A London Subway Experiment: Please Don’t Walk Up the Escalator | Hacker News Reader

A London Subway Experiment: Please Don’t Walk Up the Escalator

nytimes.com

24 pointsdanso52 comments

I commute to this station every day, at rush hour. There is an 'avatar' (a projection of a person) repeatedly asking people to stand on both sides. Recently she has started becoming more sarcastic, I think they are A/B testing her instructions as there are quite often people counting at the top of the flight.

It is very, very difficult standing on the left, it goes against every fibre of my being to do so, but I've managed it at least once now.

I, for one, am going to ask you to step aside if I need to get up the escalator, and damn the glass avatar. Your instincts are correct.

There are 3 escalators going up, and the left-most 'lane' (left-hand side of the leftmost escalator) is kept as a walking lane.

There's still the leftmost escalator for you.

(I read about this before, and thought: why don't they still allow walking on the leftmost escalator? Seems they indeed do, according to TFA.)

It's easier to stand on the left if there's someone in front of you blocking your path.

In other words I will will stand on the left if there is other people there too. I will walk up the left until I'm blocked though.

(Usually, to tell the truth I am travelling in non peak times with a wheely bag so have to stand anyhow)

Totally agree. Standing on the left with space in front is difficult.

Same here. I'll walk on the left whenever I can. And I'll stand on the left whenever I need to.

As the article points out, letting people walk up should probably be faster. What causes the block is people misbehaving. Blocking the left line because they want to go on the right line. Stopping for directions at the end of the escalator. Blocking the left line with bags or packages. But the solution should be better education, not slowing everyone down.

It's like letting people out of a car before getting in. In most tube stations, londoners are very courteous and the process is very fluid, even at peak hour. In touristic hot spots in the summer, you pretty much always have a crowd pushing in like a scared cattle. Some poster to remind passengers how things work in the UK would probably do the trick.

This has been discussed here before: standing people pack tighter than walking people, therefore all standing ends up with more throughput, at the expense of lower individual latency (for the would-be walkers).

But you only need that optimization when escalators are at full utilization. In many cities, escalator discipline is low enough that the walk/stand lane pattern deteriorates when the escalator approaches maximum capacity. The minority who don't get it and rudely block the walkers accidentally apply the throughput optimization. London seems to lack a reliable distribution of rude blockers who would accidentally optimize for throughput when necessary, so they need to search for an explicit solution.

London has sufficient loud walkers prepared to yell "Excuse ME!" when blocked.

And not enough of them in my opinion! It is a population where people will endure a lot of things before they lose their courtesy. People eating smelly food, stinking up a whole car. I have even seen some dude getting in a car with a bucket full of fresh fish and no one made any remark. A few angry eyes at most.

> standing people pack tighter than walking people, therefore all standing ends up with more throughput, at the expense of lower individual latency (for the would-be walkers)

If the would-be walkers derive much greater than average utility from a quick journey, isn't it likely that the all-standing regimen achieves higher average throughput at the expense of lower average utility?

When there are enough passengers to saturate full all-standing throughout, reducing throughput to allow individual latency improvement will soon cause waiting times before the bottleneck. Once a sufficiently long queue has formed, newly arriving walkers will not have a quicker total journey than they would have had under throughput optimization with shorter (or no) queues.

I really feel like more effort should be put into tube automation. In Singapore, all the lines are automated. Each platform has those safety double-elevator type doors the trains line up with (The Jubilee line is automated in London and has this same setup at most platforms).

This allows Singapore to run a lot more trains. I don't think I ever waited for more than five minutes. Automation is possible in London. The DLR and Jubilee lines are automated. There's push back from unions; jobs lost and such -- but overall a fully automated tube system would reduce congestion by quite a bit simply due to increasing the volume and frequency in trains safely.

There are two problems with this.

(1) Unions. (The tube driver's union is able to stop London and they are not afraid to do so.)

(2) It's not actually very easy to do for several of London's tube stations. Several of the tube stations have curved platforms making it rather harder to install the safety double elevator doors.

(1) Blame union for every next suicide.

(2) Skip automation on these stations.

Victoria line is at 34tph at peak. I think the jubilee line is running at 30tph right now and will be going up to 34tph when they have more trains.

All lines will go to CBTC soon. Not having a driver doesn't add any capacity. Indeed it can lower it quickly in the event of something going wrong (may take a while to get staff to the train to fix it)

tph? Thousands/trains/teas per hour?

Trains per hour

I'd rather have asked for an explanation of CBTC.

The platform doors should be installed for security reasons anyway. It is a small miracle that every morning, while the narrow platform are completely packed with people, and that the train goes at full speed a few inches from people's face, we do not have more accidents.

The DLR and Jubilee lines are automated.

The Northern and Central lines were automated within the last few years. The Victoria was automated since it first opened in 1968. Once the sub-surface signaling upgrade is completed, the Circle, District, Hammersmith and City, and Metropolitan lines will also be automated.

Automated in this sense means "driver controls doors and presses button to send train to the next station". When the rolling stock is next refreshed, the cab might be axed and instead it'll follow a similar model to the DLR today - a single person roaming the train checking fares etc and issuing the "close doors/move to next station" command from a panel near each set of doors.

