Harry Rosehill

Are You One Of 254 People Doing The Tube's Most Pointless Journey Every Day?

Covent Garden to Leicester Square is a tube journey 260 metres in length and takes just four minutes to walk at street level, but six minutes on the Piccadilly line. So why do 254 people a day make the journey on the tube?

This data is available thanks to the Mayor of London's new tool, which lets you see how many people do your commute a day. It's a nifty little time-suck, one that helps you quantify those faces you repeatedly see doing the same journey as you.

With regards to Covent Garden, it's intriguing to note that nearly 100 fewer people — 158 in total — do the journey in the opposite direction daily. Surely the people going in one direction to work must do its reverse on the way home? If anyone has any ideas as to why there's such a large discrepancy, please let us know in the comments below.

We presume that this particular journey is only done by out-of-the-loop tourists or people with accessibility issues — though neither station has disabled access, so this can't account for that many travellers.

At the moment the commuter-counting service only handles data from the Underground, but soon it will include Overground and DLR commutes too. For now though, we have something else puzzling us. When you plot a bizarre commute — we chose Loughton to Hatton Cross — you get this message:

Shouldn't that be 'fewer'?

Shouldn't that say 'fewer than'?