Lowri Griffiths On Why TfL’s Most Interesting Operational Success Of The Last Decade Has Produced No Headlines, And Why That Should Worry A Working Democracy

For Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.

The Northern Line, which is the tube line I take daily and which I have been complaining about publicly and privately for most of my adult life, has quietly become, over the last three years, substantially better. This is the sort of sentence that is difficult for a columnist to write, because good news about London transport is not news, and because conceding that an institution has improved complicates the relationship a columnist has with that institution. I am nonetheless writing the sentence.

The Specific Improvements

Average peak-time wait times on the Northern Line’s High Barnet branch have, per TfL’s own operational data, fallen from approximately 3.1 minutes in early 2023 to approximately 2.3 minutes in early 2026. Station dwell times at Camden Town and Tottenham Court Road – historic bottlenecks that I have cursed in print on at least four occasions – have fallen by roughly 18 per cent over the same window. Night service has been extended on the Edgware branch. Reliability, measured as the percentage of scheduled kilometres operated, is at a five-year high.

Why This Went Unreported

It went unreported for three reasons. First, the improvements happened in small increments rather than in announceable jumps, and the journalistic ecosystem does not, on balance, reward the reporting of incremental operational competence. Second, the political framing around TfL funding has remained, throughout the period, negative, because the institution’s capital position is genuinely precarious; operational improvements do not erase that. Third, complaint-style transport coverage sells more than competence-style transport coverage.

Why This Should Worry Us

It should worry us, modestly, because a working democracy depends on the capacity to notice and reward institutions when they function. London has a particular version of this problem: we have, as a city, become so well-trained at complaining about our public services that our complaint is, in many cases, ambient background noise rather than diagnostic information. When TfL fails, we complain. When TfL improves, we complain at slightly lower volume. The signal-to-noise ratio, for anyone trying to run a public service in London, is terrible.

The Columnist’s Confession

I will confess that I have, on at least three occasions in the last year, caught myself beginning to draft a column about the Northern Line’s unreliability, looked up the actual data, and quietly closed the document. This is, at a small personal scale, the signal-to-noise problem in action. I have stopped complaining, in print, about something I had been complaining about. The improvement is real. The impulse to complain is habitual. Separating the two is work.

What Should Follow

If you catch yourself about to complain about the Northern Line, check the actual timetable. TfL‘s own data is public. The last time I checked, it was – annoyingly, for my purposes – accurate.

Further: NewsThump. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/