F/on from FOI-2997 If you could provide a list of the incidents and their locations and dates I would be very grateful.

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Our ref: FOI-4394-1718/GH

Thank you for your refined request received by Transport for London (TfL) on 5 January 2018 asking for information about congestion of people on London Underground.

Your request has been considered under the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and our information access policy. I can confirm that we do hold the information you require.

The Tube supports nearly 5 million customer journeys per day. In 2016/17 a total of 1.38 billion passenger journeys were made and our transport network carried more passengers than ever before.

Our staff carefully manage the flows of customers at our stations to ensure a safe travel environment and minimum inconvenience for customers. Sometimes this requires stations being closed in order to prevent congestion. There are a number of initiatives underway that assist in reducing crowding. These include the introduction of world class timetables on the Victoria and Northern lines, and soon on the Jubilee line, increasing the number of trains per hour, which in turn reduces the number of people left at stations waiting for trains. Other initiatives include the modernisation and expansion of several of our stations including Victoria, Tottenham Court Road, Bank and Bond Street, and the introduction of services on the Elizabeth line from 2019.

Please find attached the data held on the incidents of congestion. Incidents are centrally recorded only when a full station closure occurs i.e. trains are non-stopping and the station is closed to incoming customers. Please note that these incidents would have been of varying duration.

Each station has its own Congestion Control & Emergency Plan, and there is a series of actions to manage congestion. These business as usual crowd control measures include temporarily closing staircases to create one-way systems, temporarily closing entrances and closing ticket barriers. While these measures are in place, trains continue to stop at the station so that passengers can alight and ease congestion at platform level. These incidents are generally only recorded in log books at each station. Therefore to report on these incidents we would need to manually check the log books at every station for each day to see whether any station control measures had been implemented. This would take an excessive amount of time and would exceed the cost limit described in our previous response.

We continue to keep the situation at all of our busy stations under review, including looking at what further measures may be required in the future to manage demand for Tube services.

If this is not the information you are looking for, or if you are unable to access it for some reason, please do not hesitate to contact me.

If you are not satisfied with this response please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.

Yours sincerely

Graham Hurt

FOI Case Officer

FOI Case Management Team

General Counsel

Transport for London

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