There are now 20% more tube trains in the morning rush hour. Hooray!
Time is money, but how much money exactly? For Londoners, the price of an extra twenty seconds is a whopping £900m.
That’s how much TfL have spent on upgrading the Victoria line to run more frequently than ever before, with nippy new trains and (probably?) reliable signalling. Rush hour services have now increased from 30 trains per hour, arriving every two minutes, to 36 trains per hour, arriving every 100 seconds.
It might seem like a minor change, but the 20% boost in capacity should help alleviate the Morning Victoria Clusterfuck that south London commuters know all too well…
In any case, it seems like a sound investment to us. With 700,000 passengers a day, those extra 20-second savings add up to six whole months of London life freed up per day. And of course, that’s less time spent contemplating the germ content of the average Victoria Line handrail, which we’re still thinking about.
Predictably, the Jubilee Line is next on TfL’s campaign of va-va-voomification with a 30% capacity upgrade planned for 2020, followed by Ye Olde District/Circle/Hammersmith/Metropolitan Network, Est. 1863, which is due to reach a giddy 32 trains per hour in 2022. And of course, Crossrail will be running through central London in just 18 months time. All in all, good news for impatient people (although, ironically, you are of course going to have to wait a while longer for all this.)
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