I noticed some other weird design choices in the new tube stations as well. Eg air vents that are very fine and visibly clog up.
It’s like they designed it to look shiny for day one but ignored decades of practical experience
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)
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".
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'.
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.
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.