Friday Reads – 3 July 2020

On By In Bridges, Cycles, Friday Reads, HS2, Pollution, Stations

• Combined HS2 / NPR Manchester underground station proposed (NewCivilEng)

• Tyres a significant source of marine microplastic pollution (AirQualityNews)

• Plan for 100km pop-up cycle lane network in Manchester (WalkRideGM)

• Best Parisian bridges that don’t cross the Seine – Part 1 (FabricOfParis)

• VIA Rail’s flagship train The Canadian (Lego)

• What’s the frequency, Amtrak? (RailMag)

• Transit cops could lead police reforms (Axios)

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6 comments

  1. The Manchester “Piccadilly” alternative proposal is much too sensible to ever be built ….
    “10 bridges of Paris” contains a fundamental error – I don’t think Gare du Nord is busier than Clapham Junction, somehow.

  2. It all comes down to how you measure you busyness.
    In terms of number of train movements, I think Clapham junction is the busiest in Europe. When I last checked these numbers (in about 2013) Clapham Junction has about 2200 train movements per day, out of a total of around around 22000 across Great Britain. Service levels have probably increased more elsewhere since then, but I expect Clapham Junction still close to 10% of all scheduled services.

    However, I think it is more common to compare the number of passengers, and in particular the numbers that arrive, depart or interchange at a station. Paris Gare du Nord probably has much longer trains (on average) than Clapham Junction (which has at most 240m 12 carraige trains). However, I am confident that, however you count it, Gare du Nord has more passengers than Clapham Junction (at least in 2018).

    So what are the numbers? Gare du Nord had 250 million passengers in 2018 (I don’t know exactly what this figure represents). Clapham Junction had only 30 million arrivals/departures and 30 million interchanging passengers. We can also get a rough upper bound on the number of passengers travelling through the station by adding to this the number of passengers at Waterloo and Victoria – these are an extra 100 million and 81 million respectively, giving a total of about 240 million. This figure is wrong, of course – it counts everyone who started or interchanged at Clapham Junction and travelled into London twice, and it also incorrectly counts those who travelled to Victoria on Southeastern services. It does miss out passengers travelling through Clapham Junction on Southern services towards Milton Keynes.

    So no, that article does not contain “a fundamental error” (or at least not the one you mention), and perhaps in making such a claim, you should have tried to back it up with data yourself.

  3. Alice
    Define busiest in that case …
    Number of passengers passing through / number of trains ….
    Also CJ will have more passengers passing thorough than arrive/depart at Waterloo, because the numbers who interchange at Vauxhall are rather large ….

  4. @Greg T:
    Oops, I forgot Vauxhall – that’s got 20 million passengers per year (and probably most of those pass through Clapham Junction). I also forgot about Queenstown Road and Battersea Park, but those are less than 2 million each.

    I had another look for data, and found a couple of places that said the number of weekday passengers (in around 2016) was 430000. One source is https://web.archive.org/web/20200103142839/https://www.railengineer.co.uk/2017/01/05/crowds-capacity-and-clapham-junction/
    With some very loose assumptions about weekend numbers, we can get an estimate of 120 million-150 million passengers passing through Clapham Junction each year.

  5. @GREG T/@ALICE

    Interesting. It occurs to me that as consumer/user of a railway station, the “busyness” measure might be related to the amount of time that people spend in the station (passenger minutes per day) as well as the inversely related to the usable surface area (meters squared) within the station.

    This is why Clapham Junction is a “busy” station, because the circulation areas are small, the platforms narrow and services often infrequent (to stations southbound).

    I think that train movements is a poor measure of busyness, as it’s only the signaling software that cares about trains that don’t stop (Gatwick Express, is the CJ example).

    So, Seven Sisters London Overground station would count in my book as very busy, because it has platforms that are barely big enough to paint the “stand behind” yellow lines.

    The much maligned Canning Town has wide platforms and a whole extra level underneath, which gives people plenty of space to interchange.

    Of course, this was before the one-way systems at stations that rather effectively half the station passenger capacity, because that’s what ALL one-way systems do. But i digres.

  6. The Manchester cycleway article is, I’m afraid, the usual piece of garbled reporting . For example, the A56 is described as to be closed to vehicles over a 7 km stretch. Closer reading shows that some lanes will be dedicated to cycle use, so not only will buses continue (there’s not actually anywhere else they could go for most of the distance) but other vehicles will still have provision, though narrower.

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