnes. For ITS system providers, the most potentially lucrative markets over the next few years are going to be the BRIC (Brazil Russia India and China) group of countries, all of which are building many miles of new roads, applying tolling to existing ones (8,000km in China alone) and implementing w
  • USDoT responds to death crash 'crisis' on roads 
    November 4, 2021
    'First-ever' national safety-first roadway strategy comes as 20,160 die in first half of 2021