... or, you could ask everybody to walk, thereby "quadrupling" the effective capacity.
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.
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.
waves hand Knee problems here. I can walk up the escalator, but I really don't want to. There's a reason I'm on the escalator instead of the stairs next to them.
The current proposal (stand on both sides) assumes everybody is capable of standing on an escalator. I, for one, am not. I get vertigo, I get mad, I get sad. My body doesn't handle being stuck deep below the surface for very long times, so I must walk up. I usually don't do very long underground trips because of that condition.
I love the vertigo feeling in long escalators. When I go up, I tilt my head back and stare at the ceiling somewhat above the line of sight to the top. I almost have the sensation that the tube is vertical and I could free-fall backwards at any moment.
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).
Ah. See, I have this vertigo too, but it's always on. And I stumbled on escalators a couple of time already, so that increasing my vertigo with 30-50 meters below me doesn't feel like a particularly good idea.
Probably the same way that some people enjoy roller coasters, sky diving, walking tightropes, climbing vertical walls, ski jumping, flying trapeze, skating or boarding down a "half pipe" and various other "extreme sports" without getting a panic attack.
I get vertigo when I'm on a stopped escalator! The habit of seeing the world move is incredibly sticky and makes me dizzy, even if I take the broken escalator twice a day.
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.
When traveling down, would turning around and facing the other direction help?
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?
I've violated that rule pretty much every time I've been on the tube and I never had anything but positive responses (and my head is still firmly attached).
I long ago made a decision that saves me enormous amounts of headache: if you say or do something I will interpret that in the simplest and most straightforward way possible without trying to second-guess ulterior motives or secondary (or further) layers.
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.
Honestly, I don't know. The anxiety overtakes me to the point where I can barely communicate with the people I know, mush less those I don't. Also, once I'm on, I'm frozen. I've worked up all my nerve just to get on, so I couldn't see myself turning around.
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.
It also ignores that the density of people in an hypothetical all-walking escalator has to be much lower, because walking people maintain a larger personal space. The graphics imply the density on the walking half of a split elevator is something like a 1/10th the standing half.
Sure, but most people do not walk ten times as fast (or even twice as fast) as their escalators lift them.
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.
If walking is just 50% faster than riding (i.e. walkers go at half the speed of the escalator), but requires 50% more space, then it's a break-even situation for capacity. And a win for latency.
It doesn't look like a very busy time, in that video. I count about 10 people standing on one of the escalators while there are 8 walkers going by them. There are some irregular gaps among the walkers; more walkers could easily be accomodated; it's just not busy enough; I don't really see a backlog of people waiting at the bottom; everyone is just marching naturally toward the escalator and getting on.
In the graphics, they are spread apart because they are substantially less than half (all the others choose to stand). Walking sure requires a larger spacing, but I would say 1.5-2 times the regular one, not 10.
I'm reminded of the escalators and NY Penn station. People wait in big huddles to get on the escalator, stand crowded and unable to move with none of that "pass on the left" bit. Meanwhile, a massively wide flight of stairs stands in the middle of the escalators that will often be quite empty even as the crowds to go up the escalator start forming. Hell, they're empty enough people are putting ads on those stairs: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/165/364250541_49959802e8.jpg?...
If there are stairs as an alternative to an escalator I always take the stairs unless it's completely empty or I'm carrying something very heavy. I've yet to encounter a staircase built as a part of modern, public transit infrastructure that was too long for a healthy adult to walk.
If you'd like to encounter one, visit Covent Garden. One of London's deepest tube stations, it has a spiral staircase with 193 steps - the equivalent of a 15-storey building.
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 used to get my daily exercise walking the ~150 stairs at Goodge Street, and I hadn't ever thought to do the maths to turn that into a building. Strangely I'd never even consider climbing a building that tall, but as a single flight of stairs it was fine.
I would have liked to take those stairs when I last visited London, but I didn't want to keep my family waiting. They preferred to take the lift. At least I think it was that station. It had a lift and a very tall spiral staircase.
I guess I can call an elevator in London a lift...
