Digital news from Transport for London
London has one of the most accessible transport networks in the world, but whilst we have made progress on accessibility, we recognise there is an enormous amount of work still to do.
It’s important that wheelchair users know if a station is step-free, and if it is, whether the lifts are working that day.
Tube station staff who are union members are striking for 24 hours from 18:00 on Sunday 8 January. Services are severely reduced and customers should aim to complete their Tube journeys by 18:00 on Monday.
We have a variety of digital tools available to help you get around during the disruption.
Using our Status updates tool, you can check on the status of all modes of transport. Here you can see the Stations status, with detailed info on all stations experiencing disruptions
**Planned industrial action by drivers on the Circle, Hammersmith & City and Piccadilly lines this week has now been suspended**
Some drivers on the Circle, Hammersmith & City and Piccadilly lines who are RMT union members are planning to strike from the evening of Tuesday 6 December. We will run as many services as possible depending on how many employees are available. However, we advise customers to plan for no Piccadilly line service and a significantly reduced service on the Circle and Hammersmith & City lines until the end of the day on Wednesday 7 December. Customers are advised to complete their journeys on these lines by 19:00 on Tuesday 6 December.
Interchange stations and lines will be much busier than usual. Services on other Tube and rail lines, the bus network and river will run as normal but are expected to be busy as passengers seek alternative routes. Roads in west, central and east London will also be busier than usual.
We have a variety of digital tools available to help you get around during the disruption.
Using our Status updates tool, you can check on the status of all modes of transport. Here you can see the Traffic status with detailed info
As expected, we saw very significant demand for digital services during this morning’s disruption as torrential rain and signal failures affected a number of Tube and Rail lines.
TfL website traffic during the June 23 morning peak, showing a significant increase on yesterday, and the same time last week
I get the honour of the final blog post of 2015, and it’s a pleasing one to be able to write as we look back on what the team in TfL Online have achieved during this year.
We started off the year accomplishing one deployment of new code to the website every two weeks, and that’s increased to the point where we’ve now managed our 57th release to the site in 2015. There are a lot of variables and moving parts that we monitor and co-ordinate simultaneously to deliver a safe, quality assured, zero defect, zero outage deployment to the website every single week.
For more detail, see my posts on Blue/Green deployments and Agile continuous delivery in the cloud (in 3 parts).
While we’ve successfully made these 57 separate releases of code, optimisations, reference data refresh, bug fixes, enhancements and new features to tfl.gov.uk, we’ve managed to do all this seamlessly without a single planned maintenance window, so our customers haven’t experienced any down-time at all while we’ve been making these improvements.
So, here’s how we believe we’ve fed into the ‘Every Journey Matters’ ethos:
It matters that you have access to new features and enhancements on the website quickly – WebCAT, Roads VMS, Unified API, Live Bus Arrivals, Integration of TfL Rail & West Anglia, to name but a few
With the TfL website having now been live for around 18 months, the Analytics team within TfL Online are continuing to see increased levels of traffic arriving on the site and in September we achieved a notable landmark.
With over 100 million pages accessed in the month, September was the first time this year that we’ve surpassed 100m page views without a strike occurring in that month. In comparison with September 2014, we saw a year-on-year increase of 10% as our site received a staggering 23.2 million visits during the month:
September 2015 saw a rise of +10% year-on-year, with the site receiving over 23.2 million visits during the month.
The 7th Over the Air took place on the 25th & 26th of September, 2015 at St. John’s in Hoxton, London and Transport for London were delighted to provide two speakers at the event on Friday 25th.
Over the Air is an annual 2-day event where the mobile developer community come together for ‘Hack Days,’ aimed at driving learning, collaboration and experimentation amongst developers, with software development recognised as a creative discipline. You can read more about the history, ethos and structure of the event on the Over the Air website and follow them on Twitter.
Rikesh Shah, Lead Digital Relationship Manager and Gordon Watson, Chief Technical Architect at Transport for London, were there to provide an overview of Open Data at TfL and to outline our commitment to the provision of free, open data which enables app developers to produce a huge range of travel products.
Transport for London’s Rikesh Shah, Lead Digital Relationship Manager and Gordon Watson, Chief Technical Architect, presented TfL’s Unified API at Over the Air 2015
London Underground trade unions are planning a 24-hour strike on the Tube from 18:30 on Wednesday 5 August. If the strike goes ahead, there will be no Tube service from 18:30 on Wednesday 5 August until Friday 7 August. There will be no Tubes on Thursday 6 August. We are expecting a normal service to run on Friday.
DLR, London Overground, tram and TfL Rail services will be running as normal, though all of these services are expected to be much busier than usual and we have some tools available to help you get around during the disruption.
Using our Status updates tool, you can check on the status of all modes of transport. Here you can see the Traffic status with detailed info
Building on the recent ‘Agile continuous delivery in the cloud’ 4-part series on this blog, this post summarises our approach to agile deployments to tfl.gov.uk.
I was recently in a meeting explaining our release and deployment process to some internal stake-holders and found that sometimes a picture really can say a thousand words, and a visual representation can describe the topic nicely. So this post will be short and sweet, and I’ll let the image below do the talking.
Let’s quickly consider getting products to market; in our context this means new features, enhancements, and updates to the website – doing the right thing, in the right way, over and over, continuously improving tfl.gov.uk.
Our ethos of ‘doing the right thing, in the right way, over and over, continuously improving tfl.gov.uk’ explained
If you have any questions, queries or feedback on this or any of our 4-part series on Agile continuous delivery in the cloud, please do leave a comment below. Thanks.
RMT, Unite and TSSA members are planning 24-hour strike action on the Tube from 18:30 on Wednesday 8 July, and ASLEF drivers are also planning 24-hour strike action on the Tube from 21:30 on Wednesday 8 July.
If the strike goes ahead, there will be no Tube service from late afternoon on Wednesday 8 July and no Tube service at all on Thursday 9 July. DLR, London Overground and TfL Rail staff are not on strike.
TfL Bus Alerts is one of several real-time Twitter feeds that can help you get around during the strike
