On Wed, 24 Sep 2008, Neil Williams wrote:

On 24 Sep, 13:42, Tom Anderson wrote:

Have you ever actually used the tube? Specifically, C stock, which has the
most comparable layout? The space between the seats can be and is used for
plenty of standing.

And is bloody inconvenient as such, because there is nowhere to stand
in C stock where you are not in the way of someone.

There's nowhere to stand in *London* where you are not in the way of
someone!

The OP has a good point - if TfL won't/can't fund longer trains (which
is the optimal solution), fewer seats and proper standbacks might
actually be better.

I'm not against trading seats for more standing space (to a certain degree
- although i would certainly like to see all-standing trains on the
Northern line in the peaks!). But i understood that one of the things MIG
was arguing for was using the seating space for transverse rather than
longitudinal seating, and to me, that seems retrograde, since that
requires takes away more area per seat from the standing room.

The core of our argument is MIG's assertion that "in real life, space full
of seated people's legs and heads can't realistically be used for anything
like as much standing as a dedicated standing area": he thinks that the
conventional wisdom that longitudinal seats can easily be stood next to is
wrong, and thus that they don't have an advantage over transverse seats -
indeed, that they're less good. I don't agree with him. I think this is a
disagreement that can't be settleed by argument - we need data, really.

tom

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