Ooh, I used to do that as well. Seemed sensible since I was normally being tremendously lazy and getting the tube to there from CHX (in my flimsy defence, even before they buggered everything up around TCR station, the walk from CHX to Goodge Street was mildly unpleasant.)
I get really disorientated doing those stairs. You get into a zone about 2/3 the way up where you just assume it goes on for ever as it's just a uniform spiral dotted with the occasional tourist who can't read "15 story building".
I I see a bottleneck at an escalator, I like to take the stairs and then watch where I would be in the bottlekneck to estimate how long it would have taken me to take the escalator to validate my choice of taking the stairs.
Yes, stairs. I use stairs everywhere. However, some places don't have stairs. It seems the public transit infrastructure doesn't think there are people who can and want to walk in the cities nowadays.
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.
They could have the ALL STAND rule for some stations, ALL WALK for others.
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!
It's not possible to walk up them for a lot of people (health reasons). Even fit people have trouble in some stations as the escalators can be very steep and very long.
Even fit people have trouble in some stations as the escalators can be very steep and very long.
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.
More likely, that would reduce the capacity even further, as walking people need to have more space between them than standing people, in order to avoid stepping on each others heels.
Given that there are two escalators per direction, making the middle ones purely for walkers would probably create the necessary incentives to get ~2/3 walking to bypass the longer queues on the sides..
Well, the point of the article was that if people are standing on one side, you've only got half efficiency, so if they take a whole escalator and make it walkers only and double up the other one, nothing is gained. At least if the outer was stand only and the middle was current rule, there's a 25% increase.
I think the article is missing the obvious point that the queue at the bottom affects walkers as well as standers even though it is being formed by the delays caused by standers needing more time on the escalator. Allow walkers up the middle well separated escalator without interference and many more people would walk.
I doubt it. Even if you are relatively fit, many of these escalators are equivalent to 2 - 3 flights of stairs, after sitting standing in a hot carriage for 30mins plus.
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.
That doesn't apply everywhere - e.g. Cutty Sark DLR only has two escalators and I can think of a few places which have three shared between up/down (split on morning/evening peak traffic.)
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.
why not have stairs between the escalators with arrows painted on them indicating up/down if not two sets clearly divided by the escalators themselves?
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.
I've never seen someone stopping the escalator, but I have seen the stairs standing still with astounding frequency. I thought it was poor maintenance, but it never occurred to me it was flow optimization.
I used to turn on the escalator on my parents' house station when I was a teenager, sometimes even with people walking on top of it. Then they added a key to turn it on :(.
One thing the article doesn't analyze at all: standing on both sides improves total throughput, but how does it affect the individual latency for people walking up the left side? If the answer is "it's faster for them too", then tell people that and they'll be more inclined to go along with it. And if the answer is "it's slower for them", then no wonder they don't want to go along with it.
Also the "faster for everyone" as a goal ignores that people that will go faster with this system is people that were in no big rush to begin with (so they took the right side), while people that wanted to go faster now can't.
You take away something that some people wanted to give the rest something nobody asked for.
Consider those rushing left-side walkers: with left-side walking in effect, at peak times, they may have to wait a few minutes at the bottom of the escalator to get on, while their walking will save them 30 seconds on the trip up. Not worth it. 16,220 per hour, versus 12,745.
But the metric is overall throughput, not latency. If they had bothered to characterize latency then that conclusion would probably follow. Since they characterized throughput instead, they optimized throughput at the expense of latency.
In some cases, the available space for queueing is quite limited. If too many people are queuing, so this mass extends to the platforms, it might not be safe to let a train depart.
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.)
The math is the article is a little sketchy. "But a 2002 study of escalator capacity on the Underground found that on machines such as those at Holborn, with a vertical height of 24 metres, only 40% would even contemplate it. By encouraging their preference, TfL effectively halves the capacity of the escalator in question, and creates significantly more crowding below, slowing everyone down. "
It doesn't make sense that this would "halve the capacity" unless no one was walking. It seems that with a 40% stated preference for walking, it would be only a 10% loss of capacity due to preference differences. The description should really also include a description of how fast walking is compared to standing. Elevators move at around 0.3 m/s, people walk at about 4x that pace, so even doubling the spacing requirements would shave a fair bit off of that.
