Welcome to Reconnections’ Friday Reads:
-
- • St Pancras at 150 (HydeParkNow)
- • Women built “The Ladies’ Bridge” – Waterloo (AtlasObscura)
- • Why Liverpool MerseyRail needs its Circle Line (CityMetric)
- • How Boston designed its T (CityLab)
- • E-Scooter deaths show urgent need for safer streets (StreetsBlog)
- • LA’s Regional Connector downtown tunnel construction (LACurbed)
- • US National Links: Paving potholes with pizza (TheOverheadWire)
- • Hong Kong – China trains compared (ManInSeat61)
- • When your transit agency spies on you (CityLab)
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And the myth of Waterloo Bridge being built by women continues and gets re-enforced.
According to an apparently well-researched, but little publicised, article I read years ago this is simply not true. I wish I could find the article.
Yes, women contributed a lot to Waterloo Bridge. Their significance should not be belittled nor should their contribution be dismissed. But boring factual evidence (such as the employee lists of people working on the bridge) suggests that the portion of women was relatively small.
Why have these myths come about? Well, like a lot of wartime stuff it is down to propaganda and the need to encourage women into the factories and take over other important jobs. There are loads of feature films of the era that do precisely the same thing and also some post-war ones reminding everyone of their contribution (such as the film The Weaker Sex).
The photo proves nothing other than women worked on the bridge. In fact it does prove something. The photos were taken because this was an exceptional sight (or site even). Probably few photos were taken of men working on the bridge and, if they were, they would not be interesting so would get lost.
Unfortunately, this is becoming one of these wartime urban myths (like seeing in the dark if you eat carrots) that hasn’t been debunked in peace-time.
The article about Liverpool’s circle line seems to be crayonism of the sort that is usually discouraged on here, the cost estimates seem particularly unlikely.
@Herned – it is at least merely opening a disused railway and has been proposed in the past by Merseyrail themselves. There’s far more zany Liverpool Circle line plans out there…
…That said, a key reason why it closed in the first place is that from the middle of the circle it’s almost quicker to walk to the City Centre than go by the circle – people from Knotty Ash would be in the centre in half the time if they took the direct bus or walked to Broad Green station. The article’s proposition to start at the ends and slowly link them together seems rational given those issues, but neglects that – even when Liverpool was a more densely populated city, and the docks at the northern end of the loop employed far more than they do today, people didn’t use the train service along that corridor in sufficient numbers to justify it.
With these problems, you can see why Merseyrail themselves moved to favouring re-adding passenger service on the inner loop from Edge Hill to Kirkdale/Bootle. It’s much closer to the stadia, the tracks are already there for freight, it is relatively dense all the way along, it doesn’t take too long to get to the city centre along the loop, etc.
@Si/Herned – your comments neatly illustrate the perennial problem of “going round in circles” – for too many (in terms of the justification) journeys, it’s quicker to go into the centre and out again. There’s a similar proposal for Brum, with the similar drawback, not to mention OrbiRail in the metropolis. Crayonistas are eternally disappointed….
@Graham
Indeed, circles are the ultimate in dot-to-dot crayoning.
The counter-argument is that the centre is crowded, so travelling through it unnecessarily should be discouraged. Which is true in a way, but of course the cost of building/reopening lines (which in any case can only plausibly replace a tiny fraction of the via-centre journeys) is disproportionate.
(Finchley Central from Golders Green was 2/6 as those of us alive in 1967 well remember).
@Malcolm – there are a few specific cases where the circular route is there to relieve overcrowding on the radials – the Overground Outer Circle is the prime – and possibly , only UK – example. Then there are the circles which have passed their sellby date – the Clockwork Orange is a good case, where the city centre has moved, also, in London, the middle and outer circles; and adding extensions to circles has its own problems.
One of the problems with circular versus radial options is frequency. Many radials are set up to deliver high frequency, high capacity services, but circular routes usually lack the same sort of frequency and so gains from a direct orbital route are in part squandered by extra waiting time,
@Malcolm
Surely there the orbital bus (ex trolleybus/tram) via Temple Fortune would have been the best value and fastest option?
