Londoners rank Tube lines for cleanliness
METROPOLITAN COMES OUT ON TOP IN LATEST CUSTOMER SURVEY
CLEANLINESS is a pretty important topic at the moment – and it’s especially true of the state of cleanliness of the Tube, with the government keen for Londoners to head back to our offices and workplaces in order to keep the economy moving.
You are unlikely to see significant amounts of litter or other graffiti on the London Underground compared with other metro systems around the world, which is why you probably never considered cleanliness as a factor in deciding whether to make a journey or not.
However, in the midst of a global pandemic, which looks set to continue to rise over the coming months, it is an important question.
Social distancing is hard to do on the Tube, particularly on the narrower deep Tube lines, while virus particles are also invisible and so taking your own precautions, by washing hands regularly, wearing a mask and avoiding touching anything comes into play.
Sometimes, however, people do not wear masks and sometimes you need to grab to pole to stop yourself tumbling over and knocking the rest of the carriage over like skittles.
The London Underground has made a show of stepping up cleanliness with daily hospital-grade disinfectant used on trains and in stations.
A mist-sprayer is used on board the trains to coat them in a longlasting antiviral disinfectant and poles, doors and other “touchpoints” on the Tube are wiped down with disinfectant.
Every quarter, Transport for London asks commuters to rate the cleanliness of the lines they travel on, with results published as part of their customer satisfaction survey.
The last results made available are for Q2, up to September 2019.
By looking at results from October 2018 to September 2019, we can build a picture of which Tube lines are cleaner than others, according to the people who used them on a regular basis.
On average, the lines received a score of 80.5 out of 100 over the course of the year, with the average for each quarter barely changing.
The cleanest line according to commuters was the Metropolitan Line which, despite reaching the furthest flung corners of the Tube map, achieved an average rating of 83.2 out of 100.
In the latest quarter, from July to September 2019, it achieved the highest score all year for any line – 85 out of 100.
The new S-stock style trains which run on the Metropolitan, Circle, District and Hammersmith & City lines appear to have an advantage in the survey, with the second-highest rating for the District line at 82.8 and the Circle and H&C lines combined achieving third place at 81.8.
The Bakerloo line is the London Underground line that users felt was dirtiest, with an average score of 78.5.
In the last quarter it achieved the lowest rating of any train line over the 12-month period, of 77.
Closely behind it, in second-last place, was the Circle line, which had an average score of 78.9 over the year.