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.
It seems you jumped from 40% even contemplating walking to a 40% stated preference during your reasoning there. The latter is quite a different thing and probably explains a lot of the discrepancies.
This depends on the ratio between elevator speed and (elevator speed + walking speed), compared to the density ratio between standers and walkers. I'm not sure what the outcome would be but it may be the case indeed that walker throughput would be less that stander throughput no matter what.
Considering that an escalator is one of the few real-life powerups available outside of a video game, not walking up it is tantamount to wasting it, both traveling up and down. Like getting Haste and then just standing there, or being able to Deal Double Damage and not hitting the trigger.
I usually camp at the bottom, waiting for the crowd to disperse, then grab the powerup and use it efficiently.
The powerup can equally be used for "more speed" or "less energy", just because you prefer the first it doesn't mean others shouldn't opt for the second.
The goal may not be to get to top faster, that is just one possible interpretation of efficiency. Dealing with the crowd and being bumped as people millaround vying for position isn't desirable either.
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.
There's nothing wrong with running up the escalator. The issue is people crowding to the right to make room for the people doing it, which decreases the capacity for everyone else.
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.
Only if the number of people running is small. If there's a large enough number of people running up the escalator, then the capacity will be increased over everyone standing. It's quite simple.
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.
Long, steep escalators like that make a challenging
climb even for the young and fit.
But it's not a binary climb all / stand only choice. You can climb to your desire or ability, with its incremental benefit, and stand and ride for the rest.
What is lazy about not running up an escalator? That defeats the purpose of an escalator and saves you maybe a few seconds at best. Most people prefer not to.
". The issue is people crowding to the right to make room for the people doing it,"
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.
Unfortunately I can't downvote you, so I have to leave a comment telling you how stupid you are. Like seriously what is wrong with you? Most people don't run up an escalator unless they are in a hurry, and it defeats the entire purpose of an escalator. Some people can't because they are old, or weak.
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?
Depends what you're optimizing for- energy or time.
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.
The space on an escalator is quantized. You don't stand on the same step as the next passenger, lest you be accused of frottage; the closest packing in the direction of travel is one person per step. The inter-step distance on escalators is large enough to acommodate walking motion.
>The inter-step distance on escalators is large enough to acommodate walking motion...one person per step
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.
1 per 4 steps indicates that it's not a busy time. Or it's one of those long escalators that don't have too many takers for walking. Once the walkers get through the crowd and get on the escalator, they suddenly have lots of space, if a large proportion chooses to stand. It's not because they need space; they aren't standing at the bottom waiting for a space of three extra stairs to open before they start to walk; it's just that by the time they get on, the previous walker is already that far ahead.
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.
> had gone to Hong Kong on holiday. Lau noticed that passengers on that city’s Mass Transit Railway (MTR) were standing calmly on both sides of the escalator and, it seemed, travelling more efficiently and safely as a result.
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:
This rule is one of many that make Hong Kong better for visiting mainlanders and worse for the actual locals living there. For decades the escalators ran perfectly. Nowadays, it just takes one yokel with a suitcase to block an entire escalator, oblivious to the fact that there is no one on front during rush hour. Unfortunately, the HK population is quite shy and timid in general, and these things go unpunished.
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.
I walked up and down those many times as a student at the LSE. It would've driven me mad if I'd had to stand; very, very few things annoy me as much as being stuck behind people (or traffic) moving unnecessarily slowly.
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.
It would've driven me mad if I'd had to stand; very, very few things annoy me as much as being stuck behind people (or traffic) moving unnecessarily slowly.
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.
"With the constant (and unsustainable) attention of staff, and three weeks of practice, they eventually became a little more docile [...] It’s like child psychology [...] So if you can’t tell them what to do every two minutes, how on earth do you get them to comply? [...] The handrail and tread of the escalator will be a different colour, and firmly planted pairs of feet will decorate the left of the steps."
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.
Seems like a difficult thing to do in such a small trial. Because it's just one escalator (out of 7) in one station, their only point of contact is someone at the bottom of the escalator to shout "stand still".
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.
