Why London Underground stopped people walking up the escalators
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I've been in UK many times, and being able to effectively walk up all escalators due to the diligence of the people always impressed me. Coming from a country that doesn't have such respect for basic rules, it feels just wrong despite the gain of average efficiency.
People walking have to keep some space between them, and people also walk/climb stairs at different rates. You can only climb the escalator as fast as the person in front of you, and them the person in front of them. It only takes one slow-poke to hold everyone up.
So people not walking might in fact, on average, increase the throughput vs. all-walking.
That assumes that everyone is capable of walking on an escalator. I, for one, am not. I get vertigo, and am on the brink of a panic attack for the entire duration of my ride. I can barely step on one, let alone walk, particularly when going down.
I do look for an elevator whenever possible, but there are times when one is not available and I have to work myself up to the task. I have to grip the handrail with both hands, and focus on a point on the steps themselves.
I'm sure there other issues that people have - like being able to walk but not climb - that would prevent them from being able to walk. Therefore, it's best to have the option to stand on one side and walk on the other.
Anyway, I'm guessing the answer to your question is: control. You know that you can at any moment tilt your head forward and lose the vertigo sensation. So you are safe and in control and you also feel safe and in control. That makes the experience enjoyable (I assume).
OTOH I love stepping down an escalator 2-by-2, the brain has to calculate how far the foot should jump given the size of the steps and the pace of the landscape, it's fun.
Visual inspection of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fNDgwp_w_s suggests that when two people enter the escalator side by side, the walker exits the escalator at about the same time as the stander is 75% of the way up it (~=133% of the rate of speed). The density of the walking side is surprisingly high to me (maybe accounted for by the short span relative to the monsters I'm used to on WMATA MetroRail), about 60% of the standing side. This leaves 80% throughput for the walking side of short-span split escalators relative to the standing side, only a ten percent overall cut in capacity for this one escalator in Singapore.
That number will probably go down the taller the escalator is, as the walking side slows down due to personal stamina (adjusted walking speed and percent willing to walk), and bunching, a phenomena we're familiar with from busses.
It might also allow you to start a short conversation with the traveler above you, eg. "I have vertigo which makes going down escalators tough"... would that sort of distraction be helpful or not?
Exceptions: poetry, music, jokes and other cultural expressions.
Before then I was always chasing my own tail with 'what do they mean?', which is pointless, if they meant something they could say that particular thing outright and get it over with.
This is symmetrical, so, I don't want to 'wash my hands', I would like to use the toilet. When I'm hungry I say so and when I say 'no problem' it really means that so we can move on.
All in all this made life a lot easier, though from time to time it can make for comedy.
As I say, I try to avoid the escalator, if nothing other than to be courteous. However, sometimes I use it out of courtesy as well, such as when I'm with a group of friends, and don't want them to have to wait on me. When I do need to use it, I've developed a pretty good system of keeping the anxiety in check - sort of a deer in the headlights approach, where my gaze is focused on my shoes.
So good luck getting people to do that.
That's no problem for an athletic 30-year-old like me - but it'd probably be difficult for a tired elderly fat person wearing high heels while carrying a child and a suitcase.
I guess I can call an elevator in London a lift...
Yes I put a U in honor.
The speed that you are expected to ascend as a "walker" is high. I know, because I used to climb every day, and I would get disapproving noises/looks if I failed to climb with sufficient speed.
A lot are steep and scary, the worst of them is a 1.5 minute long ride:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQwERv8V6JA&feature=youtu.be...
The first time you ride that you are not going to want to walk down it, let alone be forced to walk down it!
Other replies to your comment also show a lack of understanding that there are often no stairs because it's an underground station. Like deep underground so they didn't bother with stairs.
Since the government is willing to FORCE people to things they don't want effectively breaking a COMMON RULE OF THE TRADITION they shouldn't bother being reasonable.
Perhaps they should also set optimal speeds and force people to comply. Wait, that's what they're doing!
Angel Station's escalator can be done in seven seconds — if you have skis: https://youtu.be/fFqQOlYE4EE?t=25
(I used to use it regularly late at night, when the up escalator was usually empty. Sprinting up, two steps at a time, is quite satisfying.)
