Irene’s Law – Estimating Tube Journey Times
I may have talked of this before.
If you want to get an estimate of how long a journey will take on the London Underground, you count the number of stations and multiply by two, before adding five for every interchange.
That is then an estimate in minutes as to how long a journey will take.
My mother and I used to do quite a few long journeys on the Tube and it may have been something that she developed to keep me interested in the journey. We certainly always played lots of mental arithmetic games all the time. But then she’d been a comptometer operator at Reeve’s in Dalston and that was a job all about memory and mental and manual dexterity.
Incidentally, with the introduction of the Harry Beck map for the Tube, the counting became a lot easier, so was this law something that evolved as people learned to use the new map?
Incidentally, most of our journeys were up and down the Piccadilly line, where because it is long with lots of stations, the rule will work pretty well.
The rule seems to work for the DLR and the Overground too!
The Anonymous Widower 
assuming no signal failures :p
Comment by linyangchen | January 12, 2013 |
It’s only designed for a rough estimate.
Comment by AnonW | January 12, 2013 |
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