Study suggests London Underground may be 'too fast' - Polidicks

[url]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-34334794[/url] [quote]A mathematical study of transport in London and New York suggests the British capital should be wary of its trains travelling too quickly. If Tube journeys are too fast, relative to going by road, then the model predicts an increase in the overall level of congestion. This is because key locations outside the city centre, where people switch transport modes, become bottlenecks. By contrast, New York's layout is such that faster trains will always help. Reporting their findings in the journal Royal Society Interface, the researchers calculate that London's system would function best with underground trains travelling about 1.2 times faster than the average speed on the roads. This makes the optimum Tube speed approximately 13mph (21km/h); the current average is 21mph (33km/h).[/quote]

So some trains have to go slower depending on the rail layout? Or is this a load of bullshit?

[QUOTE=iAmaNewb;48752809]So some trains have to go slower depending on the rail layout? Or is this a load of bullshit?[/QUOTE] I suppose a good analogy would be a computer, where you have a really good GPU, but a mediocre CPU. The GPU will do a good job at calculating stuff, but it will be bottlenecked by the slow CPU, resulting in overall less performance.

does the study take into account how fast the tube would be without constant fucking strike action

just make one long train that never stops

Clearly the solution is to adopt Jeremy Clarksons proposal for the roads by shooting all bicyclists and speeding up road travel.

[QUOTE=sam6420;48752963]Ignorant and uneducated comment here: What would the advantage of slowing the tube down be as opposed to just expanding it, adding more trains and making them come more frequently? Clearly there is a demand for the trains. Not including cost of course, I'm sure it costs more to upgrade the trains than to slow them down.[/QUOTE] Not including cost? It could work. Including costs would be a tremendous difference though, most likely due to layouts as mentioned in the article.

[QUOTE=kimr120;48753015]just make one long train that never stops[/QUOTE] A ride that... never ends?

[QUOTE=iAmaNewb;48752809]So some trains have to go slower depending on the rail layout? Or is this a load of bullshit?[/QUOTE] Ideally you want all the parts of the network to be equally loaded because otherwise you will have people buffering up on the interfaces between them - the roads around the train terminals clog up and congest. If you slowed the trains down a bit, it would relieve the congestion, which is good for ecological reasons as well as mental wellbeing of people, without really increasing the travel times for most people, as they might spend a bit more time on the train but less time in the congestion.

If it were up to me, they'd invest in developing the infrastructure necessary to maintain the average speed of the trains without bottlenecking everything. But that's just me.

but how furious?

Time to apply the UK solution and install speed cameras on the railways

[QUOTE=J$ Psychotic;48754214]If it were up to me, they'd invest in developing the infrastructure necessary to maintain the average speed of the trains without bottlenecking everything. But that's just me.[/QUOTE] Parts of the tube are being upgraded to the same driverless tech Vancouver has been using for years. All the trains are managed by a central computer which knows what the daily congestion is on the line, automatically adding and removing trains from service while modifying how long a train waits at a station and how long you have to wait for another train to arrive. It's the reason why we don't use a larger capacity subway. Doing it this way meant that we had to make stations larger before we had to add more track.

[QUOTE=DrDevil;48752829]I suppose a good analogy would be a computer, where you have a really good GPU, but a mediocre CPU. The GPU will do a good job at calculating stuff, but it will be bottlenecked by the slow CPU, resulting in overall less performance.[/QUOTE] Amazing. I never thought I'd see someone explaining a transportation system with a computer analogy instead of vice versa.

Too fast? It takes fucking ages to get to Seven Sisters for no reason whatsoever. If anything, the tube within the city center is pretty fast and nice, while the further away the more it shits up with unbearably long times.

[QUOTE=sam6420;48752963]Ignorant and uneducated comment here: What would the advantage of slowing the tube down be as opposed to just expanding it, adding more trains and making them come more frequently? Clearly there is a demand for the trains. Not including cost of course, I'm sure it costs more to upgrade the trains than to slow them down.[/QUOTE] I think the article refers more to how fast it delivers people to a location - when they get there they slow down to get to another mode of transportation i.e car, bus etc - but more trains show up and unload more passengers, so a bottleneck occurs causing congestion.

[QUOTE=*Freezorg*;48754341]Time to apply the UK solution and install speed cameras on the railways[/QUOTE] This is already a thing. Trains aren't allowed to go too fast.