Too much modern public transport is slowing people down for the sake of throughput. Using the escalator this way adds capacity, but it makes journey times longer, much like the endless passages that have replaced cross-platform interchange on newer lines, or the decision to not connect Crossrail to Oxford Circus and force people to walk up, along the street and down instead.
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.
> Using the escalator this way adds capacity, but it makes journey times longer.
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.
You are wrong about the bottleneck at the bottom, generally you can usually proceed up the left and walk the escalator without being delayed by the bottleneck queue of people wanting to stand on the escalator. Those folks are generally to the right leaving a relatively clear path on the left.
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.
>You are wrong about the bottleneck at the bottom, generally you can usually proceed up the left and walk the escalator without being delayed by the bottleneck queue of people wanting to stand on the escalator. Those folks are generally to the right leaving a relatively clear path on the left.
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.
>or the decision to not connect Crossrail to Oxford Circus and force people to walk up, along the street and down instead.
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.
One of Crossrail's stations is only 200m from Oxford Circus underground station at platform level; it could have been a "double-ended" station like many other Crossrail stations. There was a deliberate decision not to connect them.
Because OC is one of the most overcrowded stations in the entire system, it's closed one in three workday evenings due to dangerous overcrowding.
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.
Okay, in my city (Edmonton) we have the province's biggest University, that is mostly served by the LRT, and the university station in underground and hence has escalators.
During peak morning hours, every single person walks up the escalator stairs and it is considered rude to stand in the morning. When the escalator is down everyone complains, because we need to 2x the walking now.
Actually the fact that escalator is broken (i.e one is turned off and the other is closed for maintenance) has created a sort of inside joke, to the point where the escalator has its website to say if its working http://uofaescalator.com/
This is complete b/s. I (too) often take the tube at peak hour, the left line is usually full, even in long escalators like the connection between the DLR and the central line at Bank. The idea that you have an empty left line and a packed right line is just not true.
It's like that here in Thailand too. They drive on the left but walk on the right in two-way stairways and stand right on escalators. Doesn't make any sense.
Escalators are very rare novelties here. I never really understood their purpose over a regular stairs, but they are so cool on the occasions I see them.
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.
That's what elevators are for. Someone in a wheel chair can't go up an escalator I don't think. All multi story buildings are required to have elevators for the disabled, so the escalator is just a fancy extra.
I don't know why you're being downvoted, there are elevators with handicap signs at pretty much all subway stops in Toronto. If you're standing on an escalator it's because you're lazy not too disabled to walk.
An interesting example of how too much uniformity can weaken a system. Where i live, there is a low but "reliable" percentage of riders who are just too rude to follow the left/right protocol. They are rare enough that during low-traffic periods, chances are quite low that you will be blocked while taking the individual latency improvement of walking. However, in periods of high traffic there will be enough of of them to reliably break the throughput-limiting lane pattern and congestion propagation will make sure that it stays that way until the next break in throughput demand.
Never occurred to me that the occasional lane-blocker was an accidental optimization.
I think the main issue is the width of the escalators. Given that strangers don't like to stand next to one another (as per article's claim), two single width escalators would end up working more efficiently than one double width.
No Western person would be comfortable riding an escalator side by side with a stranger (aka weirdo in UK speak) for the equivalent of fifty to a hundred steps of stairs in a hot smelly subway so dirty your snot turns sooty. Standing on the right to allow others to walk up the left is not a technical optimization constructed by the impatient of the world. The real optimization problem is you're dealing with people and not frictionless spheres. X number of people walking up the left is faster than zero.
They just came from an underground carriage where they were almost certainly standing next to multiple strangers in a much more uncomfortable environment.
I don't get how this is an argument for an escalator to or from a subway, that is completely disregarded while standing shoulder to shoulder and face to face while actually on the subway.
The only time I ever see two people standing still on a single escalator stair is parents with children or romantic partners - people who are comfortable sharing physical space with one another. Strangers don't share an escalator stair.
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.
Moscow has one of the busiest subway systems in the world, ranked 4th by annual ridership. There's a "stand on right, walk on left" rule, but at congestion hours passengers are advised to stand on both sides to make transportation more efficient, and it's been like that for decades.
