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?

A much more productive move, in my opinion, would be to run their
escalators a bit faster: those in Moscow, Kiev, and other former soviet
cities, go about 50% faster in my experience. It comes as a slight
surprise to the visitor, but people seem to cope.

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Clive Page