The article that got the guy fired is [1] apparently. If you search for "Gareth Dennis" - honestly his criticisms seem pretty mild.
My experience is the UK rail network targets truly patronising levels of safety. Signs and announcements on the dangers of running. Announcements on the dangers of slippery floors in wet weather. Announcements and signs about the importance of holding the handrail on stairs. Special extra video screens and announcements about the dangers of taking luggage on escalators. Announcements and warning signs that a flight of stairs is particularly long and tiring. Announcements on the dangers of using your phone while walking. Announcements that it's good to carry a bottle of water in hot weather.
I'm surprised this guy got fired - in the rail network I know, they'd have addressed his concerns by adding even more posters and announcements.
Euston is a special case. The lack of training/concern (depending on your level of cynicism) of ticket validity of the barrier staff isn’t unique (Paddington had this problem too), but the unique problem is the way the operator (network rail) do not announce platforms until the last minute leading to stampedes to the barriers.
The announcements are just there to sell more noise cancelling headphones in the on-station shops.
They delay platform announcements because they believe that a platform crammed full of waiting passengers will become a crush risk when the arriving passengers start to disembark.
When they announce the platform there is often enough time to stroll, but people rush because they want a seat.
> there is often enough time to stroll, but people rush because they want a seat.
I'm someone who used to frequently catch the last train north to Birmingham on a Saturday night (9:40pm), and it was usually full and so some people were without a seat. Of course we all rushed to try to get a seat. IMHO, it's foolishness to think people would do otherwise in that situation - after all who wants to stand for over an hour and a half when you've paid over £30 for the ticket?
> partly due to inability for the U.K. to run large projects
And what do you have to say about the Elizabeth Line? At one point, it was Europe's largest infrastructure project. I would say it has been a huge success.
Just think, an extra 11 pounds per seat to reserve your own!
I hate those stupid fees but it would increase revenue and at the end of the day…
< I’d pay it :( >
Yeah, I dunno. It seems like a shame to charge people extra for sitting, but it also would be nice for a less-fit person to be able to encode the idea somehow “I’ll wait for next train if it means I can sit,” while still giving people the option to hop on when it is standing room only.
But like, now I assume if somebody is not very fit, they don’t really have the option, right? There will be a race either way and of course the people who most need a seat are least likely to win. (I will keep standing on trains in the hope it’ll keep me from ever needing to sit, haha).
Anyone in the know knows where to look to find out the platform before it's "sanctioned for the public to be informed about it".
And no, there isn't always time to stroll to the train, I've seen some really, really late announcements. Couple this with very large countdown timers that they actually added recently to each platform and you can see exactly why people feel stressed and rush.
> They delay platform announcements because they believe that a platform crammed full of waiting passengers will become a crush risk when the arriving passengers start to disembark.
The alternative is forcing them all to wait in the same cramped concourse area (with most space lost to retail units). During disruption, it gets genuinely difficult to move through this area. It has felt unpleasant in normal use for a while, but when there are cancellations and delays it feels positively dangerous. I am not exaggerating when I say that it feels very much like it's only a matter of time before something happens and someone gets crushed or trampled.
There's none of this nonsense at some other London termini, and Birmingham New Street manages to let people wait on the platforms. Why can't Euston?
> Anyone in the know knows where to look to find out the platform...
And for anyone who isn't in the know, that's Realtime Trains[1]. It isn't correct 100% of the time; it uses the public record of train movements (TRUST) to predict which platform a train will arrive at, but is prevented by National Rail Enquiries from using the live status and delay data which official departure boards show (Darwin). That means that if the platform is changed at the last minute it is not certain that Realtime Trains will be able to detect the change.
Those will show a copy of the train describer data, which is the same thing that the actual signallers use to keep track of which train runs to which timetable, so they (or the computer, where available) can route it accordingly.
When there’s a little delay you often find that a trian leaving at say :30 will be advertised at :26 with big warnings about platforms closing 2 minutes early, so everyone panics and 400 people try to get to platform 4 in 120 seconds, which is of course impossible.
Curiously, I've had the exact same problem when I was in Britain. At Heathrow Airport. They would not announce which gate flights leave from until ~20 minutes before boarding.
