We spend three days a year delayed on the Tube
Passengers are spending almost three working days a year delayed on the Tube, shock figures reveal today.
Their journeys are taking 20 hours a year longer than scheduled, up three hours on the previous year.
The total delay experienced by the 1.1 billion who used the Underground last year increased by 6,500 million hours to 39,724 million hours.
Performance on eight of the 11 Tube lines slumped after Transport for London took all maintenance in-house a year ago, with problems worst on the Jubilee, Victoria and District lines.
Cancellations caused by strikes are also at their highest for a decade, with one per cent of all journeys lost due to walk-outs over the axing of 800 station staff posts last Autumn.
Today Tube boss Mike Brown and the Mayor's new transport supremo Isabel Dedring faced a public grilling at City Hall.
Caroline Pidgeon, Lib-Dem chairman of the London Assembly transport committee, dismissed TfL's insistence that Tube delays had been cut by a third over the last eight years.
She told them there had been a "noticeable deterioration" in delays and a 2O per cent rise in "lost customer hours" - the official measure of delayed journeys - in the last financial year.
Ms Pigeon said: "We are concerned, like all Londoners, with the downturn in performance since TfL took charge last year."
Ms Dedring admitted: "Clearly last year wasn't an acceptable level of performance."
Today there was rush-hour chaos on the Bakerloo line when the line was closed between Paddington and Harrow and Wealdstone due to an overnight power surge damaging parts at Queen's Park.
TfL has warned that next month there will be "teething problems" on the Jubilee line when its new signalling is switched on after more than 100 weekend closures. And there will be 22 weekend or holiday closures of the Northern line when its upgrade starts in September.
Lost customer hours is the time lost due to an incident. It is calculated by multiplying the number of passengers by the delay time.
Val Shawcross, Labour's transport spokesman, said: "The latest figures from TfL say there has been a rise in overall delays across the Tube in the last year and every day Londoners experience delays in their journeys. It's not good enough."
