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

  • Road space utilisation improves travel times, reduces costs
    February 1, 2012
    For major road works schemes, necessary lane closures are timed to minimise congestion, most frequently at night and on weekends when traffic is at its lightest. As a result, rigid timetables are used in planning, programming and implementing work. In the UK, to calculate the expected traffic demand through roads works, historic profiles from the loop-based MIDAS (Motorway Incident Detection Automatic Signalling) system were used. These provided a valuable indicator of anticipated traffic behaviour but were
  • Putting the brakes on smart motorways
    February 28, 2022
    The UK government has announced that development of its all-lane running highways is going to be put on hold for another few years to assess safety data. Adam Hill finds out why
  • Houston hurricane prompts TranStar warning
    April 1, 2019
    Hurricane Harvey led to the creation of the Houston TranStar flood warning app
  • euroFOT study demonstrates benefits of driver assistance systems
    June 26, 2012
    Today, the euroFOT consortium published the findings of a four-year study focused on the impact of driver assistance systems in the Europe. The €22 million (US$27.5 million) European Field Operational Test (euroFOT) project which began in June 2008 and involved 28 companies and organisations, was led by Aria Etemad from Ford’s European Research Centre in Aachen, Germany. The study looked at existing technologies and their potential to both enhance safety and reduce environmental impact. euroFOT also reveale