Considering there's no 'crush risk' in this scenario, what even is the point of it? In the end I just used any of the myriad of online sites that list flight data to know which gate I needed to head to 1.5 hours before everyone else, and got to enjoy some peace and quiet.
Unlike Euston, Kings Cross was extensively renovated for the 2012 olympics, which by the standards of UK rail stations is a very recent upgrade.
They seem to have built it with enough capacity that they can announce platforms at the last minute and send everyone scurrying without causing any great danger.
Kings Cross is a mess of different systems, especially as the whole Kings Cross/ St Pancras complex rather than solely Kings Cross (which is only a dozen platforms). The low numbered Kings Cross platforms (zero through seven) are all accessed via a sideways entrance gate line, which is not good at all and you'd clearly never do that unless there's no economic alternative.
Yeah, no. So, at Christmas I was actually going to visit my mother. Kings Cross had advanced weather notice so they'd gone to a contigency plan, wall off that "loads of ticket barriers" (actually nowhere close to enough) with movable fencing and put staff behind the fences to allow in only those who were immediately travelling.
As I arrived, they announced that due to a tree falling on the line all service from those platforms was cancelled, no trains predicted for over an hour. My train, due to leave in about half an hour, was now delayed "indefinitely" supposedly.
But I've seen this movie before, I didn't go far. Sure enough, as I was loitering near a food stand 10-15 minutes later they announced that "no trains" had a single exception, my train was in fact running exactly as scheduled.
So I went to that "loads of barriers" and of course there's an enormous crowd just stood there, motionless, because they aren't able to process anything except that they are at a train station and they aren't being allowed to board a train, so they're just stood there next to these handful of barriers. I try to fight my way through the crowd, but it's too far and after about five minutes the staff announce that oh, actually there's another of these non-existent trains going somewhere else now, we're boarding that train and the one has now left.
About an hour later, with the station continuing to announce both that there are no trains and service hasn't resumed, and yet periodically that in fact each of the scheduled trains has (miraculously?) arrived anyway on time and is scheduled to depart on schedule contrary to the message they've also read out, this time I am standing near the front of that huge crowd and can force my way through to board the next train to my destination.
I'm sure they've promised themselves there's "zero crush risk" because they've screened off the barriers. "Yup, nobody was crushed against the barriers. Good work senior management team"
The T line just opened and I’m already sick of hearing the “transfer here” message eight goddamn times when my train passes Powell Station. It plays in four languages each time, once when Powell is the next station and again at Powell itself. Sounds like they made them part of the “station name” audio itself based on the way they are cued.
The transfer information is at least in line with why there’s a voice over system in the first place: giving useful actionable information to the blind in line with ADA requirements.
But it does not need to be in four languages, nor should there ever be a single message played back that isn’t exactly the stop information and maybe some transfer information. Every single other message from “please stand clear of the doors” to “sexual harassment sucks, don’t do it” doesn’t need to be in there.
I don’t know which one comes out the speaker because San Francisco officially counts Cantonese and Mandarin together as just “Chinese” for some reason, but the fourth is Filipino (not Tagalog, Filipino is what they list which I think is just a more standardized Tagalog but I am not an expert).
Interesting, "the Office of Rail and Road ... issued Network Rail with an improvement notice"
For the benefit of readers not versed with UK regulation, an improvement notice is a formal instrument under the powers of the Health and Safety Executive. Whilst short of a prosecution notice, it definitely indicates that the powers that be are Officially Not Happy with, in this case, Network Rail.
>Signs and announcements on the dangers of running. Announcements on the dangers of slippery floors in wet weather. Announcements and signs about the importance of holding the handrail on stairs. Special extra video screens and announcements about the dangers of taking luggage on escalators. Announcements and warning signs that a flight of stairs is particularly long and tiring. Announcements on the dangers of using your phone while walking. Announcements that it's good to carry a bottle of water in hot weather.
I don't think there is a shred of evidence that being bombarded with neurotic fretting improves safety - here in the states this is usually recognized as limitation of liability. Juries will accept "we warned you," as a counterbalance to their universal tendency to want to side with the little guy against the giant corporation.
But, falls are basically the only way people get injured at DC's Metro so it seems to make sense to have significant signage about that. I'd have to imagine there's nothing unique about DC so it's probably the same story for the UK.