Relying there on the unreliable Northern – remember its late 1960s problems! – led to the poor songwriter being let down on the GG platform (which one?), by the kiosk.
Milton Clevedon: Since I started the digression, I cannot really object to it. But of course the
above-groundon-road route, although carrying out a sort-of orbital function (linking the two black bits), is intrinsically radial. Which shows the problems you get when you try to split desire lines into those two extremes, when most are really diagonal. And I thought the letting down occurred in a transport-independent fashion, simply as a change of the other party’s mind. But who knows?The song-writer’s eschewal of the bus, of course, is highly typical of tube-map users throughout history, a subject which has been much touched on amid these hallowed portals.
@ Malcolm – we were, of course, reminded by the songwriter to change at Camden Town.
@ Graham H – I understand your remarks about orbital services but it does make me wonder why Paris seems to be spending an incredible amount of money on converting the Petite Ceinture to trams, why we have orbital (or tangential) tram-train lines being built, many non radial busways and tram lines in the départments outside Paris and how on earth the huge automated orbital metro network has been justified.
I can readily expect a little cynicism from you about how the French justify spend on almost any transport project but I’ve yet to read of any of these projects, once open, being considered anything other than a great success. And all of that is on top of a huge programme of investment in radial and cross Paris links over many decades. How do they make it work when we seemingly can’t? The city region geo-economic structures of London and Paris are not that different are they?
Walthamstow Writer,
Converting the Petit Ceinture to trams?
I thought the significant thing was they decide not to do that but to use segregated street running instead.
WW
How do they make it work when we seemingly can’t?
Political will & agreement.
No equivalents of Bromley or Westminster playing games (?) for point-scoring.
No really stupid personal vanity projects ( Garden Bridge, Dangleway ) either.
Acceptance that some projects will make a loss in the short-term at least, but contribute to “network” integrity – Watford would have been oassed in Paris as an interconnector, probably.
Realisation that the whole thing is an interconnected system, & that screwing with one bit, affects the rest, probably advesely ( Khan on buses at present? )
I’m sure people can think of other things I’ve missed.
@WW
Maybe it’s that in Paris there is no fare premium for Metro over bus or tram. A lot of orbital journeys will still be fairly short and bus journeys being cheaper might put people off rail.
@WW – I thought about the example of Paris when I posted and thought I wouldn’t burden the column with a discussion about what appears to be an exception. May I offer these thoughts: the French approach to planning is (was ) very different to ours. The orbital routes originated in the ’70s Plan for Grand Paris in which Paris was divided into concentric zones (Centre, Petite Couronne, Grande Couronne, and so on) with poles of development each linked to each other – a bit like the Plan Freycinet* for the railways a century before. All very Cartesian and formalistic. No hint of pragmatism as we know, and sort of love, it here. And the French have stuck with that plan over the decades, much as they have (until very recently) stuck with the long term plan for the LGV network. Whether such a structured approach is better than the random interventions of political crayonism that we have faced in London over the last few decades is an interesting discussion; certainly, orbital lines in the UK face a much tougher justification than simply completing a predetermined hierarchy.
*If anyone doubts the existence of this approach, I would recommend they study the 2nd and third waves of the Plan, which envisaged – and delivered for the most part – the connection of all communes to departmental centres, all with a standard train service of 3 weekday trips.
At the risk of stirring up further controversy (good, of course), there is an underlying question as to whether Paris and London are really comparable in their structure. Post-Haussman Paris remained much more compact than London for several decades and differed structurally – higher density, lack of single/double focus comparable with the City/West end; whereas London expanded more loosely, surging round hitherto freestanding small towns such as Ealing, Harrow or Croydon, Certainly, Paris has become more like London structurally, with the development of a single business focus at La Defense – but that itself was the product of dirigiste planning, not unsurprisingly – although I have found on recent business visits to Paris, some quite major players are located at or near the ends of the Metro lines.
