Every day after a short 20-minute stroll taking in the local sights of a giant Asda, a petrol station and a Nando’s, I board the London Underground at Colliers Wood, before emerging huffing and wheezing atop the 136 steps at Goodge Street 35 minutes later. According to Transport for London (TfL), 151 other Londoners in a city-wide population of some eight million share in that particular daily experience.
How unusual is that? Well, it’s more common than people commuting from Upminster to Heathrow Terminal 5, as you might expect, but it’s still comparatively rare as the top ten journeys demonstrate.
From | To | No of people |
1. Bank / Monument | Waterloo | 23,323 |
2. Waterloo | Bank / Monument | 19,843 |
3. Victoria | Oxford Circus | 11,697 |
4. Waterloo | Canary Wharf | 10,284 |
5. Canary Wharf | Waterloo | 9,990 |
6. Oxford Circus | Victoria | 9,576 |
7. Liverpool St | Kings Cross St Pancras | 9,475 |
8.Stratford | Canary Wharf | 8,255 |
9. Canning Town | Stratford | 8,227 |
10. Kings Cross St Pancras | Victoria | 7,126 |
Is your journey common as muck, or unique to you? Well, TfL has developed a tool to let you find out. Just go to your-commute.london.gov.uk, enter your starting station and your endpoint, and the site will tell you how many faces on the Tube should look familiar to you.
Apparently, TfL compiled the data by examining average travel data across the Tube network in November 2017, making adjustments for closures and industrial action.
So why is TfL making this data public? “This is a fun tool created to help Londoners think about how their data can be used to improve our capital,” London’s chief digital officer Theo Blackwell explained. “We hope that by surprising Tube passengers with the number of people who do their exact journey every day, we will encourage people to help shape our new approach to technologies of the future. It’s all part of our work that puts digital innovation at the heart of making London a better city.”
To be honest, the surprising thing about the numbers for me is how few of the 152 Londoners who share my daily grind from Colliers Wood to Goodge Street seem to make it back. TfL says it’s fewer than ten people – so either I’ve been very lucky, or there are some gremlins in the system.
Nonetheless, it’s a fun tool to play around with, so dig in and see how well-trodden your daily route to work is.
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