You’d think they’d consider using a clear oleophobic overlaminate instead of flashy graphics that attract attention to the issue. Good design is more than visual.
These are Eduardo Paolozzi’s ghosts taking their revenge for the destruction of the beautiful mosaic at old Tottenham Court Road Station, obviously.
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.
Metro is a balm compared to the PenFed illuminated tunnel at Washington Dulles airport.
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.
My favorite thing about the DC metro are the micro-targeted ads. Obviously, there's all the defense contractor junk at Pentagon City, but I also remember one at Foggy Bottom that was like "so-and-so is on the payroll of ISIS and the State Department should BAN them."
I love the very-specific niche ads of the DC metro area. The #1 morning radio station in DC is WTOP and their ads are for attack helicopter programs instead of used Subarus. As in, "the Lockheed Grumman Supa-Attak 123XYZ is the proven program for warfighters in the C4ISR space <insert another 30 seconds of insider mumbo jumbo>". Certainly makes a change from car dealers and mattress stores.
How much energy is "wasted" to print all those paper posters, ship them to all stations, have people periodically replace them, discard the old ones etc?
Probably a lot less than it costs to build, ship, and actively power the displays.
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.
But why would TfL replace their old school displays with LED displays if the latter cost more than the former in the first place?
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'.
That order (alphabetical) seems correct or at least reasonable to me? Why would I care about the Shenfield train if I'm going to Abbey Wood?
(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.)
Back then, the ground itself was cold and acted as a heat sink. People complained of the cold in the underground. A century+ of trains and passengers has warmed the clay, so the stations heat up.
I've seen similar things where I work. In a new building, the architects called for small air vents that would look nice according to some aesthetic criterion. Unfortunately, the vents were so small that, to maintain air flow, the fans inside them had to spin so fast they screamed. This made for a very unpleasant environment.
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.
This is a negative outcome of the Town and Country Planning Act. We've mandated by law that all planning is done upfront and due to the possibility of construction fraud provide detailed designs to building contractors that disallow them from substituting any materials or design choices without it being explicitly requested by the employer. In theory, there can be conversation between individual subcontractors and the project managers or architects, but in practice these are not always on site at the same time and there are significant costs involved in changes as well as issues with trust. Therefore, we effectively have a very expensive waterfall process that everybody is legally obligated to follow.
If it's your project, you can order the builders to reconfigure the ventilation ducts pretty much however you like.
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.
In a small house you can move outlets. In a large building the space for every wire and pipe is accounted for. Moving the outlet means that the wires to it have to move and in turn that means a plumber later can't come in and put the pipe where it must go. In a house they solve this by having the plumber come in before the electrician (the order is much more complex), but in a large building you need them working at the same time or you will never get done. Even in a house you still need to plan the plumbing as often a pipe and a beam need to go through the same place - either the beam moves or the toilet moves.
Sometimes - but some large buildings have loads of space above suspended ceilings and in cable trays and suchlike. Office buildings know every new tenant might want to move internal walls, rearrange sockets, reconfigure the kitchen and so on, and they're built with that in mind.
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...
Many buildings are designed that way. It is a useful thing to do, but there are trade offs - you pay for that extra space in other materials and extra time. For an office the office/cubes/open layout is installed by the renters after they lease the building and thus the space you are talking about isn't part of the initial construction effort. They still plan/reserve space for the pipes and large wires in initial construction. Generally the bathrooms and break rooms (kitchens/cafeteria) would be done in initial construction and so carefully planned out.
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 don't think you disagree with me. For larger projects, like infrastructure projects, very detailed designs are used and contracts that disallow substitutions or alterations to the design without contractual agreement.
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.
Building is not a waterfall process because of the Planning act. It's waterfall because of the cost structure of building. Every time you iterate physically, you are throwing a lot of money away in time and materials. So any iteration is pushed back to the paper part of the exercise, in which case it might just as well happen before planning approval.
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.
> It's waterfall because of the cost structure of building. Every time you iterate physically, you are throwing a lot of money away in time and materials.