(There is also a nice related discussion to be had (1) as to whether Haussman’s interventions made major differences to the structure and functional distribution of activities within Paris (probably yes, but I have seen no published work on that – anyone any recommendations?), and (2) whether the constant change in political regime after 1789 had any impact on the failure to develop a comparable Whitehall/St James/Mayfair complex; did the disappearance of the French aristocracy remove the equivalent concentration to the West End?)
@GH
Well of course there are multiple historic reasons for Paris land use being different to London, just a few suggested below:
* the later Paris Walls – now mostly the Boulevard Peripherique – which inhibited linear development beyond, and it is suggested that fear of invasions also deterred some suburban development particularly in the east and north;
* those Walls also defining what is (nowadays) Carte Orange Zone 1 which however is as large as much of London’s Zones 1 and 2 (imaginez, s’il vous plait, Les Portes d’Ammersmith, Kilburn, Highbury, Whitechapel and Brixton), which is interesting as much of London Overground is therefore comparable in distance from the centre as is the Peripherique (shades of Ringway 1?!);
* the inconvenient contortions of the Seine which prevented it being a significant passenger transport artery from the western corridor, and its remoteness from the sea to be a primary port for the French Empire, compared to the Thames and its estuary.
No doubt land ownerships and Britain’s early commercial revolution, and the growth of the yeoman and middle classes, also shaped the outcome differently.
French and Parisian strategic planning from the 1960s envisaged various ‘poles’ (axes) of development supported by new cross-city communications including the RER. Look up ‘zones d’amenagement parisien’ – ZAP – on the internet for multiple examples of that outlook. These stimulated the transformation of the Paris Region which continues as wider Île de France planning, which is dirigiste indeed! (see the commentary about Paris in pp 19-20 of this link: https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/bus_planning_literature_review_jrc_ltd.pdf)
In contrast the politics of London and its Home Counties appear nowadays to be more introspective and confrontational, with London still limited administratively to the area of the 1963 London Government Act, well within the practical boundary defined by the M25, which itself is much less in scale than was defined in the 1931 Act for the London Passenger Transport Board.
Just to throw in the French tendency for middle class families (whose English equivalent would compromise with a house in the suburbs or Metroland) to have an appartement in Paris and a second home in the ancestral village.
It’s noteworthy that the walls of Paris continued to have a planning impact until well into the 1950s, unlike the walls of London which fell into disrepute in the 16th century. Following the siege of Paris in 1871, the walls were rebuilt and a ‘zone non aedificandi’ – loosely a free fire zone declared immediately outside the walls. This remarkably archaic approach led to a development of shanty towns just outside the walls in the run up to WW2 which, in one of the only forward looking acts of the Nazi occupation, started to be dismantled in the 1940s as a public health hazard. This then made it easy for the french authorities to build the Boulevard Peripherique as it continued the job of getting rid of the shanties and there were no well-heeled communities to object to being bulldozed for a motorway (unlike the plans for the ring ways in London). I think this combination of circumstances is quite unique and has led to a pattern of development in Paris that is probably unrepeated (and unrepeatable) elsewhere.
@Quinlet
The Brussels Inner Ring has a similar history, being built on the site of city walls demolished in the 18th century. However, in this case there was no shanty town era, as the boulevards were built in the early 19th century, and converted to the modern expressway in the late 20th century.
The Vienna Ring Road also has a similar history, although it isn’t exactly an expressway.
York was a narrow escape – and the great turning point in UK urban planning. But we had relatively few fortified cities surviving – on the Continent, Germany especially, there were many examples.
@ PoP – Sorry, I was unclear. I meant the bus services that were branded “PC” and run / ran in an overlapping loop as the trams do. I agree the old Petite Centure rail line is not being converted and remains gloriously abandoned.
Complete change of topic.
St Pancras at 150 includes a pic from 1912 nicely illustrating what the song laments: no churns, no porter, no cat on a seat. At first glance only two of these are visible, but close examination shows a very cat-like object on one of the trolleys. I’ve spent enough time sitting on parked trolleys to accept that they count as seats.