Reading a Guardian article on that feels, uh, really redundant? I guess we Russians have some experience in dealing with mobs.
In Moscow escalators are controlled manually. Each set of escalators has one operator. During peak hours operators manually instruct people to use both sides, constantly repeating instruction for new people that keep arriving. As soon as they stop repeating, people use only the right side as usual.
St. Petersburg has one operator for tri-lane escalators, and two for quad+ - Though maybe I just haven't noticed, it seems to me that people just naturally being the double bunching when capacity is high - usually the operators here just complain too much about people running on the escalator or sitting on the steps.
Brain fart time: how about a transit system composed entirely of escalators ? When you board, you take a slow treadmill that runs in parallel to a faster one, and that in turn to another, gaining 0.3-0.6 meters/second on each lateral skip. You do the reverse when approaching your destination.
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.
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.
TL;DR: Because many more travelers stand (on the right) than walk (on the left); catering to the latter potentially leaves nearly half the escalator's capacity unused.
Walking on an escalator is usually not very efficient thing - you cut throughput in half and will maybe save 30 to 60 seconds walking down, and only if you'll actually catch a train in that period. Walking upwards is even less efficient - saving 10-20 seconds by inconveniencing hundreds of people? Really?
All this is comparable to people crossing streets on red light and afterwards walking slower than me crossing on green.
It's still faster for the person running up the escalator but for that luxury, we are sacrificing half the capacity of the escalator.
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.
i figure it's not a luxury. people walk slowly inside the stations. escalator or no escalator. platforms are ridiculously small. i avoid taking the underground when i'm commuting to work because it's just hell. walking up the escalator is the one time i feel i'm actually going places (when i'm commuting). this would be acceptable if the rest of the journey wasn't just miserable. now they set out to make the journey 100% miserable. thanks tfl...
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!
I run up stairs. Hence have little patience but plenty of scorn for people who can't be bothered with a bit of locomotion on the escalator. Come on, I'm 56, you're half my age, move it!
London Transport might have attempted a campaign along those lines. Lowest common denominator can be tiresome at times.
With many thing once people get used to a change their behaviour adapts in ways that the changer did not hope for. I suspect this will end with each person standing across both sides of the escalator cutting throughput.
I assume the biggest improvement is removing the merging problem when people queuing on the left merge at the last minute and people on the right aren't being completely passive to the queue jumping.
Why not make the escalators smaller so they only fit one person at a time? Then they could have two lanes where they used to have one and standers would naturally block walkers.
This would get you twice as many escalators, twice the maintenance. Here in Washington DC they do a miserable job with the existing escalator fleet, I hate to imagine doubling it.
I don't think your line of thinking makes sense. Escalators already account for varying widths of people. But on average, two people of varying widths can fit on an escalator. Just make the escalators more narrow so that, on average, only one person fits on the escalator.
Have you ever been on a singlewide escalator? They have both single and double in my city. Rider comfort does not scale down linearly. It's the same story on roads, a two lane highway is going to be much wider than half the width of a four lane highway.
Ah, so you're saying that two singlewide escalators wouldn't fit where a doublewide escalator exists, now? That's a different and more compelling argument, but they could still do it. Also, this article is about putting rider preferences second. I would include rider comfort as one of those preferences.
The solution is to actually have a full escalator, with an uninterrupted row of people on the left who are walking. That's what I see in Vancouver, and cities in Japan. The escalator is fully occupied, and one side of it is used for walking.
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.
How long are those escalators in Vancouver and Japan? According to the article, what they saw in the London escalators was that on the really long ones, not many people wanted to walk, but on the shorter ones they did.
Presumably there's concern about what happens to someone in the middle if they lose balance, drop something, etc. and either they or those behind them have nothing to hold onto to steady themselves. Some of the escalators on the Underground are long, and you could hurt an awful lot of people if someone fell near the top.
It is the maximum that is safe (3 wide has a person in the middle with no handrail and if anyone fell, they would become a bowling ball).
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.
Are you comfortable standing next to someone you don't know on the subway? If not, you probably wouldn't be down there in rush hour in the first place...
