No I won't be afraid, no I won't be afraid

[venta]

Controversy in Holborn. Commuters shocked.

London transport systems have one rule. Ok, they have lots of rules. But there is one that everyone cares about. Which everyone follows, except tourists. Dead-eyed, taciturn commuters have been known to go so far as to speak to tourists who are not following the rule.

This is the rule: if you are standing still on an escalator, stand on the right. This leaves a clear path for anyone who wants to walk up or down the escalator.

When the Olympics came to London, TimeOut printed a handy guide to saying "stand on the right" in a couple of hundred different languages. There are signs in every station, but Londoners don't need them. It's engrained.

Now, various stations on the network have capacity issues. Oxford Circus, for example, has too many escalators and too few ticket barriers. At busy times, they open the barriers for fear the tide of people coming up the escalators will get crushed. Holborn, the station I use for work, has too few escalators. In the evenings (when it is mostly incoming traffic) they close some of the ticket barriers to prevent escalator overcrowding. In the morning it is a slow plod from the platform to the street as people funnel slowly onto the escalators.

So they are trialling a scheme...

Horror!

It makes perfect sense. Holborn's escalators are long (around 100 steps). Relatively few people walk up them, meaning the left hand side is often virtually empty. I am a walker, so this scheme slows me personally down, but it almost doubles each escalator's capacity overall.

Each day there has been two or three people whose entire job is to stand at the bottom of the escalators shouting variants of "stand on both sides, stand on the right as well". There are signs. There are announcements over the PA. I suspect, though am not certain, that transport staff have been making extra escalator trips purely to stand on the left and block the walkers' route.

And still people huddle over to the right like frightened, sullen sheep. Because YOU DO NOT STAND ON THE LEFT. A psychologist would have a field day in Holborn at present.

I'm pretty sure some commuters are so set in their ways, headphones in and head down, auto-piloting their way to work, that they are still completely oblivious to the three-week trial. And Holborn, bless them, are doing their best at a proper trial, with people counting throughput every day.

AndI think -I think - it is a success. Crowding has seemed less bad, recently. But really, what they're running is a two-and-a-half-week commuter-training program, after which they might get a couple of days of trial in.