Monday’s Friday Reads – 27 May 2019

1. Many parenting choices can be quite exhausting, including trying to get around without a car.

   But, there might be a bit of “the grass is always greener” syndrome going on in the article.

   I’ve enjoyed:

   – the fact that bike journeys are more predictable than car journeys which can be ridiculously delayed

   – much, much, smaller bills

   – not getting a “dad belly” quite as fast as my brother

2. I used tried out the Sydney Metro service on the opening day. At most stops the automated train did not line up with the platform edge doors, and the train had to reverse to get into position. Often this caused significant delays in opening the doors.

   I don’t recall this happening on the Jubilee Line. Does anyone know if it does ever happen on the Jubilee?

3. Rarely, I’ve seen a jubilee train overshoot the platform edge doors; but rather than reversing, it just skips the stop entirely.

4. When San Francisco’s BART subway opened in the early 1970s, the trains would stop unannounced and randomly between stations, sometimes in the Transbay tunnel under the bay, and open their doors for 20-30 seconds, then close and the train would continue on. The aerospace engineers who designed BART were at first mystified as to why this was happening. Then a railway engineer told them about wheelslip – the aerospace engineers hadn’t known about that phenomena, and had based the automated train operation on wheel count, including stopping at stations and opening doors. So the problem was soon corrected.

   I’m not at all saying that this is the reason for the Sydney Metro train station platform stopping inaccuracies – more to say that unexpected problems often turn up. Ideally in testing.

5. My recollection of the Jubilee line was that in the early days, under manual driving, the lining up of the doors was less reliable than under automatic. This perception may be due to my once being on a train when the car doors opened without the platform ones reciprocating. People used the green lever to open the PEDs manually before the driver announced anything. I didn’t wait around long enough to see how much of a faff it was to get things going again. I certainly noticed that drivers were very careful, slowing to a premature crawl to execute the final lineup, whereas the automatic operation is much more ‘gutsy’ about it, and I haven’t experienced a misalignment since.

6. Re car free

   When Herned Jr was little, he went everywhere on the back of my bike. Now he’s at an awkward age (6) where he’s too big for a back seat on my bike, and too young to cycle very far. Bit of an issue for a couple of years, especially now we live somewhere buses are rarer than tory MEPs

7. The measure of urban mobility is interesting but the metric for traffic flow is quite misleading. By measuring the percentage chance of being delayed if driving as the basic measure it takes no account of the modal share. Thus, hypothetically, a city where there was a 100% chance of being delayed, but only 5% of trips were made by car would score very badly. However, a city in which 20% of trips were likely to be delayed but 50% of trips were made by car would score much better. However, in the former case only 5% of all trips would be delayed by congestion, while, in the latter, 10% of all trips would be delayed by congestion. So a better measure would show that the latter case was worse than the former. If you did a better measure for congestion, London would come much higher up the league table than it currently shows.

8. Re car-free

   Having to do everything on foot/bike/bus when my one was young saved him and me from falling into the trap of having every moment filled with activities. I’ve seen too many stressed-out parents and children dashing from one thing to another, even leaving one early to get to the other in time. If there wasn’t time to get between 2 things in one evening without using a car then he only did one. Doesn’t seem to have harmed him too much.

9. Thanks, that’s interesting to hear people’s experience / stories about platform edge doors / trains overshooting.

   When asked about the new Sydney Metro trains overshooting and reversing, the transport minister for New South Wales said: “The train is designed to make sure the doors align. It’s a matter of seconds [to line up the doors]. That is the same with every system around the world.”

   I think he’s glossing over the fact there are some kinks in the system to be ironed out.

10. Half of the “car-free” examples are not car-free at all, as they use rentals and taxis.

    I live in South London and have a car, but I mainly walk or use the tram and trains. Adding up the times I have driven the car this year, it would probably have been cheaper to hire taxis instead – even if I paid the taxi driver to wait in my driveway with 50kg of household goods overnight because I couldn’t be bothered to lug them into the house right away.

11. About 15 years ago I did the calculation that for a childless couple living in inner London it would be cheaper to go everywhere either in a taxi or by public transport (1st class where this was available) than to own a car (for average journey making). I can’t imagine that the calculation has gone anywhere but making it even less attractive to own a car since then.

12. @ Quinlet – I agree completely and about 30 years ago, living in inner South London, I did a similar albeit very simple calculation to discover that the cost of my car insurance alone was more than an annual Travelcard covering Zones 2-6. With that, I sold my car and haven’t owned one ever since.

13. Re platform edge doors: The Stockholm City Line is a 6 km long underground line which connects suburban lines north and south of the city and relieves congestion on a two track section on the southern approach to Stockholm Central station. The City Line opened in 2017 and has platform edge doors at the two new underground stations. Trains are manually driven throughout, yet they manage to stop at the correct position. I travelled on the City Line the day after it opened and trains approached the stopping position very cautiously, crawling the last few feet. On more recent journeys the trains now approach stations at a reasonable speed (but not as fast as on the Jubilee Line) and stop at the correct position. How is this achieved with manual driving? The design of the platform edge doors provides a degree of latitude in the stopping position as the width of the doors is about 1.5 times wider than the train doors.

14. @AA The Tokyo subway is the same, lots of training.

15. So London is ranked 2nd in the world for “public transport efficiency”, marginally behind Zurich. Interesting when I’m always reading comments about how other European cities are so much better than us…

16. @Herned: not sure whether you will read this, but did you know about trailer bikes? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trailer_bike

    My parents had those trailers for me and my sister when we were about that age.

17. @Mickey C: Efficiency is not the same as Quality…

18. It’s remarkable how few hire car firms and cabs will provide car seats – and even when they claim they do, IME they almost invariably turn out not to exist or to be merely booster seats suitable for children 6+. If parents are told that it’s unsafe and thus illegal to have children in a car without car seats, the fact that it’s legal in a cab is not going to be reassuring.

    Keeping a car in London is a luxury for us – we calculated it’s about £1000 a year – but renting a car for a week or two plus couple weekends comes to around the same, so might as well keep it around. We considered Zipcar when we only had two children but getting car seats to the cars was too hard then – now they have cars on our street and neighboring ones, and we only need booster cushions, but they don’t have 7-seaters near us.

    I predict a big increase in Zipcar and Uber/cab use when the ULEZ expands in 2021.

    My kids actually didn’t go in cars much until the last couple years – I couldn’t lift car seats myself, as babies they would scream at every red light, but most importantly, they tended to be carsick and set each other off, so you’d get puking in triplicate… Whereas a trip out via bus, trains of two colours and a tram would entertain them no end. Space to jump around, too.

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