How many persons under trains on the tube, so far in 2013?

There seem to have been two separate person under a train incidents on the London underground today. I know nothing about either of them, but there was also one last Friday - and the cluster of events, well, first it made me feel awful, but then I wondered if there were any stats to help understand how common these events are.

Well yes there are. For example you can see some old-ish data for 1998-2005 here. I couldn't find any more recent data - you could file an FOI request if you like. BUT - TfL's twitter feeds tell the public whenever travel is disrupted. And since they use the standard form of words, it's quite simple to go through and find all occurrences, for example, for 2013 so far. So here they are:

date,lines
2013-01-15,northern
2013-01-28,district+hamandcity
2013-01-29,central
2013-02-03,northern
2013-02-10,piccadilly
2013-02-15,central
2013-02-16,victoria
2013-02-25,circle+district+hamandcity
2013-03-07,bakerloo
2013-03-10,jubilee
2013-03-14,victoria
2013-03-26,victoria
2013-04-05,central
2013-04-09,circle+others
2013-04-09,central

Fifteen in total, so far for 2013. Roughly one per week. This is not the same type of data as the old data I linked above (it includes fatalities and nonfatalities, I expect, whereas the old data is just for the former).

You can do some basic statistical modelling on this: if you assume these are independent events and model them with a Poisson distribution, then you find the probability of seeing two-or-more incidents on one day is 1.04% - which essentially means there's nothing particularly weird about seeing it happen at some point over the past three-and-a-bit months.

Syndicated 2013-04-09 17:36:27 (Updated 2013-04-10 02:19:44) from Dan Stowell