Elizabeth line testing ways of banishing its "ghosts in the walls"
ianvisits.co.uk
ianvisits.co.uk
Seriously, though the Lizzie Line is an example of really grand design but poorly executed. Here are some of my observations:
a. The quality of material is poor and hinders easy maintenance.
b. The high-res information displays show train arrivals in incorrect order, e.g.
1. Abbey Wood 4 min
2. Shenfield 2 min
c. All advertising spaces are now LED displays, some with additional LED-lit frames which use a lot more energy than the old printed posters, which used none. There are hundreds of these things at each station. They heat up the air inside the stations making them unbearably hot in the summer. The solution is more AC and ventilation using even more energy. I stopped caring about saving the planet when I saw what the TfL did.
d. The western section of the line beyond Paddington basically doesn't work in any reliable fashion and should just be repainted green and given to the GWR where it would fit with the rest of the often cancelled services.
In DC we had a similar change over. My complaint is just that it is incredibly tacky. It's much brighter than ambient lighting is.
Our metro system is facing a huge budget crunch (the Feds stopping COVID money, and the 2.5 states involved have been very unhelpful at providing funding). I get that advertising is an appealing revenue stream. I just wish we could do it in a way that wasn't so rambunctiously over the top; I wish we could preserve some level of taste.
It would be nicer if they would just end the advertising.
[1] London Underground (metro), several within-London urban and suburban rail lines, buses, trams, river ferries, major roads
https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/media/press-releases/2023/march/...
https://content.tfl.gov.uk/tfl-advertising-annual-report-aug...
For non locals, this is in a long walkway between access train and terminal, is lit in bright blue moving images, and plays a silly song about interest rates at high volume for the entirety of your time in the tunnel. It has cemented my desire to never do business with PenFed, for sure.
It's easy to estimate: if the displays + lifetime power costs more than all the posters, then chances are they use a lot more power. The cost of electricity isn't one of those externalities a business can hoist on society - it has to pay for each kilowatt-hour and that cost is easily quantifiable.
If they are gaining some sort of monetary incentive from replacing poster displays with LED screens, and your reasoning holds true, then perhaps in the greater scheme of things the LED displays do use less 'power'.
(Yes I know some journeys it may not matter as two trains share a route for a while -- I'm about to board such a train in Boston -- but a sign with two lines isn't hard to scan -- and even with many lines, if the times are right-justified, it's easy to spot the shortest times.)
If there are peoples who can handle heat deep there, they're the English.
But, yeah, it's stupidity.
The "tube" (with the circular tubelike tunnels) used electric from the start.
> I stopped caring about saving the planet when I saw what the TfL did.
Ok, dude, you are high on your own drama.
It’s like they designed it to look shiny for day one but ignored decades of practical experience
This was where high-profile events tended to take place, to show off the bright new shiny things. But you couldn't hear yourself think there. The solution? They turned off the fans a short time before important visitors arrived.
I learned of this when I was chatting with a worker who deals with such things. Apparently, the people who were installing these vents knew that they would be a problem. But who were they going to complain to? The architects don't work here, and the local managers don't listen to their underlings.
There are lots of stories like this in many work environments. I think the common thread is that high mucky-mucks are not interested in talking with the people who are doing the labour.
Building control require that an architect sign off on things like the size of the beam holding the roof up. If you change that, the architect will have to sign off on the building as constructed before building control will approve it.
Planning permission is given on the basis of external appearance, so you can't change too much in that area - but go look at some planning applications, they're very light on details.
But other than that? If it's your project and you tell the electrician putting in a socket to put it somewhere else, he'll tell you if it's legal under the wiring regulations, and if it is, he'll move it.
The main reason that in large projects builders are required to build exactly to the plan is to stop them substituting cheaper materials. They're under great pressure to do that, because if you allow your builders to replace expensive zinc cladding with cheap ACM cladding, and you ask several builders to tender and choose the cheapest builder, you'll always choose the builder who quoted on the basis of the cheap ACM cladding.
You're right that making arbitrary ad-hoc changes during construction can be expensive, of course. Especially if it's wrong and has to be torn out and redone.
