Monday 23 March 2009

Canary Wharf Travel Apocalypse

At least 90,000 people work in Canary Wharf every day. Only 25% of them live in the surrounding 5 boroughs. That means that the rest of them have to travel quite far to get to this simmering hell-hole.

However, there is exactly one Underground stop and line that goes there. The Jubilee line. Many of those 90,000 workers come from South-West London, since one of the reasons that the Jubilee line travels the way it does is to be just as convenient for the ex-City workers as the Waterloo & City line ("The Drain") many used to take to work. The Jubilee Line sucks though. It fails. A lot. And when it does fail, here's the sequence:

  1. Travellers from South-West Trains get to Waterloo and are held outside the ticket barriers due to overcrowding on the platforms. During this time, the Jubilee Line has "Good Service."
  2. Eventually, they will finally acknowledge that the Jubilee line has problems (for example, this morning and Friday morning they shut it down completely during rush hour).
  3. Somewhere in between the two, there will be a rush to the Waterloo & City line so that people can transfer to the DLR, the only other form of mass transit that goes to the simmering stink-hole that is Canary Wharf.
  4. Too many people will start interchanging at Bank station rather than just exiting it, leading to
  5. An evacuation of Bank Station due to overcrowding, leading to
  6. The Waterloo & City line getting shut down, leading to
  7. Everybody stuck precisely where they are.

Yep, that's right, when the Jubilee line has a hiccup, nobody gets to work in the City.

Who in their right mind allowed Canary Wharf to go in with a single tube line and no redundancy in any form in transport, and then to just keep expanding to no end? Whoever it was was an idiot.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

canary wharf is like that, because us brits want to do eveything on the cheap!

When Mrs thatcher was proposing knocking down loads of people homes so they could put up canary wharf etc, They had to agree that they would put ina tube extension, but being the british goverment - any cost is too much cost
also see
British rail, cross rail, M25, electrification of the rail, london airports

btw I came her via hacker news and your blog about visa's.