The very next picture could soon re-appear: “Electric trucks being re-charged at the Goods Depot in 1917”
Greg: Electric somethings being charged, yes. Trucks for sub-wagonload freight – I don’t think so.
@Malcolm: I’m not so sure – I could see the likes of Amazon operating fleets of electric delivery vans once diesel engines are banned from central London. No doubt they would prefer them not to have drivers.
The MR delivery vans looked like the new UPS.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/9/17334710/ups-pilot-fleet-electric-trucks-paris-london-arrival
@Malcolm
UPS have invested in a fleet of electric delivery vans for London to replace most of their diesel engined vans. They even had to fork out nearly £1m for a new substation as the electricity demand when they were due to charge all their electric vans exceeded the capacity of the local grid. It’s to their credit that they coughed up (however reluctantly) rather than abandoning the project.
Royal Mail trialled nine of these UPS vans last year and had the same grid issues at Mount Pleasant. That site is being redeveloped so upgrades may not be coming. They went with Peugeot after the evaluation.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/02/28/shift_to_electric_vehicles_wouldve_melted_royal_mails_substation_mps_told/
There is a scheme to run parcel sleds in a tunnel. If they batched them together as a train they could have a PO Railway. Magway backed by Ocado hopes to open its first route from Milton Keynes to Park Royal in London within three years.
https://www.magway.com
Aleks
“Magway”
What a vast waste of money.
How about re-introducing Red Star Parcels?
I mean the infrastructure already exists, it’s called the railway system ….
@GT – I would not dismiss magway so readily. What I would like to know however is far more detail about their technology For instance, their publicity mentions linear motors which would normally be used for propulsion but it is not clear whether magnetic suspension is also involved, or whether the vehicles ride the rail illustrated on wheels. I can see that maglev would be the ideal choice for avoidance of friction and wear. Another question is over junction switching technology. A close following small autonomous pod system like this ideally should incorporate vehicle-based switching rather than moving elements in the track, and some of the animations illustrate complex networks with many junctions. Again no technical details whatsoever are shown. This type of ‘medium distance’ idea could work well with both rail and road vehicles in a wider freight distribution network plausibly combining with longer distance high speed trunk legs on rail and final mile road with automatic transhipment. The pods of the size shown could definitely be threaded through mail rail, and the park royal destination of the pilot track from Milton Keynes could tie in rather nicely with a pipe extension to Paddington to access the old tunnels. A key advantage over the old mailrail might be enhanced gradient climbing allowing entire pods to get up to street level autonomously from the old tunnels for easy transhipment to last mile electric trucks.
@Aleks – Maybe Royal mail could get large new power feeder cables into Mount Pleasant electric vehicle charging station from west of London through the mail rail tunnels (maybe AS WELL as the magway pods for faster medium distance distribution).
To me the huge issue with Magway is that costs are not mentioned at all. Maglev is notoriously expensive, as is tunneling. Furthermore the bespoke technology makes it an orphan waiting to happen once whatever funding it obtains dries up. I also note the single rail…
@LBM – Agreed it’s all very sketchy on costs as well as technology. I note they keep their plastic pipe diameter below 1m however, more in line with large utility bores than any public transport application, and ventilation and emergency egress is no concern, which are large ticket items in passenger transport. At least some level of backing from Ocado is a plus however. They are leading pioneers in warehouse automation and have developed much of their own technology for their distribution centres.
@MT
Good points. You’d think they’d start with a short above ground tube between buildings to gain experience and demonstrate its features.
The difficulty of tunnelling in busy cities is not just about cost but also finding space. Hence Crossrail is so deep. I am also reminded of the proposal for an underground travelator between Euston and King’s Cross (designed to persuade local authorities and MPs in the North West that Euston and St Pancras were in the same place) which, when even rough preliminary designs were made, turned out be a series of escalators in order to get over or under all the existing tunnels in the vicinity of Euston Road.
Sounds a bit like Elon Musk’s Boring idea to me
@Quinlet – not to mention the basements of the British Library. The number of really deep foundations and basements has grown enormously recently with ever higher tower blocks.