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.
Building is - or should be - iterative. However each building is a separate iteration. Once you are done you stop and look at what works and what doesn't, then adjust the next one. The more you make your building different/unique from what everyone else around you is doing the more expensive it will be as nobody knows what changes really work - and even if they are for the better the lack of experience means you are paying extra for the laborers to figure out how to do things.
This reminds me of the weird AC behaviour at one of the London office buildings I used to work in. The AC or heating would turn on or off seemingly at random and when enough people complained about it (i.e. our CEO got sick one more time) it was revealed that the building is managed remotely by a company from Iowa and the thermostat that controlled our building was installed in their office and not in London. I was glad my contract ended and was not interested in renewing.
Same issue as UX and features in enterprise software. When a product is sold to people who don't have to use it then optics are more important than practicality
Very many older (and not even that old) tube stations have glossy tiled walls[1], presumably because they're easy to clean with just a cloth.
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
Just to note, most of the underground stations on the Washington D.C. metro system are bare concrete. The way the stations are constructed, using a low barrier wall, discourages people from touching the main station walls. The low light kind of also helps hide some of the grime. But overall they're relatively clean.
Probably clean up discarded biological matter pretty well. Rats have decent cognitive capabilities. I wonder if trained cleaning rats would displace the naughty variety.
Wild rats aren't naughty. They're just animals trying to make their way in the world the same as the rest of us. But they do make a mess and carry diseases, again maybe the same as the rest of us lol.
I have seen stations refurbished less than 10 years where the new benches had to be replaced because they were already falling apart after that time outdoors...
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.
All buildings - including stations should have maintenance schedules. There are things to do hourly (or when open), every 2 hours, 4 hours, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly. In addition you have 5, 10, and 30 year remodel cycles.
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.
Might be pressure treated timber - looks largely the same as untreated wood from a distance and can last a long time in damp conditions. Many sheds and timber fences are pressure treated and last well - sure they wont last a lifetime or whatever, but will probably not rot "quickly"
This is the obvious outcome when society rewards the manager who boosts the stock price this quarter (at a future cost) more than the manager that makes sure the company will survive for a hundred years.
It's very difficult to make thousands of up-front planning decisions perfectly. It'd be even more costly to try to perfect every aspect upfront within the planning stage and it'd be more reasonable to make best attempts but to provide for the ability (and budget) to retrofit bespoke alterations to fix problems that arise at a later date.
But surely it should be simple enough to look at what alterations have been made on other lines already and start off from a basis that is at least as good.
The design and planning process for UK infrastructure is already notoriously expensive and we already do significantly more "planning" than we used to do 100 years ago (when we were actually capable of rapidly building high quality infrastructure).
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.
Sounds like many of these issues could be described with better knowledge sharing and more tightly coupled processes between planning/building/maintenence.
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.
I agree that it would be fatalistic to not try to improve the situation using technology, I'm just trying to explain what happens as you try to do so with more planning.
while 100 years ago we built rapidly, there was a large cost in human lives. Planning is part of how we solved that - only part of it, but it is a factor.
With a constant rotation of contractors and the government staff overseeing them, offering innovative solutions at a better price than the next bidder, opportunities to learn from experience are difficult to achieve with large multi year projects
Or they decided it was an opportunity to test potential improvements. Testing them on a new line where fixing any "improvements" that don't pan out will be perceived as an improvement might well be better than testing them on an old line where any regressions will be immediately perceived as such...
> difficult to make thousands of up-front planning decisions perfectly.
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)
So, are you arguing waterfall is the better process for innovative designs, and agile should be used only for small renovations?
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 improve and there is trying something new. Rails have been around for nearly two centuries - they are a solve problem. We don't need to innovate on many parts as there is nothing wrong with the old technology with some minor updated. We already know what works well for a standard train system. 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!
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.
Rails in particular have improved quite a bit. Modern newest generation slab designs requiring very, very little maintenance and are fast to install.