Also, the ambient temperature and other atmospheric properties are far from ideal for physical exertion in many of these stations.
That doesn't matter so much if you're generally fit and completely healthy. If, however, you have something like asthma, the environment potentially exacerbates the condition even if you're otherwise in good shape for that kind of exercise.
One thing to take into mind, you have to set your rules based on the lowest common denominator or the most disruptive. When people don't have any expectation of being punished for not respecting others or the rules they are in the most disruptive category. Hence they will stand on the left regardless and as such you need to adjust for it. Face it, there are just too many rude or don't care people in this world from a generation or two of being told its not your fault or others will adjust to you.
* Outside peak hours: stand on the right part of the escalator and leave the left part for walking.
* At peak hours: stand in both sides of the escalator.
* At extremely peak hours: If most of the flux goes upwards, stop the downward escalator and walk on it (this is actually illegal)
PS: Acoyte station, A subway line, Buenos Aires.
The internet makes life better. Again.
You take away something that some people wanted to give the rest something nobody asked for.
Anecdote: During rush hour, I was almost at the bottom of an escalator at Oxford Circus station, when a women a little ahead of me fell over, and the man in front of me fell over her. I pressed the emergency stop button, and blocked the way for people coming down until someone had helped the woman stand.
Less than a minute later, a London Underground employee finds me on the platform and thanks me for acting quickly¹. He says the crowding at the top of the escalator — in a minute! — means the station has been partially closed "exit and interchange only". (Probably only for five minutes.)
I think this result is a due to it only being tried on one of three up escalators. By the assumption that there are 6 lanes, devoting 1/3 to walkers and 2/3 to standers can lead to greater efficiency if that more closely matches the actual preference distribution. By maintaining choice, and matching the available options to those desired by passengers one can optimize the results for both those who prefer speed and those who prefer not expending energy.
I usually camp at the bottom, waiting for the crowd to disperse, then grab the powerup and use it efficiently.
* According to current knowledge.
Some people, the goal is to expend the least energy. For some, it's to accomplish more things faster. This is true in realms outside of escalators, and in fact in all of life.
You do realize this means that you probably get to the top slower than if you just stood on it, right? :)
Just like you may choose not to grab Double Damage if you don't have an appropriate weapon you are most effective with while having DD, but could decide to defend it for a teammate who is coming a long who is appropriately equipped.
At least I have chicken.
According to the article, the problem they had was that on really long escalators, not many people bothered to run, so the capacity was indeed too low.
The solution is simple: cattle prods for people on the left who run too slow. That'll get them up it faster. Seriously, what a bunch of lazy people. I can understand elderly or obese people not running up the escalator (which is why the right needs to be reserved for them), but the rest of you have no excuse.
Here in Washington, DC, for instance, our Metro system has several escalators that are 200 feet or more in length (http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/23038/what-are-the-...). The longest one, in the station in suburban Wheaton, Maryland, is 230 feet long and climbs 115 feet vertically over that length. (Photo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheaton_station#/media/File:Wh...) Long, steep escalators like that make a challenging climb even for the young and fit.
Granted, the individual spans are less than that, but if you can rest on a landing between spans, you can also just... well, ride the step you're on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central–Mid-Levels_escalator_a...
Long, steep escalators like that make a challenging
climb even for the young and fit.
The normal situation with escalators on the tube is that the flow of people onto the escalators is less than that which would cause a queue to build up.
That is not surprising, as the system has been designed so that there is sufficient capacity on the escalators to handle the flow of people.
However, at one or two stations during rush hour the situation can be different.
Sometimes the flow of people can be such that a queue builds up.
It is debatable, though, what would happen then if people walked on both sides of the escalator.
The queue would not move twice as fast, as people will not walk on side by side.
Another problem is that people with luggage take more than one person's width.
Standing two abreast may jam up the escalator, so that people are unable to get off easily at the top.
Yes, the problem is the people crowding right to stand still. People that won't even make the effort to climb the escalator at all should just stay home with fast-food delivery and watch their butts grow. The rest of us have places to go and enjoy making a little effort to get there.
Instead of walk-left, stand right it should be walk right, run left, and stand at home where serious people don't have to waste time queueing behind you.
