A bottleneck forms in an urban canyon

I travel into London less these days. I've become slightly spoilt by being able to drive into the EMEA headquarters. Despite taking around an hour to do 18 miles its still quite pleasant to be cocooned in the car with a radio and a seat!

Despite having traveled every day for 3 years into central London from the suburbs I'm now very impatient with the number of people. This morning at Waterloo, they were manually checking tickets and there was a massive bottleneck. Its just as bad if not worse trying to get to a platform on the way home. SW Trains are in the process of installing ticket barriers at Waterloo - I dread to think what the chaos will be like once they do this. I don't think the platforms are geared up to it - just too narrow. If I look at other big London stations they have barriers set well back from the platform enabling people to filter through.

I do wonder is SW Trains have performed any crowd modelling on the numbers of people that they expect to filter through this system. Certainly some GIS/CAD tools may be capable of doing some of this modelling, but they aren't really geared up for it. Quite an interesting research paper here: http://geosimulation.org/crowds/#candy

behavioural geography - great term




We are living on an increasingly crowded island here in the UK and I think this type of modelling can be very valuable. If you are planning for ticket barrier, a new school or even an Olympic village, these types of models should be very compelling.

Cheers
Bish

(listening to Kooks - Konk)