> 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.
> is idea that modern engineers are idiots and can't think of anything people 100 years
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)
Crossrail uses advanced signaling making very good use of the resource. They use platform screen doors for both improve safety and reliability but also fast loading and unloading. Seem to me these are all improvements and were the right approach for Crossrail. They didn't do everything perfectly but the system is pretty damn good and pretty damn successful.
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.
I'm not up on all the issues with Crossrail, but that trains cost too much in the English speaking world is well known and Crossrail is not exempt. Generally this comes down to stations that are much larger than needed and other things that appear to be justified until you dig deeper and discover they are expensive and the rest of the world does without just fine.
Trains cost to much because like many other countries, Britain buys from their own manufactures. Because of the state of British railroading since privatization most of British rail manufacturing collapsed and only a very small number of manufactures are left.
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 feel the point is a bit subtler. We should strive for improvement. We should also understand that that takes more than the normal amount of resources to do something different and better & either commit to spending what's required or, if we can't afford to, use something already proven instead.
The half-done or broken improvements still get called "innovations" and give innovation overall a worse reputation.
> I feel the point is a bit subtler. We should strive for improvement. We should also understand that that takes more than the normal amount of resources to do something different and better & either commit to spending what's required or, if we can't afford to, use something already proven instead.
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.
What innovation is left? Concrete has been around for centuries in modern forms - we can tweak the formula a lot, but still the same basic idea as when it was invented 100 years ago. Most of what passes for innovation has been tried before. Other things were not tried because anyone who understood the problem knows they are cannot be cost effective. Unfortunately the people who fund this cannot be experts in the field, and thus can easily be persuaded to fund things by scammers that anyone who really was an expert could tell you in a few hours of study are a bad idea.
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".
I used to work in a building that was once a factory, the room I was in was once a break room. For years workers would come in for their lunch and lean back against the walls. Years of (probably Brylcreme'd) heads being placed against the walls led to a situation where no amount of painting would cover it up. All these little brownish-grey spots appearing on the walls a few hours after each painting.
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.
It seems they are trying to make the stickers as small as possible. Why not make the sticker bigger and curved at the sides? A feature could be made of it. Any graphic designer will tell you the value of padding.
Whilst the Elizabeth line makes a lot of money, TFL doesn't and currently is missing around half its funding needed for maintenance, trying to justify new benches on a line that's only 2 years old would be hard to justify when other parts of the network need funding much more that the core stations on the Elizabeth line
These vinyl stickers are an elegant hack. Vinyl is cheap and easily replaceable, in fact it might just be easier to put another sticker over them in the future.
I guess paying a local to put tiles as we were doing a century ago is deemed too simple and expensive at the same time?
Better to use some polymer derived from Saudi Aramco's oil, printed on a machine made in China, somewhere in east Europe at the very best.
At least a couple British managers got paid a fair amount to discuss the proposed designs in a meeting room with their contractors.
Have you looked at patterns on public seating wherever there's fabric? Or e.g. hotel carpets and the like? Consider the heavily patterned designs often serve a function.
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.
The benches are designed to be used for on average 4-5mins, maybe 20mins if having to wait for a special train. Their purpose is to serve commuters using the trains. Not as an alternative to proper social housing (which the UK has lots of).
Except the wall curves inward, which pushes your head, neck and upper back forward. Having sat on them, it's rather uncomfortable, and must be worse for people taller than me. That said, I'm not convinced it's deliberately hostile, I just think it's incompetent design, favouring a minimalist style over functionality.
Funnily, the same approach is often used for acoustic / noise issues. Add music / other sources of sound to try and mask the acoustics issue (unsuccessfully).
Yes and no. Active noise cancelling works well at a point and against some common kinds of noise, but if you want to act on a large area such as a tube station, active noise cancelling won't work. Much better to introduce a bit of white noise or music, that makes e.g. the clack-clack-clack of footsteps on the stairs much less noticeable in the wider area.
