London Underground Reliability

Personally I'm not in a position to say, but I was just thinking about the claims that I've put in for delayed journeys of 15 minutes or over in the last 4 years, when I've commuted from St James's Park to Turnham Green and back Monday to Friday.

The first year I did this I remember putting in approximately 20 claims: not far off equivalent at £4 a go to a month's free travel. I think in the last year, I may have put in 2. Not very scientific, but it may be indicative how the District Line's improved reliability in recent years. Or not, I don't know!

i think it's also worth considering the increase in passenger journeys - i.e. the number of passengers carried by LU year on year. Bearing this in mind, you see that reliability appears to have improved even under hightened demand - not bad really.

At present it is possible that if nothing is going wrong and your train remains spot on time you can be held for over 15 minutes (say 4 at Earl's Court, 4 at Hammersmith and 9 at Acton Town (often having to be left on the homes) on the District for instance). Now in your mind that's 15 time sat around. Would you put a claim in? And would LU pay it?

I have used the Underground for more years than most here, and I have probably used more Metro systems in various countries around the world than many as well.

I find the London reliability is on a long-term downwards spiral, the pace of which is increasing, and can pick out a number of items :

1. When a problem does occur, it seems to take infinitely longer to correct and restore the service than formerly. My most used system is the DLR. Operation used to be perfect, in recent years it has gone down the drain. I find that more than 10% of the trips I have made have had to be abandoned to another means, most recently leaving the train at my starting point, walking back home, getting the car out, and driving to my destination. I know that any issues on the DLR now take for ever to sort out.

2. Gross over-reaction to individual issues. One person stayed in a Central train being reversed at Bank, and the whole arrangement of tip-outs was changed for the worse, for all time. One manual operation of a DLR train leads to a low-speed sideswipe and new regulations make DLR manual driving effectively unusable nowadays.

3. Concentration on "targets" leads to the reported figures being bent to achieve the target. But complacency then sets in that things are perfect. If the target is negotiated down to say 90%, and achieved, there is a feeling that you don't need to bother any more beyond that figure.

4. Too simplistic targets. The way that running times have been eased out to hit the reliability target is one such. The target should be 99% reliability but at each station, weighted by passenger numbers, not just at the end, AND no increase in running time, AND no easing out of service intervals, etc. This is what other systems measure and achieve. Their targets run to many pages, not just simplistic one-liners.

5. Management nowadays who appear to be less capable and less competent than previously, and get absorbed in all the peripheral frippery like obscure Health & Safety nonsenses, or sending all their staff on diversity training yet again, rather than actually running the system. Management who did not know one end of a train from the other used to be unknown. Nowadays they are an increasing trend.

6. Pretending that line closures at weekends are somehow exempt from service reliability statistics. They prevent passengers travelling, they should be included in the reliability figures.

7. Open fraud of the statistics, pretending there is a Good Service when there is patently not. Because nobody checks up on this.

I can't speak personally for the DLR, but I daresay it has become a victim of it's own success. The more it is added to, the more trains that are added, the more needs to be sorted out after disruption.



I'm sure the family of the person who stayed in the train (at Liverpool Street) won't agree it was an over-reaction. I am sure if we went back to the way things used to be done, and a similar incident occurred, we would be shut down altogether. Do you really suggest we compromise safety to speed your journey up?



The statistics are compiled after we have run the railway, and not before. Nobody I know in Service Control works on a commission. It may keep some management figures happy if we meet targets, but to be honest you will find a few thousand more staff who are there to do their best regardless of targets.



If a train, loaded with customers getting on and off, cannot make the journey from A to B in X minutes anymore, do you really suggest we keep the unrealistic timings and run later and later all of the time. Or should we add time to the timetable, allow reliability to increase, and thus provide people with a journey that takes as long as it we say it will. The current padding for the sub-surface timetables has been explored elsewhere. It won't be as padded after the next review.



Show me one company in this land who isn't subject to H&S nonsense. Trouble is, nonsense as it is, it cannot be ignored or we would all find ourselves in deep trouble.



And without the shutdowns, how will the reliability this thread is centred around be improved?



It is checked. But I do agree with you on this point that we need a new set of criteria to inform people of the state of the service. But there is no "fraud." Management issue the status updates based on the criteria they are meant to use.

Equally, should some incident occur and the controller decides they want to pull a few trains out, the easiest ones to cancel are the ones already sat in sidings.

What do you then do with the punter(s) on board?

You're welcome, and to be honest, if you're like a great many of our customers, I am not the least bit surprised you would argue. They are all experts at running a transport system too.

In a different thread I would ask what you do for a living, and what reputation the company has, and whether you agree or disagree with that. But this is, obviously, is not the place.

Merseyrail had the best timetable reliability out of all TOCs two years in a row, I seem to remember.

I think the increase in running times over the years is questionable. OK, the point about advertised times is valid i.e. is it better to advertise a journey time of 54 minutes which is likely to be achieved as opposed to one of 48 minutes which is more likely not to be achieved.

However, if those lower running times could be achieved before, why can't they now? Over cautious driving brought on by fear of SPADS? Trains tipping out to go into sidings blocking the road? Or less of a willingness to get a move on and stick to the timetable?

I think that LUL is a lot better than what the press, and certain posters on thi site, would have us believe. True, when things go wrong, it affects a lot of people and thus gets a bad press. But many people fail to mention all of the uneventful journeys that they have day in, day out. Diana posted on here about the DLR, saying that its reliablity has taken a nose dive. Harsh, but yes, it has declined a bit due to the extensive upgrade works over the past few years. Havind said that, whenever I have used it, I've never had a problem with it.

I am only critical of LUL when I believe that they have not acted quickly enough to sort out a problem, or announce a "good service" when it so obviously isn't.

But I will say it again - the underground is much better than many give it credit for. Just a shame we can't put an end to PPP, continuous pointless announcements and the endless weekend engineering works.