Look at this picture from the Tube website. It shows the state of the network in the face of today’s strikes. Lines that are shown in their proper colours have line closures, severe delays or minor delays. Lines greyed out are running just fine.

It looks like a regular map, doesn’t it.

Whether or not the strikers achieve their goals today remains to be seen, but the unions are already warning that 2011 is likely to see us suffer several more strikes.

Sky News is reporting quotes from union boss Bob Crow, who said:

We are moving towards an escalation of the action… come 2011 we will have to consider escalating strikes to more than one day.

Why? Because London Underground wants to reduce its headcount by 800 because more and more of us are using Oyster cards to touch into and out of the network, which naturally need fewer ticket office staff to administer.

I can’t really see the problem. As the BBC reports, London Underground has stated that there will be no compulsory redundancies and staff will be redeployed.

So, unless it gets sorted (and I don’t see how it can, as with ticket office sales declining year on year as more and more of us top up online or by phone) today’s disruption could well be a taste of things to come.