Monday, September 26, 2005
Tube geek (11) Overcrowding
Some tube lines are busier than others. Travel from Kensington Olympia to Earl's Court late in the evening and you'll probably have the whole carriage to yourself. But risk a trip southbound through King's Cross on the Victoria line in the early morning rush hour and you'll probably end up more squashed than the proverbial sardine. Here's a tubegeek guide to the busiest station-to-station journeys on the network at morning peak time (courtesy of Transport for London's stats department):
Busiest line: Victoria line southbound
Finsbury Park → (10th busiest section) → Highbury & Islington → (3rd busiest) → King's Cross St Pancras → (4th busiest) → Euston → (busiest) → Warren Street → (2nd busiest) → Oxford Circus
tubegeek comment: The most cramped conditions anywhere on the tube are to be found between Highbury & Islington and Oxford Circus, used by in excess of 42000 passengers every morning rush hour.
2nd busiest line: Central line westbound
Leyton → (15th busiest) → Stratford → (14th busiest) → Mile End → (9th busiest) → Bethnal Green → (7th busiest) → Liverpool Street → (5th busiest) → Bank → (8th busiest) → St Paul's → (11th busiest) → Chancery Lane
tubegeek comment: This explains why I never manage to open my newspaper on my morning commute into Central London
3rd busiest line: Victoria line northbound
Victoria → (6th busiest) → Green Park → (13th busiest) → Oxford Circus
4th busiest line: Northern line northbound
Clapham Common → (16th busiest) → Clapham North → (12th busiest) → Stockwell
TfL have definitions of what 'overcrowded' means, which I'll illustrate using a Victoria line train as an example:
• Seating Capacity means "the total number of Seat Spaces on a given Rolling Stock type" [304 seats per train]
• Crush Standing Capacity means "the maximum number of standing Customers that can be accommodated on a Train at a density of seven Customers per square metre" [one train has a standing area of 132¼m², so the Crush Standing Capaciity is 926]
• Crush Capacity means "the sum of Crush Standing Capacity and Seating Capacity" [926+304=1230, i.e. more than three times as many passengers standing as sitting]
• Fully Loaded Train means "a Train carrying a load which is equivalent to the Crush Capacity multiplied by 72kg" [1230×72kg = 88½ tons of passengers]
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