Imagine the fun of rescuing a broken down pod (inevitable at some stage) from a sub 1m diameter tunnel.
Yes, well, the Euston – St P – Kings Cross idea was best expressed in the now lost Cross-River Tram, which had a branch to there.
Another lost opportunity.
Greg Tingey,
Well that is one viewpoint.
But let us not forget that the Cross River Tram team were insisting on a tram depot on much-prized land in the Kings’s Cross area. To my mind that was a scandalous misuse of future highly-valued land and would do nothing to regenerate the area – as was clearly the plan. One of the reasons why I always thought the scheme had lost its way a bit and couldn’t see itself in the wider context of the regeneration of London.
100andthirty,
Well presumably there will be access points. And technology in remote recovery will have moved on by the time it gets built. If the worse comes to the worse, there are thousands of cavers for whom a passageway size of almost a metre (and dry-ish) would be an absolute luxury and some of them would quite happily earn decent pay to sort out a broken down pod.
I am sure similar things were said when architects design buildings with large panes of glass that were a challenge to clean. Suddenly rock-climbers found themselves with marketable skills.
Back to Paris. The Boulevard Périphérique (BP) has attracted considerable employment along its length. What’s more, it passes through a number of development nodes that pre-date it.
As commenters have said, there is not much comparable to the BP in the UK; the Brussels rings don’t have the same development pattern. The tramway development plans around the périphérique are not at the same level throughout. Rather, they depend on the local traffic patterns. Very un-Cartesian.
Despite the above, part of London’s North Circular has a similar structure and function to the BP (and similar traffic problems), so could be worth more than a crayon’s attention, especially in the context of Old Oak Common.
PoP….I take your point, but it doesn’t alter the essential madness of the scheme. It would need two tunnels to return the pods or large holding areas or “single tunnel with passing places”. And if they are going to all this trouble, why sub 1m? It’s very limiting on size of package. I think a demonstrator would be easy to build, then reality would sink in when they try and get planning permission to build from MK to London
I think the diameter of less than 1m is intended to slip it into the thought-category of large-sewer in the public mind. These have been built for centuries, and seem very “cheap”.
Of course it is absurd, and to make a useful impact on London delivery-mileage, the number of London terminals would have to be closer to 50 than the proposed 1. (So as to make the so-called “last mile” come within spitting max distance of a mile).
It would be interesting to know how the proposers intend to make their money. I suspect they would make a quick exit as soon as they have sold shares in the idea.
I think this article is essential reading when thinking about small-scale parcel delivery tube lines (and any temptation to think that this is a new idea). What did for the first of these lines was that the time and effort needed to get the parcels into the pods negated the speed advantage of the line. The Magway system seems to involve standardised plastic baskets which can be transported on rails but also have hand holds for manual handling. But manually handling such small packages could kill the economics.
To put it another way, the easy part of parcel delivery is physically moving the parcels. The difficult bit is storage, sorting, loading and unloading. I have vague memories of a chief executive of the Royal Mail saying that when you pay for postage, you are mainly paying for storage, not transport.
Ocado who, from the publicity, are involved with magway in some capacity are one of the leading authorities in warehouse automation, and they have developed and own all the technology in their distribution centres. Scenes in the video illustrated pods being loaded automatically in a warehouse so perhaps this, conceptually, is rather like extending the autonomous warehouse out to a number of remote transfer stations where electric delivery van drivers load their small vehicles for urban drip offs.
An article about Ocado warehouse technology:
https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/8/17331250/automated-warehouses-jobs-ocado-andover-amazon
@MT I know it’s rude to draw attention to typos, but “urban drip offs” is too good an invention to miss. I hope it becomes, as it deserves to, a classic term of art.
@Mark Townend
This robot technology is fascinating. A modern, working version of the giant 1920s proposed railway clearing house that Antony Badsey-Ellis wrote up in Issue 2 [Updated issue number. LBM] of the LR print magazine.
The key is for any such tunnel or transport logistics scheme is near seamless connections at the ends – container freight didn’t take off until port infrastructure, lorries/trucks and railway wagons were developed to continue the transit of the containers.