How Does Transport for London Make the Tube Feel Faster?
25th June 2018
By Nathan Harper
Now this blog doesn’t start on the trains themselves. The first section will focus on the stations. We all know that London is a typical capital city, extremely busy both on the human side and on the infrastructure side. One of the main sources of transport in London is provided by the Underground. 270 stations cover 11 lines and they have to deal with up to 5 million passengers every day. That is a very busy network and it and the staff who manage it sometimes struggle to cope, especially with some of the aging and rundown facilities and trains being out of its depth in the modern world. The stations clearly need refurbishing to bring them into modern times but the TfL do not have the time or the resources to do it.
So they came up with a solution. In 2016, Holborn station ran an experiment; they asked everybody to start walking up and down both sides of the single escalators. Now the Holborn escalators are long, 24 metres to be exact, and the staff did not look at the statistics, 6 out of 10 don’t bother to walk the length of it. Due to this and as a result of it, staff thought it would be beneficial to the customer flow if the customers stood on both sides of the escalator.
But it wasn’t all plain sailing. People were still desperate to jog up. These people thought the new practice wouldn’t work and they found it frustrating, and these concerns reverberate around other stations. Therefore other stations have not yet tried this new, radical idea out. But this isn’t the first time that these exact problems have arisen. In Hong Kong and Japan, the practice of trying to get passengers to stand on both sides of the escalator haven’t worked. A behavioural science expert says that TfL are removing the opportunity for customers to choose which side they want to go on. A transport studies expert says customers do not want to think too much about what they are/will be doing during their time in the station. He says that humans only have so much capacity and time to cognitively process what they are doing or what they are being told to do. He says it’s like being on ‘autopilot’. He says that the change may work mathematically but is a psychological failure.
The underground numbers are a big problem. An increase in overcrowding means the system is becoming rife with overload and it can’t cope. TfL are committed to tackling the problem, but they don’t have the time to keep up with the projects being independently undertaken by stations to try to address the problem. One such publicised trial was undertaken by King’s Cross. Green lanes were painted to tell passengers where to stand to help others who were alighting trains. Trains are running more frequently than ever before and the station spaces are often too small for passengers either boarding or alighting.
Big pressure is on the Underground, there are not many other ways to travel around London as quick as the Tube. It was quieter in the early to mid-part of the 20th century; this was due to the implementation of escalators. But to deal with the modern day traffic, more than 1 escalator is needed. The only way to put these in is to majorly reconstruct the stations, but this rarely happens, as it can be expensive and logistically difficult. Jubilee line platforms are more enclosed than other line platforms. People are told where to stand to get in line with one of the doors of the train. But the problem with that is the spaces are overcrowded. The battle to improve capacity handling will continue. The only logistically possible options at the moment are building new stations or building bigger trains which in turn will lead to bigger tunnels needing to be drilled. Or there may need to be a review on some material restrictions of the tube trains. But the confined spaces limit those possibilities so TFL are placed into a difficult situation.
Experiments have been undertaken on the passenger front particularly on the platform to train side. We tend to think about the carrying capacity of the trains but not their capacity to cope with boarding and alighting. Signal alterations and increasing train frequency are two ways to improve capacity and avoid overcrowding. But for those things to happen, better understanding of trains and platforms needs to be learnt. Suggested improvements could be altering the spacing and the design of each set of train doors, opening the train carriage doors, door alterations on the platforms {not the trains}, gap fillers between the train and the platform, announcements to tell customers to spread across the platform, and better signalling.
Experiments to try to lower passenger numbers to avoid overcrowding aren’t new. Back in the early 20th century, stations were struggling to board trains quickly. They aimed to load passengers on within 25 seconds; instead it took 55 secs, costing 10 services an hour. To combat this, Oxford Circus station introduced barriers and pens to hold passengers until passengers on the train had disembarked. It didn’t work. The quieter station of Knightsbridge tried ‘organised queuing’. It worked but didn’t at busier stations. Then they turned to the make-up and design of the carriages. An experiment was carried out in which doors were placed in the centre of each carriage. These doors later became automated. Some underground stations are curved meaning there became a gap between the train and the platform. That’s where the saying comes from.
The first tube stations escalators were specifically designed to push people off at a diagonal angle. The design still encouraged the ‘stand on the right’ practice.
There was a study of passenger routes on the Tube. Commuters sometimes opted for more complicated routes with multiple and unnecessary changes which resulted in longer journeys. Maybe this is because they want to avoid a particular station {e.g. stairs} at a particular time e.g. rush hour.
Conclusion
I think this a really interesting subject. It majorly highlights the inadequacies of some stations and trains on the London Underground network. Regardless of whether they have enough funds or not, these facilities should still be up to date with modern times. But it’s one thing to carry out experiments and later improvements to facilities, which I think is a great idea, but you still need the public’s approval and testing has to go perfectly. It’s a tricky situation, with a balancing act required between what the passengers want and what’s best for the stations, passengers, facilities and the trains. Despite this though, the stations and trains really need to be brought into modern times and whoever budges first will give in in this battle of trains v stations v facilities v customers. It’ll be very interesting and intriguing to see what happens.