The Wonders of the London Underground

Dan Wilson has written up his favo(u)rite things about the London Underground, or the Tube as it is more commonly known. I know many Londoners hate it, but as someone who grew up in London and visits there occasionally, it is an amazing resource that puts many other metropolitan mass transit systems to shame. (Hello, BART.)

He writes:

For my money, there are few British institutions as marvellous as the London Undergound. From humble beginnings as a cut-and-cover route between Paddington and Farringdon as the world’s first underground railway, to the major engineering feats of the deep tunnels of the Northern line and the far-reaching suburban branches north, south, east and west, it’s an awe inspiring achievement of engineering and organisation. I’ve heard it said that more people travel on the Tube each day than on the rest of the rail network put together. It’s an amazing thing, that Tube, and very few folk give it credit as it rumbles them to work and fun and home again.

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Duplicate Signs

Do you ever notice how sometimes people will pile signs one on top of the other, even though they are all saying basically the same thing? I see this all over the place and I’m always struck by it. Why do people do it? Do they think that having the same sign several times will make people more likely to follow its directive?

There’s usually an underlying problem being addressed by redundant signage - perhaps the first one was too small or not visible enough, or it didn’t say exactly the right thing, or experience after it was put up showed that more detail is needed. Often there is an official, professionally-made sign that proved inadequate and has been supplemented in ad-hoc ways with hand-made signs.

In general I find redundant signs fall into several categories:

• Duplicate: Where one signs duplicates the message of another, perhaps just by literally being a second copy of the first sign, or being a different version with the exact same message
  
• Additive: Where one sign adds nuance or clarification to another
  
• Opposing: Where two signs say different things about the same thing
  

I try to photograph redundant signs whenever I see them and I’ll post the better ones here. Here’s an example to get things rolling, taken at the Montgomery Street BART station in San Francisco (BART is SF’s subway). BART is rife with ad-hoc signage amusement which is a typical outcome of a top-down oriented organization where the staff are constantly having to compensate in their own way for planning inadequacies. Whereas the London Underground uses one font and one signage style for absolutely everything that appears in any station or train, BART is the complete opposite. There is no consistency to anything and the whole thing is a visual jumbled mess.

This elevator control is a perfect example. It is a panel about 2’x3’ mounted to the right of the elevator doors:

There are two things going on here: a button to call the elevator (on the left adjacent to the door), and a button to call the station agent in case of an emergency. (Why they are so visually and in fact physically connected is unclear - are there an especially large number of emergencies outside the elevator? Or perhaps it’s because the BART elevators constantly break down and someone in a wheelchair can be stuck?) Obviously people kept pushing the Agent button when all they wanted was the Elevator button.

Like so many things in BART this assemblage of controls doing very ordinary functions is custom made for no apparent reason. And the design with the white panel behind the Agent button visually overpowers the Elevator button, which blends against its background, and people must just reach for that without looking at the label (form and color cues will outgun labels every day of the week).

Frustrated station agents undoubted fed up with responding to false alarms must have attached the can’t-miss flourescent sign. Unfortunately it has the effect of emphasizing the Agent button even more and making the Elevator button even less obvious!

Ironically, this whole panel is a redesign of the original that had been in place for years. In the earlier design the two buttons looked identical and were housed together on a single panel, but the Station Agent button was to the left (so closest to the elevator itself) and the Elevator Call button was to the right. I did a double take any time I tried to use it (to carry me + my bike up). So obviously this redesign was intended to address this problem but actually made it worse. Ah, progress.

Public Bicycles in Paris

There was a definite up-tick in bicycle usage in Paris that I noticed on this visit compared to a few years ago. High gas prices have probably contributed to that - gas is $10/gallon equivalent there, so quit complaining about $4. But also the mayor of Paris has instituted a fantastic bicycle rental system called the Velib.

It works like this:

Stocks of bicycles are placed all over Paris at special rack stations.

You walk up to the touchscreen kiosk and register (placing a 150 Euro/$225 deposit on your credit card in case you don’t return the bike). You can buy daily, monthly or yearly subscriptions. There are additional fees per hour of using the bike. For the first 30 minutes it’s free, it’s 1 euro for the next 30 mins, and then the fees going up very steeply after that. So the pricing scheme is heavily biased toward short “rentals” and rides rather than keeping it for the day.

The kiosk lets you register, pay, and has a map

The bikes themselves are custom-made and are very cool looking in a retro way. All curvy and brownish-gray they are extremely size adjustable so they fit lots of people. They have generous splash guards, a basket, dynamo-powered head and tail lights, internal-hub gearing (so no delicate derailleurs to break or maintain) and cable locks for quick locking up. Because of their distinctive looks no-one is going to steal one and claim it belongs to them. Supposedly they are impossible to maintain outside of the service because they require custom tools, a further disincentive to theft (not to mention the deposit on your card).

People from all walks of life ride them, from young to old, people in business attire or people out doing shopping. You see them everywhere. And I think I only saw one person using a helmet…. Despite the craziness of riding in Paris traffic the Velib has proved a smashing success. It appears many were skeptical about it given how free bike schemes have not done so well in other countries. But the city has put an impressive amount of resources behind it. Not just development of the custom bikes and kiosks themselves, but there is an amazing infrastructure of staff and trucks at night that redistributed the bikes so they don’t get bunched up in certain areas, and of course clean and maintain them.

Would love to see something like this in San Francisco but I have my doubts about how well it would work. Paris is mostly flat, SF definitely is not, but there is also not the respect for communal property in SF that there is in France, and the bikes probably would not get treated well. Not to mention no-one would want to pay for it…