"96% of the customer injuries were related to slips and falls within rail
stations, and about 52% of those were on escalators." [1]. The stat for employees was 40% with being struck by an object in #2 at 25%.
I work in transportation safety, primarily aviation but we also support WMATA. We usually define barriers which prevent, control, or mitigate an accident or undesired state [0]. Safety systems often require warning signage. Anecdotally, I find that regulators, companies, etc. use signage or safety bulletins than active barriers [0] because they are cheaper and quicker to implement. Even when they implement something like, say, abrasive floor treatments [1], that is only one barrier and likely imperceptible to the public.
Warning signage may be helpful, but I am skeptical of its effectiveness (especially as implemented). For example, "ice-warning signs do not have a statistically significant impact on the frequency or severity of vehicular accidents that involve ice." [2]
I'm not sure being reminded not to slip would reduce my likelihood of slipping.
Seems like things like making sure floor transitions are mild, adequate drainage, textured floors would be more effective. (polished stone and concrete are a nightmare with some shoes that I own in wet weather).
I genuinely don't see the harm of these things – I often think the issue is that lots of measures improve safety at the margins (e.g. if someone is drunk and stumbling down the stairs this announcement might help them) rather than on average. That is: many safety features will produce limited tangible benefit to the average person most of the time, but they do reduce accidents which normally happen at the tail end of the distribution in more extreme circumstances.
I saw myself doing this in realtime when visiting California for the first time. The initial shock of seeing signs that warned of cancer causing chemicals in buildings quickly faded when I realised they were on every building - soon becoming as blind to them as the locals.
To be honest this is a general problem with the UK. Try driving on any major street and you'll realize it's plastered with mostly useless signs. A dozen warnings assault your senses at any one time, which makes it very difficult to pick out what is actually important. This is compounded by sometimes completely braindead implementation of rules. E.g. most bus lanes in London can be used by motorcyclists, but some cannot. There's no rhyme or reason, the entire thing is decided by a small blue sign at the start of a particular stretch which may or may not have an even smaller motorbike icon on it - among an icon for a bus, taxi and pushbike. Whoever thought this is a good idea is either a moron or deliberately wanted to extract fines from motorcyclists who accidentally use the wrong bus lane.
> To be honest this is a general problem with the UK
Hotel lifts would appear to be another example of this. Automated "doors closing" / "doors opening" announcements seem to be present almost everywhere.
Presumably a significant number people suffer appaling crush injuries from lift doors in other countries ... or maybe they don't, and companies across the UK just let their Health and Safety conslutants get the upper hand.
Blind person here, I find the "doors closing" / "doors opening" announcements pretty tiresome, and I don't think they provide any benefit to us.
They sometimes even make things worse. Especially on bilingual elevators (not that uncommon in European countries where English isn't an official language), there are so many announcements that the elevator just can't keep up when there's a lot of traffic. I've seen a few elevators that were always a few announcements behind during periods of high activity.
The "lift (elevator) going up / down" announcements, on the other hand, are quite helpful, and I vastly prefer the European system than the American mess of ADA-compliant beeps.
(speaking as a person who isn't blind) The biggest omission seems to be that there is nothing to tell you what floor you've arrived at. This is probably fine for an empty elevator but as soon as it gets busy and there are 10s of floors I'd imagine it gets hard to navigate.
The "tunnel ahead" sign always struck me as particularly pointless. Who needs that sign? Surely if you're driving towards a tunnel, the enormous tunnel itself is the indication you need that you're heading towards a tunnel?
Those are for truck drivers and those carrying dangerous goods
The Blackwall Tunnel in London has those signs starting something like ten miles south (ie on the edge of the city!), to try an ensure such vehicles don’t reach the tunnel unwittingly and force it to be closed.
I mean the one they put directly in front of a tunnel, with the tunnel picture inside a red triangle. I live quite near Blackwall tunnel and haven’t seen it any of those on the approach. The ones you’re talking about are, I believe, red circles containing the actual restrictions which are, of course, fine.
Also strictly speaking, the restrictions, even if those red circles were combined with the tunnel warning, the tunnel warning is still irrelevant - you’d have to follow those restrictions whether or not there was a tunnel.
