Tube passengers lose 26 million hours to delays in a year

Passengers on the London Underground lost more than 26 million hours to delays, cancellations and other disruption on the network in the last year, according to new Transport for London board papers published on Wednesday.

The papers reveal passengers suffered 26.4 million “lost customer hours” in the last 12 months, including strike days, as well as delays waiting on platform and in tunnels because of technical failures.

TfL measures time lost by calculating delays that lasted for two minutes or longer, across all of the Tube’s customers.

Lost hours were up from 22.7 million in 2015 and 24.2 million in 2014.

The local government body puts the blame for the increase directly on strike action, saying when industrial relations-related delays were taken out of the mix the number of lost customer hours was 18.4 million.

London’s underground network was hit by a series of strikes in the latter half of last year and the early part of this year, primarily due to employment disputes surrounding the new Night Tube service, but also due to safety concerns isolated to individual parts of the network.