There is no reason for anyone to run up an escalator unless they are in a hurry, and it's only going to save them a couple seconds. Then you are still going to get stuck behind a crowd of people walking up a regular stairs or hallway, where people aren't expected to crowd to the right for you to run past. Why should it be different on escalators?
In theory possibly but I've never seen that. It's rare for standing passengers to be one per step. In the real world it's probably 3 per 4 steps standing, 1 per 4 steps walking. I think what we need are coordinated escalator classes taught in a similar manner to ballet, for greater utilisation.
The standers are creating the rate-limiting bottleneck, basically. I suspect that even if the mix is 50:50 walkers:standers, the walkers will spread apart more. You probably need something like 60:40 or 70:30 to fill the walking side to better capacity. Or some priority line for walkers, long before the escalator, so that walkers can aggregate together from the get-go. Let all the walkers rush by, and then the remaining standers can use both sides.
Example:
Suppose 300 people get off the same train, and face a long escalator. Nobody wants to walk, except for five people. Also, everyone respects the "stand on one side" rule.
Now suppose those five people are mixed randomly into the crowd. They have to wait for all these walkers to board the escalator and end up spaced far apart from each other. Perhaps by the time the second walker gets on the escalator, the first one is already at the top.
Now suppose that the walkers are given priority access, through a separate queue. (Which they should: I mean everyone is already reserving half the escalator for these guys, yet not letting them get to it, right?) So now, these five people can just march straight to the escalator as a group, get on it, and march on up, remaining closely packed. After that, no more walkers are left in the fast queue. Moreover, everyone else can see that. So, then remaining people start using the full escalator.
Problem (mostly) solved, all-round.
This is almost the behavior I seen in Japanese train stations. There isn't a formal separation of queues, but just about. People separate themselves into walkers or standers based on their intent and start to line up accordingly before reaching the escalator.
Is this new? When I visited Hong Kong in 2011, you had to stand on the right and walk on the left. In fact, this was one of the things that caused a great deal of anger towards "mainlanders" – tourists from mainland China – who ignored such social conventions.
EDIT: I just googled it and apparently the "no walking on the escalators" rule in Hong Kong is only a few months old:
http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/education-community/artic...
The rule is a sad attempt to make this situation the status quo. When this isn't happening, people walk on the escalators all the time. London is silly to take an example from this.
While obviously not everyone will be able to walk, we should be encouraging more people to do so and certainly not slowing down those who are able and willing just to make more room for the lazy. I find it hard to imagine that the percentage of people who are physically incapable rather than just unwilling to climb an escalator is large enough to cause meaningful congestion.
Isn't this exactly the point, though? At peak times, there are significant crowds around the entrances to escalators at busy Underground stations, and those crowds hold everyone up regardless of their preference for standing or walking. The idea here is to avoid the crowds forming a bottleneck in the first place, or at least to reduce the delay if there are still too many people to sustain full throughput.
I wonder if they have tried to simply explain to commuters why it makes sense to stand on both sides. Treating people like intelligent and responsible adults often works much better than treating them like intellectually disabled children.
They hinted at in the article about if they were to expand the trial, they would be able to sell the public on the benefits of it, presumably through a larger campaign.
If the escalators are at capacity then the right thing is to build more. But that costs money, so instead we get "cheats" like this.
In the article they mention that on these long escalators, the majority of people would only stand anyway, so their time on the escalator is the same. For the minority that do walk up, even though their time on the escalator is slightly longer, because the bottleneck was significantly reduced they're not waiting before the escalator for as long which makes up for it.
If you're increasing throughput, it means you're getting more people out of the station in the same amount of time, so their journey is quicker.
> If the escalators are at capacity then the right thing is to build more.
But in the article they demonstrate with diagrams that they're not at capacity because everyone is leaving the right sigh free for people to walk, but no one actually does.
> But that costs money, so instead we get "cheats" like this.
I'm not familiar with the geography of London's stations but I would imagine building more escslators is hard. Lack of space and added disruption while they build them.
This is a great optimisation. I would imagine the cost-to-benefit ration would be heavily in favour of utilising the existing escalators capacity more efficiently, rather than building new ones.
