Having been living and working in London since 1988, I've developed a love-hate relationship with London's public transport system. For traveling around in Central London, there's usually no better way than public transport - the London Underground ('LU' or the 'Underground' or common known as 'the Tube'), Docklands Light Railway (DLR), buses, River Buses, etc. All these forms of public transport is coordinated and planned at a strategic level by Transport for London (TfL). By far, the most important part of the jigsaw is certainly the London Underground - it carries over 3 million passengers journeys a day, it has over 250 miles of track and serves over 270 stations in and around London.

Click here or on the above map for the full version or here for the full map in PDF format

London has the oldest subterranean railway system in the world and probably one of the largest if not the largest. However, it being oldest and largest does not guarantee being the best. As the result of years, if not decades, of underinvestment and poor management, London Underground is in very poor health - financially and operationally (see Performance indicators). Given the Underground is a vital part of the London's public transport strategy, it is highly alarming. Moreover, since a significant majority of people who live and work in London use the Underground sometime during the day and few people use other forms of public transport exclusively, the operational health of the Underground is doubly important, for if problems arises in there, it will quickly spill out and affect other parts of public transport. However, the Tube is in a poor state. We, the passengers, the traveling public, the customers, are getting a very bad deal. It is when you go to the TfL website for the latest travel update and you are confront by the image below that you understand how bad a deal we are getting...

If the service provided by LU is so bad why don't people use their cars? There are two factors that deter people from driving into Central London for work: the Congestion Charge and the cost of parking. The Congestion Charge is applied daily at a rate of GBP5.00. However it will double if you do not prepay or pay after 10:00PM of the day you enter the Charge Zone and even heavier penalties if you fail to pay before midnight. In a city where any kind of free space is priced at a premium, parking spaces are no different. I've been to a couple of sites (here and here) to find out the cost of renting a parking space in the City of London (the principle financial district of London, where I work) and a typical space costs around GBP45.00 per week or around GBP200.00 per month!! For mere mortals like myself and the Ruler_of_spike, driving into work is simply uneconomical and unrealistic.

Relatively speaking, the traveling public of London is paying more than anyone else in Europe to travel on one of the least efficient network. The level of fares we are asked to pay is beyond reasonable. At the same time, we are getting, what is considered, poor value for money. The history of problems on the London Underground is well documented on many online news sites (This is London, From the Evening Standard and BBC London, to name a couple of better known ones). To add to that, Transport for London actually acknowledges how poor the service offered by London Underground and offers a real time Service Information (which is a list of all the delays and problems in its services) and a real time map on disruptions in the system (a colorful map version instead of text). Additionally, TfL can actually beam the latest disruption it cares to tell you to your cell phone via WAP or SMS.

Personally, I prefer to use the Travel Alerts service, through SMS or e-mail. This is service that alert you of any problems on your chosen route on a daily basis. For each of the route, two messages per day at times of your choice. I have SMS alerts for my regular commute during the weekdays. Lately, I've added a route that covers all the lines of the London Underground system at the peak of the morning and evening rush hours (7:00AM and 6:00PM). The information is sent to me via e-mail every day of the week and I've reproduce them the details in the table below. These are problems that LU is prepare to tell you about and there are less severe problems that are not reported to whatever central control which produce this service.