The plan, starting next month, is to open the cablecar later than now.
On weekdays that means an 8am start rather than 7am.
On Fridays that means a 9am start rather than 7am.
On Saturdays that means a 9am start rather than 8am.
On Sundays nothing's changing - still a 9am start.
🚡 🚡 🚡
Now
From December
cut
Mon-Thu
07:00 to 22:00
08:00 to 22:00
1 hour
Friday
07:00 to 22:00
09:00 to 22:00
2 hours
Saturday
08:00 to 22:00
09:00 to 22:00
1 hour
Sunday
09:00 to 22:00
09:00 to 22:00
-
You might be surprised to discover that the Dangleway opens that early but it always has. This was because it was sold to Londoners as a public transport option tourists would also enjoy, hence an expectation it'd be used for the morning commute. This was patently ridiculous, but the gondolas have rolled out every weekday at 7am just in case. Now, finally, TfL have quantified quite what a waste of resources that's been.
They've done this in a consultation, because apparently it requires a consultation to change the cablecar's opening hours. This was launched on Friday, then almost immediately taken down for some reason, then republished earlier this week. It doesn't say much but it does say they intend to make the change on 1st December so it's pretty much a done deal.
That's not just tumbleweed, that's the very definition of transporting air across the Thames. That's 100 cabins crossing the river of which 96 are empty. That's a 15 minute gap between anybody turning up. That's more staff on duty than passengers. And this is happening every weekday before 8am, wasting public money on a service barely anyone's using and nobody actually needs. The real question isn't "Should we start later?", the real question is "Why on earth have we been starting so early?"
And this is not new!🚡
We have data to show that Dangleway usage has been minimal first thing in the morning for years. Darryl Chamberlain (of the Greenwich Wire) used to submit an FoI request every year asking for hourly passenger numbers in the second week of October. Afternoon and weekend figures were always fairly healthy. But between 7am and 8am they've always been anything but.
Passenger numbers between 7am and 8am (second week of October)
Before 8am the cablecar only twice exceeded 30 passengers an hour, that's one passenger every two minutes. The average was 20 passengers an hour, i.e. one every three minutes. For comparison the 2023 figure from the latest consultation would have been 8 passengers an hour - four one way and four the other. That's lower than all the 2010s data, suggesting early morning numbers are even worse now than they used to be, but they've always been negligible.
Cyclists are getting a 40% cut to their free time🚡
One of the best unsung Dangleway bargains is this.
At present this means you can turn up with a bike at any time from 07:00 to 09:30 and you'll be waved aboard for nothing. Bargain! But from December this perk will only work between 08:00 and 09:30 which is an entire hour less, or in percentage terms a 40% decrease. To be fair if only four people are turning up before 8am then barely any cyclists are going to be inconvenienced, but the impact may be more serious on Fridays when the free period will shrink to 09:00-09:30, a mere half hour!
Also, as the consultation's FAQ remind us, there will soon be a special bus for cyclists operating through the Silvertown Tunnel.
This'll mean no cyclist arriving before 8am need miss out, they'll be able to board a bus nearby and get across the river anyway, initially for free. But the lack of customers on the Dangleway does suggest the early start on the shuttle bus could be a complete white elephant too. Why start the bus at 6.30am when all the evidence suggests cross-river cyclists are barely present before 8am?
But is an 8am start still too early?🚡
Changing the cablecar's start time to 8am makes sense if barely anyone's travelling before that. But is anyone travelling during the next hour, i.e. 8am to 9am, or is running the cablecar then a waste of money too? Sadly the consultation doesn't include data for any other hourly time period and it would take too long to put in an FoI request to find out. So I did the next best thing and stood beside the Dangleway one morning this week and counted the passengers.
The great thing about doing a Dangleway passenger survey is that you can do it all from one side of the river because everyone either comes in or goes out. Also the cabins have glass windows so if anyone's doing a round trip for sightseeing reasons you can count them too. So I arrived on the north bank at 8am and started counting, and continued counting until 9.10am to make sure I'd included everyone who boarded on the south side before nine. It proved an exercise in tumbleweed.
In the first ten minutes there were only two passengers, both heading south, and the rest of the time the cabins churned round carrying nobody. Things perked up a bit around quarter past eight, if you call eight passengers perking up, then dropped back over the next half hour. All the early danglers appeared to be off to work, some in offices and some on building sites, including a tiny handful aiming for City Hall. Just seven of the passengers had bikes. No tourists were apparent before 8.45am. Travelling south towards Greenwich was more popular than heading north, that is until just before nine o'clock when the tide turned.
Dangleway passengers between 8am and 9am
🚡 Total heading north: 15
🚡 Total heading south: 24
🚡 Total passengers in one hour: 39
These figures are much better than the four passengers an hour TfL claim are travelling before 8am, but they're still paltry. The 15 passengers heading north are essentially one minibus-ful, and the 24 heading south the equivalent of a single single decker. By my calculations every cabin crossed the Thames six times during the hour I was there, just short of 200 crossings altogether, but only 27 of those had anybody inside. Having stood and watched the minutes tick by I can only imagine how bored the staff must be.
Just start the day at 9am and be done with it🚡
You can tell 9am is when the cablecar really kicks into action because it's when they turn the music on and target tourists. As Hey Jude reverberated around the Royal Docks the first family group turned up with the intent of crossing and finally gave the ticket office staff something to do. A third of the passengers I surveyed turned up in the last ten minutes and could easily have waited until 9am to start their trip. TfL must know what a waste opening early is.
It's great that a few people have managed to incorporate the Dangleway into their morning commute, but it really is a few people and it wouldn't hurt if the big beast wasn't switched on until 9am. Despite all pretences it is essentially a £6-a-time tourist attraction and should be treated as such, rather than keeping it running this early to save face.
As I said nine years ago, "TfL could easily close the cablecar before nine in the morning and inconvenience almost nobody, but they never will because to do so would be to admit that the cablecar is not a useful commuting option, which was the main reason given for building it in the first place." We're halfway there.