But it's not illegal - if you're in charge of a project and an installer tells you the specified vents are going to be a problem and they recommend a bigger one, nothing in law prevents you from telling them to go ahead and make the change, right there on the spot.
Of course, how often the person with in charge of a large project will be talking to the vent installers while they're working is a different matter...
It of course isn't illegal to make changes - but it is expensive and thus not something you should do. (though some things are much easier than others to retrofit half way in.
I'm talking with some level of experience here. I did a residential project that was obviously much smaller than this but still very expensive (£100+k). Even for this architects recommended a detailed design and a contract that enforced this.
Also, it's possible to request a variation, especially if something wasn't going to work. There is a category called 'non-material variation' which the planning officers are lenient with.
If you got rid of planning (and building control) I guarantee that the quality of buildings would go down. Before building control, many unhealthy buildings were built due to bad drainage, etc.
Also it's because of the financial structure. People invest a lot of money in something with a delayed, sometimes for years. Delay increases everyone's risk, increases interest expense, and defers revenue.
Choosing bare concrete looks cool, and you don't need to pay a tiler to install them, but anyone who has ever done any amount of cleaning ever will tell you a smooth, porous surface like that will look grungy soon enough and be basically impossible to clean by hand.
[1]: not only the London Underground: glossy wider-than-long tiles aren't generally called "metro tiles" for nothing
https://hackaday.com/2023/12/24/absorbing-traffic-noise-with...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/01/swedish-...
On my commute they are fitting new cladding to hide a brick wall on an outdoor, not covered, platform. All the studwork is standard timber screwed into the wall. Any water ingress and this will rot quickly. Oh well.
Of course you always have someone do urgent maintenance - if a pipe breaks you fix it now. However replacing that pipe might leave a poorly patched wall until the next 10 year cycle when the fix is made invisible.
You have to empty trash, clean the floors, and other similar things several times per day.
Every year you replace filters and do a deep cleaning. (check the documentation for equipment - sometimes this might be a 1 month cycle not 1 year!) You also do a full inspection of everything, touch up paint, and patch anything else. This should be very routine, and thus always cost the same (inflation adjusted).
Every 5 years you repaint. You also replace carpet where overly stained. That is touch up the cosmetics in a more in depth way. However this is a small cost.
Every 10 years you have to do significant work in the bathrooms (While toilets can last for centuries they start to look bad when you try in a commercial setting). If there is a kitchen it also needs significant work. Avoid moving major things, but this is a higher cost. You should probably be replacing benches on this schedule.
Every 30 years you do a major remodel. Here is where you update everything at sometimes high cost. Add elevators if you don't have them. Expand the station footprint if it is too small (you need more stains). Move where the doors are. Change the station approaches. Add more bathrooms. This will be expensive.
I would expect there to already be consultants doing similar to what you've suggested however the work is complex and many will be quite cut-off from the build process or only around in the short-term.
It sounds quite fatalistic what you've said, that we've basically reached maximum planning saturation so we can only pay the costs afterwards when things go wrong.
But surely questioning these assumptions is good for our civic involvement and for the lines.
So don't. Just use something well tried and tested and don't try to be innovative (in areas we you can't dedicated significant amounts of resources for up-front planning)
I think I agree with that a bit. For hardware, Apple might be an example showing that dedicating significant amounts of research to your designs is more likely to lead to good hardware designs.
I don’t see that happen soon in the software industry, though. We’re still constantly replacing libraries and frameworks with stuff that promises to, eventually, be perfect because the current approach isn’t perfect.
there is a lot of room to improve trains. However it all starts with standard gauge steel track, with standard sizes tunnels, standard switches, standard control algorithms (with computers this had recently had a revolution, while there is room to improve this is again in the mostly solve area), standard "rolling stock" and so on. Let me bring out here two standards that are a bit new: platform doors - now that someone invested them and proved they work everyone should retrofit to them; and elevators - it is criminal that many stations around the world still haven't been retrofitted (criminal as in I think someone should be in prison anywhere you find they have not been retrofitted) Once you have all the standard stuff laid out you can make a few tweaks to see what works, but only a few as we know the standard stuff works.