So it is slow now for those of us that normally go at speed through the warren tunnels such as Holborn. There will be no fast overtaking lane on the escalators.
Yeah, that's nothing at all like America. Over here, people will just get on and stand in the middle of the escalator and hog as much room as they can.
This is London we are talking about.
There is often simply no room to just build more escalators.
Crossrail runs directly under Holborn, Tottenham Court Road, Oxford Circus and Bond Street, but it's not a frequently stopping line like the Central that visits all of them. Also the far exit from TCR and BS are a considerable way towards OC. It costs the same to go on the Central line to OC even if you started your journey on Crossrail.
However when the CR2 Euston-StPancras-KingsX station opens with a walkway from PancrasX far longer than 200m, it may look a bit silly for OC not to be directly connected.
British drive on the left side of the road, so more natural tradition would be to stay on the left side of escalator and run on the right.
As a kid I was taught that walking up or down an escalator was rude, could cause injury, and defeats the purpose of the escalator. I think I was punished for doing it. When I went to DC, people were asking me to move out of the way so they could run up the escalators. I thought they were just being rude, but then I noticed lots of people doing this.
I don't remember there being any signs or anything anywhere explaining this. It just emerged as part of their culture. Very interesting. I will definitely try running up an escalator the next time I see one.
Never occurred to me that the occasional lane-blocker was an accidental optimization.
Is this some sort of British slang thing, or did somebody make enormous strides in hologram technology when I wasn't looking?
Must be almost touching the escalator's "Design Capacity"!
So if you let people stand on the right and walk on the left, you're getting higher density and throughput, since you now have one person standing per stair PLUS people walking on the left. It's like turning a 1-lane into a 2-lane street.
Reading a Guardian article on that feels, uh, really redundant? I guess we Russians have some experience in dealing with mobs.
An treadmill running at 10m/s with pairs of people spaced at 0.5m has a capacity of 40 people/second, or 2400 people per minute, or one large train every 30 seconds. The average speed is higher and you no longer need to wait for a train. The only very small problem is the prohibitive cost with existing tech.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Caves_of_Steel
The Roads Must Roll was published in 1940. The Caves of Steel was published in 1953.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central%E2%80%93Mid-Levels_esc...
On long escalators, mark some of the stairs in a particular color at regularly spaced intervals. Those are the designated "rest stairs".
Someone walking up who changes their mind (temporarly or for the rest of the ride) just finds a green stair, and moves over to the standing spot to let those behind pass.
Rest stairs can be spaced reasonably sparsely so as not to cut into capacity too much or annoy people, and would only be featured on the long escalators where this is a problem.
Maybe some people give up on the idea of walking up the long escalators in rush hour because they don't want to hinder someone who is faster.
All this is comparable to people crossing streets on red light and afterwards walking slower than me crossing on green.
Having another row of people on the left means the overall capacity increases and everyone moves faster but I always walk up the stairs and this won't benefit me one bit. Everyone else wins.
Standing when I'm in a rush can never be faster than walking up the escalator.
why doesn't tfl try and improve the stations instead of coming up with this crap? i hate to sound like some sort of hillbilly but hey, if everyone walks up the escalator the throughput is even greater! another one: if you close down one station for a whole year, why not improve the platforms by making them bigger? in fact, you close down the station for a year and when you open it again the works are not even close to being done! fantastic!
/rant
http://klaprothlaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Tourism-to...
London Transport might have attempted a campaign along those lines. Lowest common denominator can be tiresome at times.
lol I can see that being taken out of context.
It's surprising to hear that Londoners are just keeping one side clear, with few "takers" to climb up. Are they unfit or something? Respectful, though.
It is much more efficient than 1 person wide - two double-wide escalators offer more capacity than the 3 single-wides that fit in the same space, and likely consume less energy and cost less to maintain.
So some of the 3000 people were literally standing on the platform, but many of them may have been new customers or time-shifted rides that didn't even exist before.
All of this seems like a very micro optimization to eek out efficiency in peak throughput. The bigger macro problem is that transit is centered around sharp peaks due to inflexible work/life schedules. Moving everyone in London or New York around is tough enough, but doing it in a few hours each day is a nightmare and you have to massively overbuild infrastructure.