No, active noise cancelling isn't about masking noise with sound, active noise cancelling takes the original noise and mixes it back 180 degrees out of phase. The net result is zero noise, when done perfectly. In practice it's almost like that (for the frequencies covered by the noise cancelling equipment - in an airplane it's like the background noise just.. turns off. What's left is typically people talking. It's easier to hear the flight attendants).
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).
It's glass fibre reinforced concrete (GFRC). Very much doubt it's heat-reactive, suspect it's just oil & dirt on a somewhat porous surface (so cleaning properly is labour-intensive, stickers are cheaper)
It is very very very unlikely that they would build an underground pedestrian station that had walls that reacted to heat, unless it was to absorb heat in case of fire.
I'd also think that plastic resins are not the best thing to be reacting to heat.
Used to have grease spots on the living room wall adjacent to my dad's computer, where 6yr old me and my 4yr old brother were leaning against the wall while watching dad play Duke Nukem and Quake. (mom didn't allow us to play these games)
It's not hostile, it's just practical. Seats with backs would take up way too much space. And you don't need it anyway because the maximum time you'll be sitting on these is like 5 minutes.
If the (quite useless) armrests weren't there to prevent the homeless from sleeping on them, people wouldn't be sitting in the exact same spot every time, causing a light smear instead of defined person-like shaped on the wall.
While it's an interesting point. I'm not sure I agree that these are here purely to stop homeless people from sleeping on them.
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.
> 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.
People without a home do not have access to the platforms that these seats are on. These seats are on the underground, past the ticket barriers, and they would quickly be removed for trespassing on private property, as all TFL stations are staffed.
Typically in London, People without a home would be found outside the station, or occasionally in the concourse.
Bro you've clearly never ridden the tube. Homeless people are on it all the time begging. They slip in behind other people through the barriers at busy or unmanned stations.
Londoner for 24 years. I don't know what to tell you, 'Bro'.
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.
Some of the small, outer, (above ground) tube stations I use have periods where staff leave the gates open and leave the public areas. They even do this during busy periods. It is easy to get onto the tube network at these places.
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?
Thank you for verifying that what I'm saying is not that unreasonable. I'm getting downvoted way too much for totally factual claims here.
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.
You're getting downvoted because armrests only act as 'hostile architecture' when they stop people lying down to sleep, and the beggars on the tube are visibly not sleeping.
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.
Yes, I was responding to the claim that "People without a home do not have access to the platforms". That is all. That therefore rules out that as the main reason that homeless people are not sleeping rough in tube stations. I never mentioned anything about the hostile architecture. That was someone else, so I do not deserve a downvote for it. I was only addressing the claim about access, so that we could discuss the real reasons for the lack of rough sleeping in the tube, not fantasy ones.
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.
I mean i think the vast majority of them are homeless and/or drug users. Lots of homeless people are cos they're freezing their nuts off with no hope every day. It's honestly impossible to tell which of them are on drugs and which aren't. But I find it unlikely that most of those people aren't homeless.
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.
I don't think I've ever seen a homeless person sleeping in a London Underground station in 30 years of commuting, and many of them have benches without armrests.
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
Well, without a ticket, anyway. N15 is a three hour bus journey for cheap, overnight, and certainly use to be popular for rough sleepers, providing they had a ticket.
And even if they weren't there for hindering homeless people, they're still hostile for overweight people - the ones, aside geriatrics, that most need the seats.
I’m pretty sure a lot of the discoloration comes from pigments/microplastics from the clothes rubbing against the wall. Look how dark the shoulders of these “ghosts” are. If it were just grease, you’d expect the head part to be darkest.
We should somehow cram AI in it and lure sweet VC money.
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.
Add a “rate this stream” leaderboard gamification feature powered by blockchain and crypto, just to appeal to any holdouts from 2021, and we’re in business.
It's funny that a significant fraction of human effort goes to counteracting that humans (as a whole) are pretty gross — constantly shedding a fine, moist mist of dead skin cells and waste products wherever we go.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimacassar