"Tim Roll-Pickering" wrote:
Paul Corfield wrote:

I wasn't there and have never been there during rush hour on the
current station layout. However the various photo images that have
been sprayed in the media over the weeks show a station completely
jammed full with people pressed up against the gatelines *and* people
queuing outside the station too.

Allowing a station to get to the point where there is no circulation
space is really rather daft. Even LU at its most overloaded stations
seem to do a bit better than that in that two way flows in and out
remain possible.

Some weeks earlier I used London Bridge in the evening peak but travelling
against the tide and it was pretty lousy then on an average evening. There
were few clear signs to direct incoming passengers to the correct gates and
then once through them it was "Fight your way through the crowd to either
the exit or the tube escalators" - and these are two distinct destinations
on such a busy concourse with all the consequences for having to cut
through - and so that just adds to congestion and frustration. Outgoing
passengers were all just piling up on the concourse with no idea at all
which platforms their trains would depart from. There was no attempt to
encourage some space around the barriers or to make it easy to move around.

Notably the platforms themselves looked very empty unless they had a train
in them and the system had declared its destination. There didn't seem to be
any cases of people awaiting a train on the platform itself, either due to
altered patterns or the info system adopting a "don't tell until the driver
is in the outward cab" approach. Great for incoming passengers who don't
have to fight their way off the train itself but it just adds to the scrum
to get to a train with only a few minutes' warning.

I think one reason for the latter is that the current low-level bay
platforms are quite narrow, so they don't want departing pax filling them
too soon. It can be a real scrum when a packed 12-car train arrives, and
there are departing pax waiting on the platform.