It sounds crazy, but Holborn really does have vast amounts of traffic in the morning and evening, frequently enough that they'd have to shut the gates until the platforms had cleared enough to fit more people in.
The results of the experiment prove that throughput on the left side is slower.
A quick "easy" but apparently utterly culturally unacceptable way to increase capacity by some 240% would be to work from home one day per week on average (or a half day every other week, or two days every other person, etc) and flex working hours such that the "rush hour" is twice as long.
This would interfere with primate dominance rituals such as enjoying lower social class suffering, so instead we'll get something that merely redistributes suffering.
I watched someone carry a wheelchair down the escalator a few weeks ago. No one could get past them, since the owner of the wheelchair was clinging to the person kind enough to escort them.
That short escalator ride isn't a public health disaster.
The lack of healthy food available to commuters is probably a bigger problem.
Recall how much the idea of evolution bothers some people. Are you sure this isn't a similar type of situation?
We seem to have evidence that obesity isn't always a choice.
You know what's faster than either walking up stairs or an escalator? Walking up an escalator.
However, as I was changing from the Central line to the Piccadilly line in the morning, like many others I walked through the much quieter 'No Exit' corridor (against the flow of traffic) to avoid/alleviate the congestion in the actual designated exit corridor. I'm not sure if I was counted in their stats as a +1 or -1?
Then they closed my local station anyway, so I switched to the overground. 5 mins more, but so much nicer!
You guys who do that piss me off.
I often do the opposite of you in the morning (Piccadilly to Central), which means fighting my way through or against all of you who are not supposed to be obstructing those of us getting onto the Central Line.
You guys come off the central line trains in bursts, so when you're there, there's a lot of you streaming at once. And regardless of whether you go up or transfer to Piccadilly Line, I need to intersect through your stream (which I wouldn't have to do if you used the right Exit corridor). Intersecting through your stream has resulted in getting elbowed or hit with satchels in the tunnels not designed for two-way pedestrian flow.
And usually the people that consciously decide to go through the No Exit corridor are more likely to walk quickly in a hurry, which only makes it worse.
So observe carefully next time you do that, and see that you're causing inconvenience, and even some danger, to those of us coming onto the Central Line, all for the sake of saving a small amount of time for yourself.
When our driverless cars head underground, they will all be going at the same high speed.
A network of high speed paths with efficient out-of-path access for starting and ending journeys could in principle offer dramatically higher throughput than current mass transit on the Underground, even with individuals or small groups sharing private vehicles. The trouble is that the amount of time and money required to build that network underground would be staggering even under ideal conditions, and conditions under London are very far from ideal.
A tube train carries over 1000 people maximum. But it also takes up about 1km of track before the next train (estimated since stations are about 10 minutes walk apart). We have 1 person per metre of tunnel. The platform is roughly the length of the train, 130m.
A small cart carrying one person could be, say, 1.5m long, and take up 3m (very optimistic, I think). Now we only have ⅓ person per metre of tunnel.
Let's say 200 people get on or off the train at a busy station. There's a train every 120 seconds. The additional space is slightly larger than the train (the platform).
If it takes 10s to get off the cart, in 120s we can load/unload 12 carts. But they're smaller, so we can do, say, 75 in the existing platform space (130m). That's 900, so this bit isn't a problem.
Maybe it adds up; I'm actually far to tired to continue working it out...
Tube train tunnels are large. If we were developing some alternative method of transport, why would we reserve the entire cross section of current tunnels for single occupancy vehicles? As demonstrated by the Tube itself, much higher densities could be achieved, even with private vehicles, either by having multiple people per vehicle or by using smaller vehicles that didn't require as much space and could run alongside others.
Of course density isn't the only thing that matters. Consider that the average speed of an Underground train is about 20mph. A fit person can run faster than a Tube train moves over short distances.[1] Clearly if you had a system where loading and unloading happened without blocking the main tunnels, significantly higher speeds could be achieved over the kinds of distances a typical passenger might be travelling.
[1] No, really! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH_Z8Ghuq6E
If we're talking about a hypothetical alternative transport system to be built underground and carry private vehicles potentially with single occupancy, you could probably fit four such vehicles within a cross sectional area not much bigger than the existing tunnels. The engineering practicalities would presumably still favour a round tunnel, which would be less efficient in space if you were running smaller vehicles in parallel, though.