It seems to me that the throughput on the left side is faster - and therefore even if it were more spaced out (not the case in rush hour when it is almost as crowded as the right side), the fact that people are moving faster and spending less time on it would make up for any difference.
No it isn't. Think about it, throughput isn't determined by how fast people are moving along the escalator. It's determined by how quickly they get onto and off the escalators. People get onto and off the right side more quickly simply because more people want to stand still.
The results of the experiment prove that throughput on the left side is slower.
From tfa: An escalator that carried 12,745 customers between 8.30 and 9.30am in a normal week, for example, carried 16,220 when it was designated standing only
I don't quite understand how that works. Surely there wasn't a crowd of 3000 people at the bottom of the escalator when people were walking on the left? Where do the extra people come from?
Public transit in major cities is a set of complex queuing systems. If a station is slower getting people out, they will crowd on the platform and create "back-pressure" on the entire system as the crowd causes incoming trains to take longer to unload, people will see longer queues to enter the system so they'll be marginally more likely to take a cab or abandon their trip.
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.
I used to use the station they trialed this in at rush hour frequently, and over the course of an hour I could believe 3,000 people ended up queueing for escalator space, which is compounded because people are trying to cross the standing queue to get to the right side and walk up. You've also got the flow of traffic from the down escalator doing the same thing.
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.
Its also interesting to see the cultural turmoil people are willing to put up with just to avoid the implied worse alternative of flexible working hours or working from home occasionally.
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.
So in conclusion, present-day Londoners are lazy, and rather than encouraging people to move more, we should pander to them. Why not give everyone a Coke and a Big Mac with every Oyster card too? No wonder there is an obesity crisis.
Isn't there anything more interesting to say? Resentment isn't too useful.
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.
Done that myself a few times. In the present system, those who aren't able to walk, don't have to, and those that can, ought to be encouraged to, for the matter of public heath.
Their journey usually involves walking to the station, walking to the escalator, walking from the escalator to the train, and walking from the train to work.
That short escalator ride isn't a public health disaster.
The lack of healthy food available to commuters is probably a bigger problem.
It's more subtle than that. The difference in attitude between "I walk when it's unavoidable" and "I walk whenever I can because we spent a billion years evolving to do it and living in a city is very bad for my overall health and wellbeing".
It wouldn't be quite as large of a problem if people who were physically able would just quit being lazy and walk up the escalator, even if it is a bit of a hike. It's not like walking to the top of a skyscraper.
You know what's faster than either walking up stairs or an escalator? Walking up an escalator.
I used to go through Holborn every morning at 8.50am and I could see them preparing the experiment a few weeks in advance. They placed people in all the corridors to count throughput.
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!
"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."
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.
Please don't walk against the flow, it inconveniences so many people. :(
In some cases it can half the throughput for a coridoor as people walking in the right direction have to slow down and merge into another line just so you can go past.
Digging a single tunnel under the length of London (the Crossrail project) cost ~$25 billion. And that's just one tunnel. London has a population of ~8.5 million, and a single road lane with automated vehicles can handle around ~3,000 cars per hour. Multiply it out, and the cost of tunnelling a road system large enough to carry the entire city at high speed becomes mind-bogglingly huge.
I said "WHEN our driverless cars head underground". I did not say all the travel would be underground.
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.
I don't think you've seen a London Underground deep tube line, you ain't getting two levels of cars in that space. No overtaking either, as they use separate tubes for each direction. Even the larger, shallower subsurface lines are UK loading gauge, which isn't big enough for double decker trains. I doubt any double decked traffic on existing UK railway land without extensive expensive rebuilding.
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 depends very much on the design. Remember that at any given time, most of the tunnel in the Underground is empty. Most of the time you're waiting in stations is because other people are getting on or off, not you or your own party. And most of the stations you stop at (and travel slower before and after) aren't relevant to your own journey.
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.
But the bits of tunnel that aren't empty are extremely full.
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...
Sorry, but I don't think some of your assumptions make much sense.
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.
Tube tunnels relay are not large. They vary a bit by line but in general they're really really small and severely limit the design of new trains. There's no way you'd fit two vehicles side by side in those tunnels, and they're not high enough to stack them either. Nor are they interconnected well enough to make one the passing lane. Have a look for yourself if you get to London, the entire tube system is mind-boggling.
