please empty your brain below |
On the Overground, the fully step free stations are all on the East London core, where the only rolling stock passing through ever are the LO 378s. This means they can have a platform that is higher and closer to the train without causing clearance issues, especially as all trains stop.
It would not seem unreasonable, were funding better, to make "Make the subsurface lines fully step free" a fairly short project for TfL, followed by "make all tube stations on the surface step free". The ones deep underground are a thornier challenge. |
The symbol for Accessibility is a wheelchair, with the implication that they are the target passengers for accessibility upgrades, rather than those with heavy luggage or those who find climbing stairs merely difficult.
Wheelchairs on the TfL rail network are not exactly a common sight, and certainly not on the deep-level tubes. Would any wheelchair-bound readers of DG care to offer any experiences? Has the increased number of Accessible stations actually made any difference to their use of the network? |
Deep level stations have escalators so so stair climbing is limited.
I am 100% able-bodied but face the access stairs at Harrow-on-the-Hill station with as much dread as if I was about to climb the north face of the Matterhorn! |
It would be better if passenger accessibility was measured by passenger volumes - so how many of the busiest stations are accessible, rather than just any station.
Without unlimited investment, which isn't going to happen, there is little value to having step free access at Oakwood or Southfields, as there are few places to travel to, although Crossrail will improve things in Central London. Personally I prefer the clean traditional 'blob free' + 'zone free' map. |
Counting the number of step free stations on the map is a quick and easy metric for assessing accessibility of the network. More telling would be an algorithm that compared the number of step free journeys across the whole network with the total number of journeys available to the able bodied. A decent approximation of this would be to track the number of interchange stations - particularly in zone one - that are step free.
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If anyone is thinking of writing a program to implement Marc's idea of counting possible step-free journeys, they should probably weight each journey by some estimate of demand for such a journey (difficult, I know, in the absence of point-to-point ticket data).
Because the inability to travel step-free between, say, Southgate and Upminster West should not have much weight against the in/ability to travel between, say, Tower Hill and Oxford Circus. |
What's the newest station on the map with no step-free access? Hatton Cross?
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Newest is probably Hatton Cross, but of the 36 existing stations added to the map in 2015, only eleven are shown as having step free access.
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