Then again, as I mentioned elsewhere, the cost of actually doing any of this in both time and money would be wildly prohibitive today and seems likely to remain so for many years to come, so this is all rather hypothetical anyway.
Come to think about it, what would be the optimal layout of such an underground tunnel system for single-occupancy vehicles? The current system of changing lines and the station layout that results from it would no longer be a good fit, you'd have to come almost to a standstill. It could even be that reusing the tube tunnels would be less efficient than boring new tunnels in a future where tunnels can be bored "cheaply" with very little human involvement.
[1] https://youtu.be/X_ffeK8SIDo?list=PLF8E85417123BEF2F&t=66 (Quotes, roughly: 500,000 components in the tunnel boring machine, staff of 20 round the clock,
Small single passenger vehicles can also pass each a lot more easily in the amount of space a train takes up. You could have two levels in the amount of vertical space a train takes up.
I also don't think a train takes up less of the available space and time than individual cars would, when has to stop at all the stops. All other trains must wait too. The flow is constantly interrupted.
Robotic underground construction is also going to be a lot cheaper.
Whatever happens and whatever the mix between walking and vehicle transportation evolves, people are going to prefer to travel in their own vehicles over being crammed into cars with strangers and having to navigate escalators.
This particular system is shaped by the current technological constraints, not so much by people's desires. When technology advances, it will eventually change.
As for "robotic underground construction", it's not like they have a load of Navvies digging by hand nowadays, a modern tunnel boring machine is pretty damn robotic, but it still costs a fair chunk of change to tunnel.
THAT is a very british approach. Planners know that a problem is approaching, a problem created willingly by infrastructure improvements elsewhere. But rather than address that spillover issue with money/time/new bricks, yet another code of behavior is to be enforced. The people are to shoulder the burden yet again. Heaven help the tourist in a hurry who gets an asbo for not maximizing the carrying capacity of tube escalators. I wait for the day the escalator stops and everyone stands motionless for fear of being ticketed.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyL5mAqFJds where shoddy architecture is answered by suggesting that things will be ok so long as only lightweight people enter the building.
And i thought there was an obesity crisis? They've been telling us for years to keep moving and now here is a government agency telling people to stand motionless? I say encourage people to burn calories by running the escalators in reverse!
Also, frankly, if you're unwilling to follow the local code of conduct, you deserve an asbo/death sentence/stern tut-tutting and disapproving glares.
Well it's the opposite isn't it, the current code of behaviour is being removed if anything. You suggest simply building more escalators? How would that not cause yet more congestion problems due to infrastructure upgrades?
They would, if they removed queues. It's not uncommon for people to avoid particular stations because they're often overcrowded, especially if their destination is only slightly further from the previous or next station.
(Transport For London encourage this — the line diagram on Piccadilly Line trains advises against using Covent Garden station in the evening, since it only has lifts, and queues form.)
What makes you think we'll suddenly see some sort of escalator police formed to enforce these norms?
http://content.tfl.gov.uk/standard-tube-map.pdf
Until recently disabled access wasn't really considered. The Docklands Light Railway which started in the late 1980s, and the late 90s Jubilee line extension are the only fully accessible bits on the network.
Stations with suitable access are specifically marked on a lot of the maps for exactly this reason.
Looking at the 3D diagram of the station [1] it seems the original lift shafts didn't go to platform level anyway, and are now used as emergency stairs and a ventilation shaft.
Even if it's possible to add lifts, and even if the expense isn't astronomical, it would still only make sense if it could be done for many stations on the line — but most of them are this old, and handling far more passengers than ever anticipated.
[1] http://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2015/07/12/3d-maps-of-every-...
I think the point is enough people prefer to stand over walking than any dedicated walking space is likely wasted.
Seems like they are just shifting the cost for finding out from themselves to the disrupted travellers. Even if over longer periods of time this proves more efficient, disrupting normal patterns for regular commuters will cause a lot of stress and disorientation; such stress may be a soft cost, but most commutes already suck. I guess when you're a government agency, it's hard to fail your customers in a way that matters to you.
(do simulations for a living)