Make sure when you look at standards above you look at what others have done. If you have an idea odds are someone else has already tried it: find them and figure out how it works - sometimes you can tweak to be better sometimes you realize it is a bad idea.
> Innovation generally tries things that look good to politicians who don't understand trains, but in reality people who understood trains 100 years ago had the idea and rejected it as a bad idea - and the reasons they are bad ideas didn't change!
I'm all for respecting old ideas but this idea that modern engineers are idiots and can't think of anything people 100 years didn't think of is also wrong.
> Make sure when you look at standards above you look at what others have done. If you have an idea odds are someone else has already tried it: find them and figure out how it works - sometimes you can tweak to be better sometimes you realize it is a bad idea.
I don't disagree.
In the context of Crossrail, this seems to be what they have done for the most part. So I don't understand the criticism.
That is not what I was trying to say. I'm saying that politicians and managers are unable to think of things that people 100 years didn't think of. While that isn't 100% true, it is very close.
Though most of the time engineers today couldn't think of anything they didn't think of 100 years ago. However sometimes advances in other science means ideas that wouldn't work back then could work today. This is almost entirely incremental improvements though.
Crossrail didn't follow the same practices as building 100 years ago. And the results are terrible. (of course some of this is good - better safety standards - but the whole is a system that costs far more than expected for lower quality than possible elsewhere using modern standards)
Yes, infrastructure has gotten more expensive, and that is particularly true in the Anglosphere. But those problem don't have so much to do with the chosen design, but rather it operation and planning processes.
What actual parts of the design are actually bad?
Station being to large is a question of taste and priorities. Saying that such tradeoffs are not worth it is different then just saying straight up that 'the results are terrible'.
The half-done or broken improvements still get called "innovations" and give innovation overall a worse reputation.
Indeed. I wish this point were articulated that way more often.
> The half-done or broken improvements still get called "innovations" and give innovation overall a worse reputation.
We fetishise innovation as an abstract concept, for good reasons because you cannot have progress without innovation. What we tend to miss is that while innovation is good, some specific innovations are terrible. This is particularly infuriating when they are re-surfacing old, solved problems. Looking at wall tiling for example (or the cladding that can be found in much of the Underground): this was a good solution to a common problem. Bare concrete walls have obvious downsides, which is why we don’t tend to use them in building anymore. Doing away with tiling or cladding sounds like an architect being innovative, but if the replacement does not solve the problem, it’s a regression. It will look modern and clean as long as it will be properly maintained, which is to say for about a year, and then it will decay the way concrete does. It will eventually be clad, or reviled as a post-modern monstrosity the way some bad brutalist buildings are today.
Innovation for innovation’s sake is cargo culting progress. This is giving innovation a bad name.
The problem isn't that the politicians are not experts in construction - there is far too many things politicians fund for them to become experts in even a fraction of them all (they also have to fund medical studies, military spending...). The problems is politicians don't respect trained experts, thus don't keep people around to become deep experts, and in turn there is nobody around with deep technical knowledge to say what is a good idea. Or if there are such people around they are not in a position where they can be listened too, instead any scammer is allowed to present their pitch for "innovations".
The real cost of these project is the big tunneling, the trains and so on.
Going for something innovative makes sense, because it can be easily changed later if it really fails (and that has yet to proven).
Of course, it requires to actually clean the vents...
Modern software development, and especially UI design, in a nutshell.
Then one day the room was properly refurbished and management paid the decorators to put in a special barrier layer and the grease spots finally dissipated.
Actually, I'm not sure that these are stickers. Maybe it's paint. If it's a sticker it'd be very difficult to apply this perfectly...
(Search "vinyl train wrap".)
Hmm indeed, how could a rail line that makes a mere £1 billion in yearly revenue afford such an egregious expense.
What funds TfL is basically fares and city and central government taxes. Ideally the taxes fund the improvements and fares fund the operations.
But fares are down since COVID, while the service kept operating.
At least a couple British managers got paid a fair amount to discuss the proposed designs in a meeting room with their contractors.
You can regularly clean well enough to address health and safety and still end up with plenty of marks that are high effort to remove that only really affect appearance, and so designs that reduce the visual impact have been used in high traffic spaces pretty much "forever" as a means to reduce the need for high effort cleaning.
