Peak hour tube traffic rises to pre-pandemic levels

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The rush to offices saw traffic jams on the roads and record numbers on the subway on Monday, as public sector workers appeared to be left behind in their homes.

Traffic has returned to pre-pandemic levels in major cities as a large number of large companies have ordered employees to return to their workplaces at the end of the summer vacation.

However, many public sector workers did not return to the morning rush as ministers continued the “gradual” return of civil servants.

The official directive to work from home was rescinded on July 19, but Whitehall sources said departments had only a slight increase in civil servants returning to the office over the summer.

A spokesman said the government was “gradually increasing the number of employees in the workplace” in order to “reduce the risk of transmission of the Covid virus”.

Meanwhile, large companies such as Sainsbury, BP and Vodafone have asked workers to start returning to the office from Monday.

Data from SatNav TomTom showed that peak traffic has returned to the same levels as in 2019 in major cities.

In London, traffic peaked at 61 percent of congestion on Monday morning according to the figures, which was just a shade below 63 percent on the same day in 2019. This is compared to the same day last year where congestion peaked at just 49 percent.

There was a dead end on the main roads into the capital on Monday morning, with bumper-to-bumper cars and trucks on the A102 from Kent to London.

It was a similar story in Birmingham, where traffic peaked at 49 per cent on Monday morning compared to 51 per cent in 2019 and 34 per cent in 2020.

Monday was also the busiest day on the subway since the pandemic broke out in March last year.

Transport for London said that between 7am and 10am there were 831,000 calls at stations, with more than 332,000 on the network during its busiest hours.

Tube use has ranged between 30 and 45 percent during the pandemic, but returned to 64 percent of pre-Covid levels on Monday.

Passengers also reported that the streets in the capital had been crowded for months. One of them, Damien Wilde, shared photos on Twitter of busy streets in the City of London. “The city is certainly busier than I saw this morning,” he said, “but it’s a little dripping, not a flood.”

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