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Comment by balabaster | Hacker News Reader

The lie isn't that you can walk faster between two points on the map than by taking one or more trains... the lie is that by following the signs, you can get from one train to the next in the most efficient manner. People expect signs to take them on the most efficient route... they don't expect to be routed half way around London to get from one train to the next when a short escalator ride to the surface and through 2 doors you can achieve your same goal...

... though it is a low tech solution to an otherwise extremely costly redesign of the station.

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I think they have sacrified efficiency for no crushes or stampedes.

I don't class it as a 'lie' to quietly favour crowds flowing in a safe manner over the quickest route. They are the experts in what is safe for peak crowds, not some bloggers.

Of course I regard it a 'lie' that the platform crowding at places like Bank is very safe at all.

Did you watch the video all the way through? Their closing conclusion is that London Underground are experts in what is safe for peak crowds.

Calling it a "lie" is effective headline writing.

Actually I had to piece it together from other commentators... My employer sensibly bans youtube videos.

I responded to the comment and the 'lie' title

But you're allowed to post on HN?

Besides, watch videos and stuff at work on a phone over your own data connection.

> "I don't class it as a 'lie' to quietly favour crowds flowing in a safe manner over the quickest route"

I do understand your main point but it's by no means the "quickest" route. Following the signs tends to spread people out. Even at busy times, it's still quicker to take the shorter route out, despite the extra crowding. Regular commuters already know this.

This is a good example of the conflict between individuals who want to get between points A and B as quickly as possible and the station that wants manageable flows without crowding.

I think you parsed that line wrong. I read it as:

> I don't class it as a 'lie' to quietly favour "crowds flowing in a safe manner" over "the quickest route".

It's a well-formed statement, not a dangling comparative.

I love that we dont read comments on HN, we parse them!

You must be quite the interwebs young'un. People have been parsing comments on geeky forums since forever. I've seen quite a few instances of it on Slashdot. For e.g.: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=89151&cid=771254...

Well at least they have replaced the accident that was the old thameslink station at St Pancras.

The interconnections between the lines at the major Tube hubs are really complicated, and a redesign may not always be possible.

Here's a site that has diagrams of how some of the stations are put together:

http://husk.org/www.geocities.com/athens/acropolis/7069/stat...

The Bank <-> Monument short cut I figured out by myself. Although it's more or less in a straight line, you have to go a long way down before coming back up again.

> the lie is that by following the signs, you can get from one train to the next in the most efficient manner

How efficiency is being judged needs to be specified here.

The most efficient route for the good of the whole system over its entire operating week may be quite inefficient for individual people on their individual routes at specific times. To traffic management analysis you are not an individual, you are part of the mass of a flow in a collection of interconnected flows.

If the signs were dynamic so could change gradually as congestion starts and moves around the system then this would disparity would reduce, as at quite times people can be sent the most direct way and at busy times the way that will reduce their impact on the congestion. That would be a costly upgrade though.

This is still stretching the "lie" bit though. Just because you are not shown the quickest route does not make it wrong, or a lie.

The most efficient route isn't necessarily the safest, in terms of routing large numbers of people underground.

It's simply crowd management. They talk about that in the last 30 seconds of the video.

Heh.

There are shortcuts through the stations, and unmarked turnings to places you want to go that are quicker than the marked ones, when you get to know the stations you change at frequently.

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