Improving the Flow of People: the Victoria Station Redesign

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in demand. Similarly, entering customers’ departures from the system occur in intervals resulting in queues not evident via simple “people-per-minute” analysis.

Just over 27,000 exiting customers alight at the northbound and southbound platforms between 7:00-10:00am with 16,693 utilizing the primary flow and 10,496 utilizing the secondary flow (case, Table 2). At a rate of 33 trains/hour (case, page 3), a train arrives every 1.82 minutes, or every 3.64 minutes per platform. At this rate, 3-hour peak demand of combined customer flows (i.e., convergence of entering & exiting customers at train arrival) for the northbound platform is 457 people (308 entering, 149 exiting) and 414 people (14 entering, 400 exiting) for the southbound platform. These numbers indicate capacity utilization rates of 153% and 138%, respectively. The problem is exacerbated during the 15 minute peak-of-peak period when the northbound platform demand reaches 211% capacity utilization and the southbound reaches 186%. The platform overcrowding is yet worsened between 8:45-9:00 – the peak-of-peak for exiting customers – during which 12.3% of all exiting customers utilize the platform, compared to 11.2% between 8:30-8:45.

Despite slight overutilization at the escalator stage of entering customer flow, overcrowding conditions at Victoria Station are a result of sever overutilization of platform space caused by a convergence of entering and exiting customer flows. Essentially, customers alighting from trains use all available platform space and thus entering customers are unable to board the train. This bottleneck explains the rationale of under-capacity trains departing an overcrowded station (case, page 3). Given the limited nature of available underground space, there exist no viable design modifications to ameliorate the congestion. Absent total reengineering of the station, the space cannot accommodate both entering and exiting customer flows. Therefore, the only feasible solution is complete reconstruction of the station.