LONDON — Walking, riding bicycles and standing in overcrowded double-decker buses, hundreds of thousands of London commuters struggled to reach work Thursday during a 24-hour strike that closed most of the capital’s subway system, according to a wire service.
By 7 a.m. — a usually quiet, pre-rush hour time on London’s public transport — people were standing shoulder-to-shoulder on the famous red buses, or waited in growing lines at bus stops. Some unlucky commuters who tried to board already packed buses were held back by harassed-looking conductors.
Sidewalks were crowded with people walking to work, and many more cyclists than normal weaved in and out of traffic in a bid to beat the strike. In a city where the streets are often packed with slow-moving cars, buses and trucks, bad traffic jams were expected all day.
To make matters worse, Britain was still recovering from a one-day strike by 750,000 municipal employees on Wednesday that had closed schools, libraries and recreation centers in their first national walkout in more than two decades. The strike, over a demand for higher wages, also had affected social workers, garbage collectors, school cafeteria workers and librarians.
Although that job action passed unnoticed by many Britons, especially in London, where nearly everything, including museums and tourist attractions, remained open, Thursday’s subway strike was a different matter.
“I got up an hour early to get into work before rush hour starts, and it is already pandemonium,” said Mark Thompson, 32, on the Number 91 bus from north London to King’s Cross station. “It is going to be a very long day.”
The obvious strategy of beating the rush was a citywide failure.
The very first main line trains of the day were already full, and on a north London line passengers could not squeeze onto some of the trains.
The strike immobilizing most of the London Underground, which carries 3 million passengers a day, began at 8 p.m. Wednesday. In addition to the chaos Thursday morning, the strike was to disable the city during evening rush hour, too.
Members of the Rail Maritime and Transport union walked out after talks with management aimed at averting the action failed Tuesday.
An official with the London Underground said Thursday morning that a skeleton service was still running, but only about 7 percent of the trains. Although RMT workers had voted 8-1 in favor of the strike, about a third of workers had not returned their ballot papers, said the official, on condition of anonymity.
“Clearly there are some workers who did not want to strike,” she said. She said about 39 trains were running Thursday morning, compared to 504 on a typical day.
The union says London Underground management has failed to arrange full consultation with union safety representatives over the planned partial privatization of the subway system, known as the Tube.