London’s newest commuter route/tourist attraction opened to
the public on 28 June this year. I was lucky enough to travel on it on its
very first day of opening, and very lovely
it is too. I was also lucky enough to use it a few times during the Olympics
and enjoyed every second.
The cable car has, however, been billed by
Boris and TfL as a "vital new river crossing for east London", not a tourist attraction,
and indeed this was the justification for using public money to assist in its
contruction.
Of course, as the adage goes, the proof of the pudding is in
the eating – so how have people been using the cable car, or dangleway as it’s
affectionately known, and for what purpose? Well, the good folks at The Scoop have posted about this, most recently looking at hourly numbers of users by day, which tell their own story. The chart below is based on the data obtained by The Scoop under the Freedom of Information Act and published earlier this week.
The blue lines represent use at
the weekend, the others weekday use. This vital river crossing is clearly being
used as a tourist attraction, with peak numbers on Saturday and Sunday afternoon.
There are small numbers
using it in the weekday mornings too (masked by the vastly larger numbers using at
weekends on the chart), but how do those numbers compare with those using the
tube/DLR to make the equivalent journey? I crunched the figures obtained by The Scoop to look at this in more detail.
These “average use” figures show that on the cable car user
numbers build slowly during the morning peak and jump dramatically after 10am.
The tube/DLR, by contrast, has a spike in the number of users between 09:00 and 09:59, presumably commuters. Numbers then drop to a low level, climbing slowly but steadily
through the rest of the day. But only during the 07:00-07:59 period do numbers using the tube/DLR match or exceed those using the cable car. Cable car user
numbers peak in the mid morning-early afternoon and then decline towards the
end of operations. This clearly suggests that the cable car appeals as a
tourist attraction during the week as well as at weekends (albeit at a lower overall level than seen on the weekends).
The data obtained by The Scoop also, by sheer good fortune,
allow us an insight into what happens to tube/DLR use when the cable car is
closed. My hypothesis is that when the cable car is closed, urgent journeys transfer to the equivalent routes on the tube/DLR whereas non-urgent or leisure journeys are either not made or are delayed.
So what happened on 16 October? The first chart shown above
shows that there was a clear spike in use on 16 October after the cable car reopened – a
spike which is not seen on any of the other weekdays at this time - that we can
reasonably assume to be due to the closure and subsequent reopening.
Looking at hourly user figures for 16 October for the
tube/DLR while the cable car was closed and comparing them to average figures
for the same hours of the day during the rest of that week tells its own
story. Tube/DLR journeys did indeed increase during the hours that the cable car was closed.
Number of users of tube/DLR and cable car on Tuesday 16 October, compared with average use on the other four weekdays in that week, 15-19 October 2012
|
|
Hour of use
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
10
|
11
|
12
|
13
|
14
|
15
|
16
|
17
|
18
|
19
|
|
|
Tube/DLR
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Average weekday
|
8.25
|
8.5
|
11.25
|
12.25
|
12
|
19.75
|
20
|
20.5
|
16.25
|
17.25
|
|
Tues 16th
|
9
|
20
|
28
|
16
|
24
|
21
|
28
|
27
|
17
|
11
|
|
Cable car journeys
replaced by tube/DLR
|
0.75
|
11.5
|
16.75
|
3.75
|
12
|
1.25
|
8
|
6.5
|
0.75
|
-6.25
|
|
Cable car
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Average weekday
|
267.25
|
365.5
|
381
|
357.25
|
393.75
|
367.25
|
323.75
|
260.75
|
174.5
|
158
|
|
Tues 16th
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
204
|
558
|
257
|
204
|
|
Cable car journeys
delayed
|
-119.75
|
297.25
|
82.5
|
46
|
||||||
For example, between 12:00 and 12:59 on 16 October, 28 people used the
tube/DLR to make a journey equivalent to that covered by the cable car,
compared with an average of 11.25 people making that same journey on the other days of the
week. This picture continues even after the cable car reopens between 1600 and
1659. I estimate that over the period 10:00-15:59 46 journeys that would have
been made on the cable car were instead made by tube/DLR. Contrast that with
over 300 journeys that were delayed until after the cable car reopened. This
suggests that almost 7 times as many weekday off-peak journeys on the cable car are
potentially for leisure rather than non-leisure purposes.
Some might call this a triumph – an attraction that wasn’t
asked for, built in a location no one thinks is sensible or necessary is
attracting leisure users on wet weekdays in October? All well and good except
that we’ve paid for it out of our taxes and are getting charged through the
nose to use it! Time to bring the dangleway in from the cold and start
including it in Oyster PAYG caps and travelcards. Then we might start to
believe it’s a mode of public transport as well as a tourist attraction.
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