London cable car that cost £60,000,000 has a shockingly low demand at rush hour

London’s Cloud Cable Car, which cost around £60,000,000 to build, only carries an average of four passengers an hour during the early morning commute.

Demand for the gondola service, known as the Dangleway or the IFS Cloud Cable Car, reached an average of four journeys in each direction between 7am and 8am from August 2023 to August 2024.

Transport For London is now looking to cut the cable car’s morning opening times by up to 2 hours from December 1, despite the fact it still attracts tens of thousands of people each week.

Journeys begin at 7am from Monday to Friday, but in the first hour of service, there is an average of just one occupied journey every fifteen minutes — all while a cable car runs every 30 seconds.

This means it reaches only 0.8% of its capacity, as the cable cars can move up to 5,000 people per hour. 

The Dangleway opened in June 2012 with a price tag of £60,000,000, connecting North Greenwich with the Royal Docks in 10 minutes.

It once had an average of 20 commuters in the early morning period, or about one every three minutes, data from 2013 to 2018 shows.

TfL has proposed to shift the Dangleway’s opening time from Monday to Thursday from 7am to 8am, and from 7am to 9am on Friday.

They also want to begin journeys an hour later on Saturday, which currently opens at 8am, while the Sunday service will open unchanged at 9am.

The changes to the timetable will be introduced alongside the planned autumn/winter timetable changes from December 1.

After 8am, the London cable car attracts tens of thousands of people every week.

TfL data from the same period show that weekly passenger numbers ranged from 11410 in the third week of October 2023, to 49014 during the second week of August 2023.

More than 14,000,000 trips have been made on the London cable car since it first opened in 2012.

TfL said: ‘Operating a near empty service is neither environmentally nor financially sustainable and TfL is seeking to review the current opening times alongside our planned changes to the winter timetable.

‘These changes are part of our work to deliver better value for money and ensure customer safety by both matching services to current demand and enabling an additional maintenance window which will further improve the reliability of the service.’

For those who want to travel before 8am between the Greenwich Peninsula and the Royal Docks after December 1, a new shuttle bus service will soon run between the two via the new Silvertown Tunnel, scheduled to open in 2025.

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