please empty your brain below
First it told me to change at Stratford and take the Jubilee, which takes months. I set the option "do not change at Stratford" and it sent me to OXFORD CIRCUS to take the Bakerloo line. I could not get it to give me the easy and quick option of Central/Waterloo & City, and note that it didn't even tell me to change to the Northern at Tottenham Court Road.
Are the computer journey planners being fiddled with to make people take Olympically-correct routes, even if they are, wouldn't they be trying to keep me off the Central or Jubilee?
When all the venues in the Olympic Park are in use, there are almost 150,000 people watching sport. Add to that the spectators from earlier sessions that day who decided to stay in the Park to look round. Then there are the people who arrive in plenty of time for their sporting event later on in the day. And finally, there is all the ‘background demand’ to consider – passengers who use Stratford station on a regular basis but are not going to the Games. This includes the workforce and customers of the UK’s third largest shopping centre.
All the modelling for the Games has shown that demand for the Olympic Park NEEDS to be spread between Stratford and West Ham (and Stratford International). Given that Stratford is now synonymous with the Olympics in most peoples’ minds, the message to get some – not all - spectators to use West Ham has to be very strong.
It has and always will be the case that people who have an intimate knowledge of London’s geography will be able to pick holes in the transport plan for a big event. I would suggest that this is because they are thinking of how they, personally, can get to and from the event as quickly as possible - and not how to direct crowds safely and effectively to transport routes that have sufficient capacity.
If there are delays entering the park from Stratford station that are longer than the walk from West Ham station then it is not misleading to promote West Ham.
Is it misleading to move spectators to less crowded routes - nicer for them and out of the way of commuters?
Realistically no one station could cope with all the Olympic Park traffic. Obviously it's possible to build such a cavernous place, but the people in it still have to feed onto the trains available and it wasn't practical to build new Tube lines to serve a bigger station when there are alternatives nearby anyway.
Just assuming such a place had been built there would be three other major considerations:
1) Cost, especialy when you consider..
2) Legacy use. Yes, there will be events at the park after the games, but nothing on the scale of the Olympics and no transport demands to match those crowds.
3)Vulnerability. If a security alert / incident closes the station you've lost your entire transport access in one hit. Doesn't matter how big it is then, it's shut.
Stratford may be closer, but if people ignore West Ham and all attempt to travel through Stratford it will likely keep shutting to stop overcrowding. Once that happens it may as well be on the moon for all the use it will be.
DG: yes there are some less-than-intuitive routes, these are designed to use the capacity that is available. The south side of the Olympic Stadium is fairly equidistant from Stratford and West Ham. The entry to the Hyde Park site ("BT London Live") is considerably closer to Edgware rd and Paddington then it is to Green Park (where you might typically go for Hyde Park) and slightly closer than Hyde Park Corner. Wembley Stadium is closer to the stadium than Wembley Park but how many people can it handle?
At Liverpool Street the signage will direct you towards the Greater Anglia service. Hardly a "longer" way - it is direct, non-stop, 7 minutes travelling time and even a lightly loaded Class 315 is going to more comfortable than a heavily loaded Central line train. Another example where all available routes are being used and not just those ones 'that take longer'.
Some signage is up 5 weeks early because there is a lot to do and a finite number of nights to do it.
http://diamondgeezer.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/step-too-far.html
Oi, Kirk, I can't use <a> tags any more! I get an "Internal Server Error" whenever I try to submit.
Isn't this just the tragedy of the commons? It may be in the interests of any individual spectator to use (e.g.) Stratford, but it is not in anyone's interests for /everyone/ to try to use Stratford. So the manipulation of the signs to try to favour the less-obvious routes is /overall/ in everryone's interests.
Or something.
Yes, I know that some people have to travel via West Ham or the system chokes up.
But I have a problem with people standing on a perfectly good Central line platform being wilfully misdirected up and away to travel via a longer route.
If circumstances on the day require, sure, then people can be redirected. But for the default route to involve an unexpected mile long walk, that doesn't seem fair to less-fit spectators.
(it reminds me of the excessive redirection for passengers at King's Cross St Pancras. People are sent the long way to balance out the flow, but if you're an elderly traveller, or in a hurry, you suffer)
Six tube lines run into St Pancras, both stations have extra-long platforms (thanks to Eurostar), and it can manage trains every 5min at peak times. Surely such a service can handle nearly as many people as the Central line?
I'm no transport planner, so what am I missing?
Pete: what will happen is you waste taxpayers money when TfL call out contractors to replace them.
DG: we are going to agree to differ over Mile End. But I'm paid to think these through to their logical conclusion across the transport system and its about more than one platform at Mile End.
CS: DG has already posted the 'Javelin' timetable which is 8 trains/hour for most of the day. At about 1,000 passengers per train it is about a third of what the Central line can carry. Admittedly in greater comfort. There is a substantial and very well thought out 'routing strategy' behind where signage goes that is agreed between LU, the TOCs, etc. One of those issues is that Olympic traffic generated at King's Cross, St Pancras and Euston (interchange from main line+hotels+people who already know where they are going) will fill Javelin without pumping more interchange traffic towards it from the Tube.
Go back about 10 months and DG unwittingly blogged on this, when the spectator journey planner wouldn't let him take the Jubilee from Wembley to Stratford!
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