This Side of the Pond

There’s a new initiative in development that’s supposed to make the London Underground more of a pleasant experience and less of a writhing coil of snakes, but I’m not sure how I feel about it. The concept is fantastic in theory, but it relies on collecting data from everyone’s phones.

The reason for this potential intrusion is that the Tube is overcrowded, hot, sticky, confusing and always late, but it costs a great deal of money to buy trains and build lines. I’m not even sure where they’d put a new line – if you’ve ever seen a map of the underground, you know it’s a spaghetti bowl of criss-crossing lines in a configuration that bears no logic whatsoever.

This is what happens when you build things bit by bit in a city that’s been sending roots into the ground for a thousand years. Finding spare patches of land for stations must be taxing enough, let alone figuring out how to get a pipe big enough for a commuter train to link them.

So instead of buying new infrastructure, the brains in control of this mess had the bright idea of using technology to make the existing infrastructure more efficient. It could use WiFi data to figure out what each commuter is doing between entering one station and exiting another.

This could help them decide where to send extra staff, where information boards are needed and even where to put retail outlets. Meanwhile, those commuters could be sent messages letting them know they’re about to experience overcrowding (which, I’m telling you now, is going to require at least six messages per minute) and suggesting a different route (which will also be overcrowded).

To give you some idea of just how many people are trying to squeeze into these trains, I witnessed several people use overhead luggage racks as recliners on a journey to the city center one New Year’s Eve. Meanwhile, on one memorable occasion, I was forced to spend 40 minutes standing on one leg when two cancelled trains made the third so busy that there simply wasn’t room for any more toes.

This new scheme could also recommend waiting for the next train to come along if the one pulling up to the platform is jam packed. I don’t think this is going to work because it’s an unspoken rule of London life that one must always walk fast enough between platforms to have a chance of catching the train before the one you usually catch.

It doesn’t ever work, but we operate on hope alone as commuters in one of the world’s busiest cities. We hope the train won’t come to a halt in the tunnel, baking us inside metal loaf tins with absolutely no air conditioning.

We hope we won’t be late for work – or, as happened to me, for a job interview with a prestigious worldwide publisher. Despite leaving an hour early, I was 40 minutes late and had no way to let them know because you can’t get a phone signal underground.

Meanwhile, there are no three words so terrifying to a Londoner as “rail replacement service”. If delays are frustrating, construction closures that require bus replacements make us downright furious.

This is because the bus will take the most circuitous route it can think of through the busiest roads in London, and it will only do so once an hour if you’re lucky. They try to limit these services to the weekend, but they really are so awful that most of us would rather stay home.

No, you won’t convince a commuter that the tortoise beats the hare. We trust in our superstition that everything will be fine if we can just walk fast enough to catch that earlier service.

We certainly wouldn’t be interested in waiting six minutes for another train (assuming the schedule board is telling the truth, which it never is) when we can see a perfectly reasonable four square inches of space on the carriage in front of us.

The underground Big Brother could also give suggestions for alternative routes from your A to B, because there’s usually a dozen ways to move between stations and few Londoners have the patience to time test them all. I doubt, however, that the service will ever admit you’ve just spent an hour at six different stations to reach a place you could have walked to in ten minutes.

London, you see, isn’t very big, especially within the central zone. A seasoned traveler knows how to sprinkle some station-hopping into a journey, but this new service is unlikely to factor that in.

I will concede that the service could be extremely handy for visitors and newcomers, who haven’t yet memorized the squiggles on the map and are blissfully unaware that they will never, ever get a seat on the Central Line.

On my first solo outing in London, for example, I solemnly perused the map and wrote down instructions for myself. I got about halfway and was feeling pleased with myself when, at one specific station, I was required to exit the Piccadilly Line and switch over to the District Line.

I dutifully exited the train, ran across the platform and jumped onto another one. How was I to know that this station had double the platforms for the Piccadilly Line and I’d just essentially got back on the same train?

A roommate of mine once fell asleep on a service that passed our house and found himself six stops past his destination, right at the end of the line, in another county. He then fell asleep on the return journey and woke up at the other end of the line, in yet another county on the other side of London and about 15 miles from home.

Unfortunately, this had all taken so long that the trains were stopping for the night, so he had no choice but to nap on a bench until morning. He’d been living in London for ten years by that point

I tell you this to illustrate my point that the Tube is a beast without master. You can never completely learn its foibles, nor entirely bend it to your will. And if this Big Brother program is capable of taming such a tyrant, maybe we should be more scared of the technology than we are the trains.