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Mill Hill East
Dave Arquati wrote: MIG wrote: Dave Arquati wrote: MIG wrote: John B wrote: Kev wrote: This does sound like the thin end of the wedge. Ask people who used to use the Watford Junc to Broad St (Liverpool St) and Watford to Croxley service what they think of this. OK, so in the first case a poor frequency service has been replaced partly with the current NLL clockface 4tph timetable (set for further improvements under TfL Rail) and will be replaced further with the ELLX between Dalston and Shoreditch. In the second case, the link is set to be rebuilt with more useful connections. During London's decades of stagnation and decline, many useful rail links were short-sightedly destroyed. The ideological antipathy of a progression of governments and transport ministers towards public transport didn't help matters. However, it's now clear that the default mode for public transport in London is one of expansion not contraction. Since Mill Hill East isn't an Aldwych or an Ongar but somewhere with decent loadings, it would therefore be hard to see why anyone would choose to close it... But once it loses the through service it will have poor loadings. Aldwych is right in the centre of London, but that didn't save it. I don't suppose for a moment it would have closed if it had a through service (or why not close Temple, St Pauls or Chancery Lane?). Not sure of the logic here - St Paul's and Chancery Lane are extremely busy during the week. I was mentioning non-interchange stations that have a through service, in the same general area as Aldwych, which didn't, and wasn't as busy. I'm suggesting that the lack of through service reduced demand for Aldwych rather than its location. As other posters have suggested, Aldwych was probably doomed from its birth. If Aldwych were reopened today with through services to Cockfosters (which in itself is physically difficult), I think demand would still be poor for two reasons: 1. The frequency with which Aldwych could be served would be limited by capacity considerations on the rest of the line (it's not as though you can just slot extra trains in the timetable between Holborn and Arnos Grove, and the existing trains are busy with people heading to and from places like Piccadilly Circus). In turn, sending trains to Aldwych would pose reliability problems. 2. Even if served by a relatively high frequency, it's just too near other Piccadilly stations to be particularly useful - even Holborn is only a few minutes' walk away, and Covent Garden is much more useful for the key theatre-going market. I think we are both saying that the inevitable poor service made the station unattractive. The poor service at Alwych follows from it being on a stub with necessarily either a shuttle or infrequent through service. A station on an imaginary through line at that location might well have been popular. The first of these applies equally to Mill Hill East, particularly from a reliability point of view. The second does not. Roding Valley, Chigwell and Grange Hill are still open, despite having much poorer demand (only about enough to support a bus service, let alone rail). At least partly because they are a pain to get to by train, either a long way round (and infrequently) via Hainault or changing at Woodford. If some expensive repairs cropped up which no one was keen to fund, I suspect that the line would be under threat. Demand at those stations is surely limited by local geography rather than frequency - there are so few people living in their catchment areas (at least on foot). Even if a high-frequency through service were provided, it would probably be carting around air. The only way significant demand increases might occur would be through park-and-ride, and even then there are other equally suitable stations either south of Hainault or on the main Epping route. This would also seem to be a major consideration at Mill Hill East - low population density around the station severely limits demand, and even park-and-ride (or bus feeder) demand would probably be limited to passengers from quite nearby because of the poor road connectivity of the area. But a good through service does create demand. A lot of the Underground was financed by property speculators on that basis. |
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