In message , at 10:13:26 on Sun, 29
Nov 2015, Clive Page remarked:
I'm surprised nobody else has noted here what I saw last week in (I
think) the Evening Standard: that TfL are about to tell passengers at
Holborn not to walk up the escalators. They claim that the
passenger-carrying capacity is greater when people stand on both left
and right. There was no mention of a penalty for those trying to walk
up the left hand side, but as we all know, it only takes one person to
block that side by standing on it for the whole system to degrade to
standing on both sides.

I really doubt the capacity arguments: it may be true that you get more
people on the standing side than on the walking side as walking needs a
bit more inter-person space, but on the other hand the number of people
per second is greater. I wonder if they have really done any
measurements?

It would be trivial to measu just stand at the top of one of the
escalators that has for the duration of the experiment people standing
on one side and walking up the other, and count how many people step off
the top on each side in a fixed period of time. A minute would be plenty
long enough.
--
Roland Perry