5m is an age in London! Most tubes arrive 1.8-3m apart at peak times (meaning average wait times of half that), and even at non-peak times it is rare to wait more than 3m. Unless on an outer branch of a line that must share its service between multiple such branches outside of the central metro area.

Most lines are having automated operation rolled out to them gradually as well; they just retain a driver to keep everyone happy. The busiest lines already are: Victoria, Jubilee, Central and Northern. The latter two were retrofits.

Notably, the Victoria line has no such doors, and currently runs more trains per hour than the Jubilee line, although this is slated to change, though it won't lead by much after the upgrade.

In Switzerland they were and are trying hard to educate people:

http://www.tageswoche.ch/images/cache/3264x2448/fit/images%7...

http://files.newsnetz.ch/story/1/7/5/17591954/35/topelement....

http://www.dicconbewes.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/img_05...

http://www.dicconbewes.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Links-...

Officially, the results were mixed. It often happens that someone is just unaware of the situation and blocks the whole escalator. But personally I think that it works really well, moreso during rush hour. I only have a couple of minutes to switch trains and always ask people in a friendly manner to let me pass and they always respond well. I think it's good to raise awareness.

>Walking anywhere in London or navigating the subway during rush hour means having to make a mad, dodging, aggressive dance against an oncoming tide of people, many of whom seem oblivious to Britain’s long tradition of walking on the left.

I feel obliged to point out that this 'long tradition' only exists on escalators in the London Underground. Anywhere else in the country (or London for that matter) we walk on whichever side we feel like.

It took a while for me to figure this out, but there's actually an unmentioned rule in the US that you walk to the right when you're passing people, at least when it's congested enough that you have to choose. I see a lot of people from overseas struggling with this where I work, at least early on.

Isn't that just a parallel of driving rules?

Yeah, I was responding to the "we walk on whichever side we feel like" part, which is not the case in the US.

German here. It's totally non-intuitive for me that I should pass on the left when driving but pass on the right when walking. Or vice versa.

When coming to London, this always makes me spend extra CPU cycles to ensure that I'm not doing anything wrong.

I have seen people observing the rule of leaving the left line for people walking in any escalator in London. Perhaps out of habit of taking the tube, but it's not specific to the tube anymore.

Extensive discussion of this question from around 5 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10916704

At least part of the problem with Holborn is the station's horrific design. Each platform has only one entrance, and if you want to change from the Central to the Picadilly line (which many do) you have to walk directly through a flow of people who queuing for the escalator to exit the station.

This is compounded by the high number of tourists using the station (usually on their way to Covent Garden, or doing the aforementioned change.) For such an important station in London's infrastructure, the actual station design is terrible.

You know, I've lived in London all my life and I've never encountered this "London Subway".

You occasionally see signs around for them (though not so much in town, more often a little further out); where the path takes pedestrians under the road ;-)

Interesting though, because it subtly demonstrates that some NYP sub-ed is strongly convinced of the provincial nature of New Yorkers.

I wonder if it would make more sense to tell people "please consider walking up the left side of the escalator instead of standing". It would probably improve congestion, but even if it didn't, people might get a little bit more exercise out of their commute.

That is the normal recommendation on the London Underground and that is what they are specifically not doing in this case as an experiment.

http://citytransport.info/Digi/P1240646a.jpg

No, that means "if you choose to walk, walk on the left". I mean "Walk, and do it on the left."

Another idea to reduce congestion even further: "Please ALL walk up the escalator."

No. The point of this experiment is to show that this would make things worse. Much worse.

Maybe I'm just hypersensitive to this right now, but I really didn't get the point of the Brussels snipe in the last paragraph. Can't we just enjoy exercises in optimising escalator throughput without mentioning Brexit?

And more on topic: I would be interested to see how this system, and the normal system, compares to somewhere like covent garden which only has lifts and gets seriously backed up. So much so that the official recommendations are to avoid the station at peak times and walk from other nearby stations. They'll have to do something about this at some point but there's no easy fix here.

Maybe someone could explain why it is necessary to reach the top of an escalator before everyone else. Is your work so crucial that 5 seconds is going to make so much difference or is it that you just don't like standing still?

Some of the escalators are very long and very slow, you can save a couple minutes, combined with less congestion at the ticket gates (because you just beat most of the people flooding the station from your train)

Also catching a connection. Running is usually involved given the wonderful lateness our railways pride themselves on.

5 seconds makes all the difference when you're running for a train.

During rush hour the platforms are packed meaning you might have to wait for 2-3 trains before you can board. So arriving at the platform a few seconds earlier can shorten your trip by 10 minutes or more depending on your route.

Thanks, it was a genuine question and this goes someway to explaining what, to an outsider, looks like crazy behaviour.

Yeah, actually sometimes I'm in a hurry. Sometimes I'm trying to make it to a plane or get to a meeting that starts at a particular time, and making it to one train versus the next one fifteen minutes later can make or break an opportunity. Does that make sense?

Yes, thanks

Why being fast and energetic when we can be slow and inefficient?

They do that in Moscow as long as I remember.

During rush hours, it's "please take both sides of an escalator", during calmer hours, it's "please stand to the right, walk to the left".

Mostly works.

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