I'm from the UK and have been riding the Tube for decades.
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.
Right, sorry. If the tunnels were even 30cm wider this would indeed be a lot simpler, but as you say the cost of that would be wildly prohibitive in the foreseeable future. TfL would love it, though ;)
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.
Are tunnels likely to get much cheaper? Compared to a lot of construction work it seems to be fairly automated already — take a look at some Crossrail videos [1] — so I'll bet a lot of the cost is design, planning and solving unexpected problems. And the cost of the machine.
FWIW, my civil engineer friends once told me that the biggest problem with building something like this often isn't the tunnel itself, it's making sure you minimise damage to everything already built on the ground above. In this case, there is a lot of London up there, and causing subsidence under a road with average house prices in the millions would be a very expensive mistake.
>>The stand-on-the-left controversy is no exception. Harrison, Stoneman and their colleagues believe it could make a noticeable impact on congestion at some of London’s busiest stations, congestion that will only get worse as train design, frequency and reliability improve, as the trains get faster and the doors get bigger, and ever more passengers are dumped on the platform at a time.
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!
In terms of resource use, that is a spectacularly efficient solution. They are not "shouldering" a burden, they are using existing capacity to a fuller extent, which is just about the most efficient solution to any problem anywhere. It's cheap and gets the job done.
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.
It is efficient only when the escalator is running near capacity, not when the escalators are less than 1/2 full. I suspect that this experiment will result in new rules to be applied 24/7 no matter whether they are anywhere near capacity.
Why would you expect that? Given how pragmatic most Brits are about rules and etiquette, at least once social norms have been established and people have become used to how things work, your assumption seems rather pessimistic.
> But rather than address that spillover issue with money/time/new bricks, yet another code of behavior is to be enforced
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?
It depends on which infrastructure you upgrade. Adding more trains/lines/stations will certainly bring more traffic/passengers. But escalators just move people within stations, they do not add new routes/destinations and so aren't going to bring people to a station that would otherwise not be there.
> escalators just move people within stations, they do not add new routes/destinations and so aren't going to bring people to a station that would otherwise not be there.
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.)
That's some fine dystopian fiction you've written there. Back in the real world though, its not like there's police enforcing the current norms of standing to the left, pulling people aside to issue tickets for blocking the right hand side. At the worst someone doing so will be asked to move by a walker.
What makes you think we'll suddenly see some sort of escalator police formed to enforce these norms?
Capacity could be improved even more, without fuelling the obesity epidemic and inconveniencing those of us who prefer to keep moving . All they have to do is make walking compulsory on both sides.
I'm an escalator walker myself but not everyone is physically able to walk up or down a very large set of a stairs. Just because someone can not do that doesn't mean we ought to design things to exclude them.
Of course not. However, since you have several lanes, what about having "walking compulsory" and "standing compulsory" escalators? Assuming enough escalators to get the right distribution, this would ensure maximum throughput and minimum annoyance at peak hours.
I think you'd still end up with wasted escalator capacity. If the observations in the article hold true in this scenario, you'd have a mostly empty "walking" escalator right next to a packed "standing" escalator.
I think the point is enough people prefer to stand over walking than any dedicated walking space is likely wasted.
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.
Access for physically disabled passengers is a significant challenge on the Underground. A lot of stations still really don't have routine platform access for wheelchairs to some or all lines. Even those that do then have the problem of platform and train being at different levels and often having a significant gap between them when the train stops.
Stations with suitable access are specifically marked on a lot of the maps for exactly this reason.
Holborn station is 100 years old, although it was significantly altered in 1933 when the original lifts were replaced with escalators.
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.
Would this not be fairly straightforward to simulate? I see statements like: "and, it seemed, travelling more efficiently and safely as a result." and "His report prompted Harrison and her colleagues to wonder..." and think... they're guessing? They're going right to disrupting normal travel patterns of many people for a trial on nothing more than a hunch? Why not prove to a reasonable degree that this would actually work beyond the anecdotal feelings of a few employees before inflicting such a change on the public?
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.
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.