Not really much difference for a wall.
The women who wear white tend to choose fabric that doesn't stain easily, an approach TfL might have considered earlier.
Perhaps what they're doing is cleaning and then looking for a way to mitigate the need for intensive future cleaning. Seems sensible.
If instead it was by adding sound then it would defy the purpose. I use active noise cancelling because if I don't I'll hear a noise in my head for weeks after a long-haul flight (I have tinnitus in one ear which makes it even worse).
I'd also think that plastic resins are not the best thing to be reacting to heat.
For a start, I would give anyone on the underground about 3 minutes, if they attempted to sleep anywhere, before they were moved on. It's one of the few places where you regularly see staff on the public transport network in London.
I think there is a legitimate argument that these arm rests are actually providing a useful service by delimiting the space for each person. Few people will naturally sit on the spot at the end of a bench seat which is already partially occupied (and other people will discourage it by sitting near the middle). Where as people will take an empty seat which is clearly free and separated from the other people on the bench.
Yes, exactly this! Especially when the platforms are crowded, it makes so much sense to be efficient on the allocation of seats.
Now we’ve still got to deal with some people bag-spreading but normally most people take their bags off as soon as it gets busy or someone asks.
And yes, I don’t recall any opportunity to sleep as I shuffled along in the massive crowds for the Waterloo and City line.
Typically in London, People without a home would be found outside the station, or occasionally in the concourse.
Yes beggars walk down tube trains trying to get money, but they don't tend to set up shop on the platform which is what we're talking about here. I'm also pretty sure most of the people that have asked me for a quid on the tube were not homeless people, just chancers and drug users.
Besides which, once you were past the barrier, sleeping on the tube train itself is likely to be a much more viable and comfortable option than the platform.
as for "unmanned stations"? All London Underground stations are rostered to be staffed during operating hours. Stations located underground have specific staffing requirements and minimum staff numbers, which vary depending on the size of the station. This is a fire regulation requirement arising from the King's Cross fire in 1987.
There's also stations that share common areas with overground trains that don't even have gates (West Ruislip, for example). And then people also squeeze through the pram/wheelchair gates or closely follow someone through. It's easy to do because the ticket offices are closed and whatever skeleton staffing they have is busy elsewhere. These gates (and stations) are effectively unmanned in this context.
But I agree. It's actually very rare to see people begging on the underground compared to other cities. I don't think access is the issue. Maybe the BTP spend all their time on it?
I do see beggars at least once a week these days I'd say. They've increased a lot compared to my first years in London when I would safely call it rare. I reckon because of cost of living.
The beggars are constantly moving, and only ask for money on trains that are in motion, in order to evade the staff. Those that want to stay in one place set up just outside the station entrance.
Furthermore, a tube platform is a poor place to sleep, not only because the staff will move you on and the trains are really noisy, but mostly because the tube is closed at night.
I do agree that some-human was wrong to say "People without a home do not have access to the platforms" though, as you're right that it's possible to access the platforms without paying. But some-human was right in the broader context of the thread - whether the armrests constitute hostile architecture - that we do not see rough sleepers sleeping on tube platforms.
In reality the reason is because the authorities want to stop them and they do this through policing the platforms obviously but hostile architecture is put in place to make sure they don't have to be searching for homeless people all the time in the first place. It's a joint effort, obviously.
And yes I know every station has to be staffed. I mean they look for moments of time when no staff are watching the barriers at lower staffed stations. I have had people slip in the barriers behind me it very obviously happens. Homeless people are perfectly able to get in. They don't sleep there because everything possible is done to stop them.
Seems very unlikely that’s why they’re there, given the station is covered in CCTV, highly staffed, and the train itself would be much more comfortable to sleep on
> (quite useless) armrests
Very useful for apportioning space on the seats for multiple people to sit
It's shockingly bad in terms of reliability for such an expensive form of transport.
It's become "apology line". It should apologize with full day discounts, see how that incentivizes them to improve their service.
Maybe a counter overlay on the stream keeping track of how many people got hosed that day, which would increment using computer vision, GPT and a very expensive production pipeline.