I'm sorry, but UK is positively devoid of road signs compared to some other countries lol, I've been driving here for well over a decade and it's really nice how few signs are here and it mostly relies on common sense.
67 road signs on a 360 metre long stretch of road - and to me, what's shown in the picture is very typical, especially in big cities. There are soooo many signs it's close to impossible to read all of them and still look at the road.
At a society level, ads are paid for with the opportunity cost of other things that people could be thinking about, e.g. cancer-curing drugs. We can therefore say that ads cause cancer.
Both are at the cost of a generally more tranquil and quiet environment. I would take the most boring, crack-filled and grayest concrete wall over someone else’s messaging whether it is paid for or the agency’s own propaganda.
One of the reasons that people like many tourist destinations is that many tourist destinations forbid most outdoor advertising. It's subtle, probably many tourists don't even realize it, but it changes the entire feel of a place.
> I genuinely don't see the harm of these things [..] they do reduce accidents
It would be good to see actual data backing up this hypothesis.
The cynic in me says another equally plausible hypothesis would be that this is entirely about the owner/operator/landlord avoiding any legal responsibility for accidents than actually reducing the number of accidents.
My mother had a job coming up with such warnings. She was a 'home safety technician' for the local council, advising people not to fall off ladders and the like. It seems to work like there are statistics that so many people end up in hospital after falling of a ladder or whatever and the council thinks we must fix this, we'll hire someone to educate the public. The odd poster probably doesn't make much difference to the number of people falling but it was quite an easy and entertaining job for my mum.
it's not so much "harmful" as it is a symptom of and also reinforcing a society mentality of immature and infantile irresponsibility. but one might also argue it is harming visual and acoustic silence by constantly announcing something and hanging signs everywhere.
There is an art to the production of low cognitive load information systems, which, as somewhat of a bonus, have the side effect of being navigable even by the mentally impaired.
Don't believe it? Think about that credit card of yours. You can instigate the movement of money while so piss drunk you can't even walk! Amazing on how such care isn't put into other things.
Judging by the graph on the linked page, the UK's rail network is mostly safer due to a lower number of workplace accidents. A cynic might suggest that that's correlated with a lack of maintenance :-).However I do also believe that the UK takes workplace accidents more serious than some other European countries.
Getting passenger fatalities down is mainly achieved by not letting your trains crash, and keeping an eye on the platform-train interface. Copious announcements about how to safely walk around a railway station probably only make a minor difference.
Oh it’s absurd. When I grew up in Britain we used to joke about America and how they had a sign on everything but the U.K. is now 10x worse. The endless announcements. The sign language video on every single timetable screen (Why? can deaf people not read? How do they navigate the 99.9999% of the world that lacks such screens? Can’t their iPhone help?). It’s madness.
My favourite is how the classic “mind the gap” (worthy as some of those gaps were quite big and it varies from station to station) has been replaced with “mind the gap between the train and the platform” as if some people are too stupid to know where the gap is? (And no sign language videos for that, so presumably it’s a slaughterhouse for the hard of hearing!).
And what is the “it” that we’re supposed to be seeing and spotting anyway? Maybe they could solve that problem instead.
You're talking about railway lines and stations with ad-hoc upgrades that are as much as 200 years old (yes). Most of the network is comfortably over 100 years old and trains were slower, and frankly, people were less mollycoddled.
But, with regards to the article, he's 100% correct, Euston is dangerous. And it's currently one of the worst central London stations for things going wrong. It's pretty much every other week at the moment. London Bridge used to be as bad with overcrowding until they rebuilt most of it.
Then again, Euston was supposed to be redeveloped for HS2, and that's been kicked into the long grass, even though all the hard work has been done. I don't think there's anyone truly as stupid as the UK government.
Exactly. See Sidney Dekker's Field Guide to Understanding Human Error. The posters do (almost) nothing -- other than covering the backside of those who put them up, and doing safety theatre. Looks good, does nothing for safety.
The same author, Sidney Dekker, has a very good book about how to deal with someone like this whistleblower. It's called "Just Culture". Well worth a read. Spolier: It's not to silence them, not this way. You can silence the person by, you know, actually doing something useful. But that requires actual change, and more importantly, a change in attitude. And you need to convince the crowds that you are doing better by NOT putting up posters. You'll be surprised how many people really think the posters help.
