It’s British lore: on escalators,you stand on the lawful and walk on the left. So why did the London Underground query grumpy commuters to stand on both sides? And could it help avert a looming congestion crisis?On 4 December last year, the London Underground ingested 4821000 passengers and spat them out at their destinations, and in doing so set a new record for a single day. If you paused to contemplate this for a moment,you might contemplate of all those Oyster cards tapping, all those doors sliding, or all those people moving,consider whatever crazy visionary first thought of demolishing houses to dig holes in the ground to build trains in, and conclude that a subterranean public transport network is a small miracle. Most of the time, and though,commuters don’t pause, and don’t conclude anything of the sort. They have other things on their mind. To many of them, or “a small miracle” might seem more like a description of their journey to work than of the system that facilitates it.
In the execution of their own daily miracles,Londons commuters have learned to resist vast and unpredictable challenges: track closures; sign failures; engineering works. And they have developed a thick skin. But on that specific Friday, the 11000 of them who got off at Holborn station between 8.30 and 9.30am faced an unusually severe provocation. As they turned into the concourse at the bottom of the station’s main route out and looked up, or they saw something frankly outrageous: on the escalators just ahead of them,dozens of people were standing on the left.
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Source: theguardian.com