In message , at 11:23:37 on
Mon, 10 Mar 2014, Paul Corfield remarked:
Cambridge is slightly different from many places in that it has a steady
flow of passengers all day, and a very spread out peak (so I'm not sure
quite what hours Colin is talking about, although traditionally he's
rather Kings-Cross centric in his view).

The station is very busy at some 'traditional' off-peak times like 10am
on a Saturday, and in the evening the local (mainly outflow) peak is
from perhaps 4pm-6pm, but most London commuters won't be arriving back
until well after 6pm.

Sure but that simply means that the analysis required to get a
workable gateline has to be done in more depth and with excellent
input from the operating staff who know all these nuances about demand
over a day, over a week and over the year.

You could get 98% of it from a bloke with a clipboard stood there for a
week.

A judgement has to made about how you handle regular, predictable
demand and then what you do for events which might draw exceptional
crowds a couple of times a year.

Those sorts of events seem to get special measures anyway (eg lots of
bluebottles to handle the football hooligans) so the gateline is the
least of your worries.

London Underground has to deal with those variations all the
time and so do the TOCs.

I am not for a second saying it is easy just that it requires thought
and potentially a lot of money to get it right. I recall a post from
Colin (I think) that said the queues to buy tickets at Cambridge had
stretched out of the station and round to where I believe the Busway
bus stops are.

There are frequently huge queues to buy tickets at Cambridge (my
daughter has reported waiting half an hour to buy a £2 ticket from a
machine). That's partly because there are relatively few windows (and
machines) for a station with that much traffic, but also due to the
physical constraints of a listed building that's now had its circulating
area even more reduced by the barrier installation.

Back in the day there would be chaps with portable machines issuing
tickets as well as the windows/machines, and not providing that is
simply yet another way that the ToCs show lack of empathy with the
public.

Meanwhile, if they had a counter with Edmondson day-returns to London
sold for cash only, the number of people they could serve would more
than double instantly!

I found that staggering but I guess it illustrates the scale of demand.
It's been a long while since I visited Cambridge so I'm possibly out of
date about the stop locations.

The MGB stops have currently been moved "temporarily" about two hundred
yards further from the station, but I'm not betting they will move back
ever. I think they used to be where the rising bollards are in this
Streetview, but are now where the bus-in-the-distance with the red rear
lights is:

http://goo.gl/maps/ubaH2
--
Roland Perry