London Underground passenger’s head ‘crushed’ and other injuries revealed in TfL safety report

By Joe Talora, Local Democracy Reporter

A Tube passenger’s head was “crushed” earlier this year when they tried to urinate between two carriages of a moving Piccadilly line train, a Transport for London (TfL) safety report has revealed.

The passenger was not killed but did sustain a “serious injury” according to TfL’s quarterly health and safety report, which details some of the other unfortunate ways in which passengers and staff were injured between April and June this year.

While the majority of incidents occurred on the London Underground, several customers suffered injuries using other modes of transport, including one who sustained a serious injury when their TfL Santander hire bike “collapsed” after the front wheel came off.

Across the Tube network there were eight falls from escalators and eight falls from stairs that resulted in serious injury in the first quarter of 2022/23.

On the London Overground, a visually impaired passenger suffered a serious injury after falling from the train to the platform.

According to the report, TfL did not meet its public transport customer safety scorecard measure in the first quarter of the current financial year, with 2.73 injuries per million journeys, compared to the target of 2.58 injuries per million journeys.

In the report, TfL said: “We continue to strive to improve the safety of our public transport network.

“We are embarking on a new strategic approach to working in a risk-based way: building a broader understanding of our safety performance; diagnosing and prioritising our top safety concerns; and enabling transport modes and teams to take local action on these concerns.

“In taking this approach, we have initially prioritised common customer safety concerns including slips, trips and falls; passenger/transport interfaces; and road risk.

“First and foremost, we will focus on improving what is within our control. However, we acknowledge that customer incidents will always be influenced by human behaviour. Our Customer Experience teams across TfL continue to work hard to identify effective strategies to positively impact customer behaviour on our network.”

In total, there were 43 serious injuries across London’s public transport network between April and June this year, as well as one death. Meanwhile, 263 injuries were recorded among TfL’s workforce, including two serious injuries.

The report notes that, while workforce injuries remain below pre-pandemic levels, certain causes of injury including assault on the London Underground, have returned to pre-pandemic levels.

(Picture: Rawpixel)