The most egregious ones were ubiquitous signs on the London Underground stating that travellers should take care on the escalators; there were 111 accidents on the escalators last year, after all.
Those accidents can be life changing, and often cause delays to services or dangerous levels of congestion during rush hour. I also suspect TfL are motivated to reduce liability - if they can show on CCTV somebody walking past a sign saying to take care, and then not taking care, TfL's coffers (i.e. the public's, it's not a private profit making entity), can be protected a little more from egregious legal claims.
But then trains highly overcrowded so in the case of another Greyrigg the death and injury toll would be far higher.
But affording to a train company there is "no upper limit on the number of passengers in a given train carriage". I did point out that the laws of physics, and basic human physiology would refute that assertion.
So, maybe safety theatre rather than patronising levels of safety.
The UK rail network is in the unhappy position of getting sued whenever someone gets hurt, however stupid they're being. I think there was a case where some youths cut through the fencing around a depot, climbed on a train and got killed by the overhead wire - and then Network Rail got fined for not having a more vandal-proof fence or something like that.
>My experience is the UK rail network targets truly patronising levels of safety. Signs and announcements on the dangers of running. Announcements on the dangers of slippery floors in wet weather. Announcements and signs about the importance of holding the handrail on stairs. Special extra video screens and announcements about the dangers of taking luggage on escalators. Announcements and warning signs that a flight of stairs is particularly long and tiring. Announcements on the dangers of using your phone while walking. Announcements that it's good to carry a bottle of water in hot weather.
Everything wrong with the UK today can be summarized as society going from "Mind the gap" to this insanity.
I agree that the announcements are annoying, but isn't this an overly emotional response? UK railways are extremely safe (as shown in the following link that someone else already posted here), and the annoying announcements might just be one of the less appealing aspects of an overall safety culture which is working as designed. I certainly don't see any connection between annoying announcements and any of the real problems facing the UK at present. E.g. what do they have to do with the housing crisis, or the social care crisis, or ...?
The annoying announcements are due to very a real problem facing the U.K. - what do you think the “it” is that we’re supposed to be spotting? It’s not a herd of unicorns.
Several of the stations on my local line (SWR out of Waterloo) have sliding gates that are prominently labelled "Warning! Sliding Gate!!". But they are manually operated, so they're never going to move of their own accord.
The place is a bit overrun with "don't run with scissors" warning notices, but they don't fix the things that are actually dangerous, like the terrazzo flooring that's like a skating rink the moment it gets even slightly damp.
What stuck out to me wasn't the signage, but "See it, say it. Sorted." Right along with "mind the gap!" that is going to be my enduring memory of UK rail.
Sure, but the "See it, say it, sorted" announcement is played over and over ad nauseam on the train; it's not just a sign. It's the national rail equivalent of "mind the gap" on the tube, which is also said over and over again. In the case of the tube it makes a little more sense since the ridership is changing significantly at every stop. But on a 4+ hour ride up to Edinburgh, it is pretty redundant to make the announcement every minute or so.
"Mind the gap" announcements used to exist only where there was a huge gap on curved platforms. These locations still use the authoritative, male voice.
Playing the woman's voice version at every station started about 15 years ago.
It's a thing our governments do to ensure that we are all slightly traumatized by the possibility of terrorism at all times. They make us afraid to make us easier to control.
I believe the purpose of these safety warnings is more about mitigating liability for accidents rather than any true concern for traveller's well being.
those are just to limit their liability: we told them not to so it's not our fault. The real safety, the one that they should provide is somewhere else.
My experience is the UK rail network targets truly patronising levels of safety. Signs and announcements on the dangers of running. Announcements on the dangers of slippery floors in wet weather. Announcements and signs about the importance of holding the handrail on stairs. Special extra video screens and announcements about the dangers of taking luggage on escalators. Announcements and warning signs that a flight of stairs is particularly long and tiring. Announcements on the dangers of using your phone while walking. Announcements that it's good to carry a bottle of water in hot weather.
I'm surprised this guy got fired - in the rail network I know, they'd have addressed his concerns by adding even more posters and announcements.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20240414153709/https://www.indep...