Archived: Tube strike – Web and open data analytics

As expected, last week saw 4 days of high demand on our website and open data during the Tube strike and in the build up to it, with traffic at 1.67 x normal levels over Wednesday 5th and Thursday 6th August.

The strike started on the evening of Wednesday 5th which was the busiest day, with 1,315,328 visits, though this was considerably lower than the busiest day of last month’s Tube strike, when we hit a record 2,058,618 visits.

With 1.3 Million visits, Wednesday 5th August was the 6th busiest day this calendar year, preceded by January and July strike days.
With 1.3 Million visits, Wednesday 5th August was the 6th busiest day this calendar year, preceded by January and July strike days.

The morning of Friday 7th continued to see an increase in demand, but with numbers starting to drop back to normal levels as the day went on.

Our web and data services performed well throughout the period of high demand, with no reports of issues accessing our services.


Website Activity Summary

  • There were a total of 2,505,451 visits to the website across both the 5thand 6th, with 1.9 million daily unique visitors consuming over 10.2 Million pages. This was 1.67 X more than normal levels but less than the previous strike.
  • Over the strike period the greatest uplift in traffic was on Wednesday which was +11% up on Thursday, and this daily trend mirrored last month’s strike.
  • With 1.3 Million visits, Wednesday 5th August was the 6th busiest day this calendar year, preceded by the January and July strike days.
  • The busiest hour over the strike period was on Wednesday between 4pm-5pm, where 112,000 visits occurred (more than double the 51,000).
The busiest hour over the strike period was on Wednesday between 4pm-5pm, when there were 112,000 visits.
The busiest hour over the strike period was on Wednesday between 4pm-5pm, when there were 112,000 visits.

Headlines

  • Home page  received 1 million visits, down from 1.8 million for the previous strike but it was 530K more than a normal day.
  • Journey planner results  986K visits. The same period on the previous strike saw 1.6 million, but it was 400K more than a normal day.
  • The strike information web page – received 515K visits. Over the same period during the previous strike, the page received 1 million visits.
  • Devices – Overall the device split for the entire period is in accordance with usual site averages: Mobile phone 53%, Desktop 39%.  However, some fluctuations were seen throughout the hours, with Wednesday afternoon dominated by desktop over mobile phones.
  • Open Data –  A total of 35.4 million requests were made from Wednesday up to 9am on Friday.  The requests have been 1.7 times greater than normal levels over the same time frame.
  • Social media – #tubestrike was mentioned a total of 80K times between 5th and 6th August, with the peak occurring on Thursday morning between 8am-10am.
There were over 35m Open Data requests from Wednesday to Friday morning
There were over 35m Open Data requests from Wednesday to Friday morning, almost twice the normal levels over the same time frame.

We thank you for your patience during the strike and appreciate that it was harder to get around than normal. We were doing all we could to make sure that our site and other digital tools were as useful as possible during the disruption.

If you have any feedback on how our services performed during the strike, please leave a comment below as we are always aiming to improve the digital tools we offer to help keep London moving.

1 Comment

  1. I’ve been looking at your Planned Works Calendar to establish which days to avoid travelling if there are no tubes in my area. For the last few days all I see are the months of March to May 2014. I did report this on the tfl alerts Twitter account on 12 August but got no response and today I still cannot see anything later than May 2014. Planned track closures is up to date so I can get the information there but having reported that there was a problem I would have expected some action to be taken, and for someone to have at least tweeted back to me that this would be sorted.

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