Boris Johnson's £60m cross-Thames cable car keeps having to close because it's too windy

The Emirates Air Line has already closed 20 times this year because of the weather

Boris Johnson taking one of the first rides on the Emirates Air Line last year (Getty Images)

‘Too much wind’ has now joined ‘leaves on the line’, ‘rail-melting sunshine’, ‘snow’, and ‘rain’ as a legitimate excuse for being late to work.

The £60m cross-Thames cable car championed by Boris Johnson has already had to close 20 times in 2015 because of the wind, according to its official Twitter account.

The cable car is officially known as the “Emirates Air Line” because its naming rights were bought by a Gulf state airline

Mayor of London Boris Johnson hailed the £60m project as a “stunning addition to London’s transport network” when he launched it in 2012.

Transport for London even put the new service on the official Tube map and named the stations after its sponsor.

But with the contraption's dire reliability it perhaps isn’t surprising that very few people actually rely on the cable car to get to work.

In October 2013 only four Oyster cards used the car more than five times a week – the number of times needed to trigger a ‘regular commuter’ discount on the fare.

A year later, in October 2014, that figure had fallen to zero, with not one person using the car regularly.

In the words of the cable car itself: