Tourists waste more than £100,000 getting the London Underground between capital’s two closest Tube stops

The two stations are less than a five-minute walk apart

Each week hundreds of tourists are wasting money on taking the Tube between the two closest stops on the London Underground network: Covent Garden and Leicester Square.

According to a Freedom of Information request made by The Telegraph, an average of 862 people make the short journey between the stations on the Piccadilly Line each week.

This equates to almost 45,000 passengers annually.

In reality, the two stops are not only a four-minute walk apart, they are even on the same street, making the journey on foot often quicker and easier than taking the Tube when factoring in getting down to the platform, waiting for a train and resurfacing on street level.

A single pay-as-you-go fare is £2.40, meaning the total amount of money spent on this usually unnecessary Underground trip adds up to around £105,000 per year.

The two platforms are just 275m apart, according to TfL, with a Tube journey time of 37 seconds.

Other Tube stops that are a very short walk apart include Embankment and Charing Cross (a four-minute walk); Mansion House to Cannon Street (three-minute walk); Marylebone to Edgware Road (six-minute walk); and Holborn to Chancery Lane (seven-minute walk).

Earlier this month, Tube drivers began an ongoing strike over noise levels on the London Underground.

The RMT union instructed members to drive at half speeds on 28 sections of track spread across the Jubilee, Central, Northern and Victoria lines from 10 October.

The move is part of an ongoing dispute over the “barrage of noise” created on certain lines.

More than 95 per cent of RMT members voted in favour of industrial action; the union said the primary concern is protecting drivers’ health and well-being.

The Independent’s Simon Calder found that certain sections of track recorded sound levels for passengers of up to 107.7 decibels – roughly corresponding to being within 1,000 feet of a jet aircraft at take-off.