Not all transport experiments are about crowds and how to avoid them. One famous piece of research took place on New York's subway, where students were tasked with the nerve-wracking job of asking passengers if they could have their seat, without any explanation as to why.
It turns out most people will get up and stand if you ask — but it's terrifying to have to ask. No wonder that the London transport authority marks as one of its successes a trial for a "Please Offer Me a Seat" badge — similar to the "Baby on Board" buttons — so that people whose need to sit down wasn't immediately obvious wouldn't always have to explain themselves.
And there's more to travel than speed. Getting to work on time is important, but plenty of commuters are happy spending five minutes more on a train in order to get a seat or avoid changing lines, Sutherland argues.
That could be one reason why a Wi-Fi based study of passenger routes on the Tube was so surprising, with commuters sometimes opting for convoluted routes with multiple, unnecessary changes or spending longer travelling than necessary. But if you stop assuming speed is our main factor, other passengers' routes only look bonkers because we don't know their motivation — perhaps they'll do anything to avoid Bank station at rush hour, prefer to avoid stairs, or know a colleague takes a certain train and want to avoid small talk.
Proof of the fact speed isn't everything was borne out by TfL's escalator experiment. Making everyone stand was actually faster for passengers to get out of the station, but it neglected the psychological discomfort of breaking existing etiquette. British commuters would rather queue than break rules. This article is part of our WIRED on Transport series where we explore the challenges and solutions in transport, such as the future of borders after Brexit, the new race to make supersonic travel work and the hover train that never was.
Cheap oil killed sailing ships. How I, a year-old writer with a crippling existential fear of space, trained to be an astronaut. Search Events Jobs Consulting. Troubling numbers. How does the Tube compare globally? Image source, Thinkstock. Could slowing down the Tube decrease congestion levels? Longer journeys in London tend to involve more than one mode of transport.
In London, the model shows congestion in blue concentrating into major bottlenecks when trains on the underground network red run faster the right-hand case ; each map is 'normalised' to its own maximum traffic level - if they were on the same scale, the left-hand map with slower train speeds would be almost completely white.
The structure of the New York system produces even more congestion at the city's centre. Related Topics. Computing London Underground. Published 28 January In theory you can follow that line of inquiry for each line, accounting for the spurious branches of lines like the Central, Northern, Piccadilly, Circle, District and Metropolitan, and come up with a rough estimate for the average speed of the line based on how long it takes to get from one end to the other.
Helpfully, someone else by the name of Michael McHugh has done that before now, and came up with this bar chart to show the results. Mmmmm, data. Image: Michael McHugh. The Central line is allegedly fastest, the Victoria and Jubilee are second and third fastest, and the Circle languishes at the bottom of the table. What we do have is some rather patchy indications of where on the network the tube goes especially fast.
As the network is above ground at this point as it is for approximately 60 per cent of the entire London Underground system, ironically , you get pretty good signal, so you can clock up the speed that the train is travelling at. The old A-stock train, here near Chorleywood station. Image: Antje. Being new and shiny, the assumption might be that these trains can go faster, but in reality the opposite is true.
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Try The App Maybe Later. No matter how many times you ride it, there's always something new to learn about the London Underground. Here's 25 of the most interesting facts The network of tunnels extends to miles. For comparison, it's only miles from Hull to London. The network became known as the Tube in the early part of the twentieth century.
This is an abbreviation of the nickname The Twopenny Tube, which was given to the Central Line because all fares cost tuppence.
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