Coronavirus Implications For London's Transport

Essentially, no. The commissioner - himself on the way out to manage “Fit for the Future Houses of Parliament” - is beholden to the mayor, and we have a full-scale game going on between the mayor and the government, doubtlessly with some politics being played (to be fair to Khan, mainly on the government side).

I think we need to cross everything we can in the hope that the infection rate in London doesn’t start creeping up again. If it does then there’s a real problem as the transport system simply isn’t workable, and I don’t think another lockdown is either affordable or viable. We really needed to be starting from a blank sheet (in other words back to where we were in January time but this time round with the mitigations like social distancing robustly in place), but it doesn’t feel like we’ve quite rewound that far - indeed the scientists seem to be intimating exactly that. It’s rather depressing that the prime minister seems more concerned with keeping people happy by telling them to go for a sunbathe, than outlining a robust plan for getting the nation safely back to work, which surely should be the absolute first priority after keeping deaths down. How can we have a serious plan when they’re too busy playing politics with the mayor?

London Transport has always had a rather uncomfortable relationship with politicians, and this affair is no exception. Ironically the big railway seems to be avoiding a lot of this, for now at least, which is perhaps made easier by running a more calendar service, and crucially Home Counties commuters being more readily able to work from home, and in most cases have viable car access for other journeys.

(Please note I’ve attempted to depoliticise the above as much as possible, it it’s not easy when the current situation is now pretty much wholly politically led - which is perhaps why it’s turning out to be such a shambles. One wonders what the likes of Frank Pick, or the extraordinary engineers who delivered the Victoria Line, would make of all this?...)



Yes I presume that’s the issue, and to be fair it isn’t an unreasonable concern as tipping a train out will result in having to walk back along a crowded platform, and perhaps having to approach people who aren’t aware the train is terminating.

As I’ve intimated before, the key workers haven’t been a problem in this respect - without fail they’ve been on the ball, supportive and readily able to work with staff to achieve whatever needs to be done. We are now back to the more normal breeds, like the nightmare weekend before the lockdown, and that’s where problems start to re-appear.

One would have really liked to hope that with everything going on people would have shifted up a gear and made the effort to be that little bit more on the ball, in order to make the best of a bad job and make life easy for everyone. Based on my observations today this hope is not turning out in reality. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, two months ago the self-same people would perhaps have been panic buying toilet rolls and experimenting with drinking bleach!

Being brutally objective, “essential journeys only” isn’t in practice so much about keeping the raw numbers down, but perhaps about keeping the right sort of user - or more specifically keeping away the ones who cause problems. Unless Londoners can quickly convert themselves to be more along the lines of this right sort of user, we have a problem. Will Londoners rise to it?

The way things are going in my locality, with packed trains and packed beaches, I think it is possible we will have to have lockdown reimposed. I hope we don't get a local second wave imported mainly from London.

It is interesting that they have tended to run fairly smoothly. Over the lockdown I’ve tended to spend a bit of time waiting for trains on London Bridge H/L and it’s been noticeable how literally everything has run and been on time to the minute. Perhaps they have taken some benefit from their drivers being able to do RDW which must have bolstered their coverage. It also helps that running a calendar service compared to LU must make planning easier. The Victoria Line must run more trains in a couple of hours than LNER do for a full day!

I do find the LU situation rather unfortunate, as the whole situation hasn’t really shone LU in a wonderful light. Some of this was beyond our collective control in that there’s not much that could be done about Covid-related absence, and likewise the social distancing is something imposed from elsewhere. However I continue to hold the opinion the timetabling situation could and should have been better handled.

Something like Thameslink must be haemorrhaging even more money than LU. 12-car trains that are normally fairly well filled even in the off-peak are running around with less than 10 people on, sometimes less than 5. I suspect a lot of people in the Home Counties don’t want to be on a train at the moment, and use of the car is more viable than in central London.

Sorry, but it will be the other way around. Deaths in London have been in single figures for the last week, The Midlands, North East and North West seem to be lagging by a couple of weeks. 

It will be interesting to see if this trend continues. London may have benefited from transport being so heavily restricted, with many particularly in central London not having cars this does rather restrict the ability to move around, likewise with many businesses still being closed.

As of this week roads, and noticeably this now includes motorways, are now busier, and mainline termini have also been busier. Euston yesterday for example was the busiest I’ve seen it since March. If people are now moving around then what’s now to stop it being brought back to London? Especially if it is claimed to spread as readily as someone sitting in a seat that an infected person has occupied.

There must be some nails being bitten amongst the political and scientific classes as we speak. This country just doesn’t quite seem to have managed to get as firm grip on things as others have. It does seem generally acknowledges now that not enough was done early on, and the lockdown was then too little and too late to fully correct us from the point we’d then reached. Now we seem to be in a state of limbo - a now very loose lockdown still going on, yet still with millions of people not returned to work, as well as schools closed. We’re really not in a good place, and we all need to hope that things pick up quickly, if they don’t as a country we’re in for a catastrophic shock in a number of ways.

I think some people are blissfully unaware of the economic danger the country is currently staring in the face. People have been insulated by a highly generous furlough scheme, unfortunately at some point reality is going to bite for many. This isn’t a 8-month bank holiday but a crisis, as can be seen by the difficulties in providing safe transport to get people to work, and in opening schools in order both to educate children and provide childcare to allow their parents to work.

Buses to resume front door boarding

tfl.gov.uk/info-for/media/press-releases/2020/may/london-s-buses-to-return-to-front-door-boarding

I noticed this in the 2nd paragraph...

Well that's going to be fun for the drivers...

Its all very well thinking of these ideas, but how do they expect a drive, who is working alone, to enforce them?

This is exactly why there’s now quite an awful atmosphere amongst elements of the workforce. Many feel they’ve been dumped with the task of keeping things moving (which isn’t in itself the issue as many are quite happy to be at work and doing their bit), but the level of support provided has been woeful, and in some cases positively destructive.

I’d like to say more, but this would then become political as it runs from LU management right through the mayoral office to the government, so I’ll leave it there on that score.

From conversations I’ve had with others, this is by no means unique to transport. I really feel for people like supermarket staff who have doubtlessly had it even worse, especially during the panic buying period.

The next few weeks are going to continue to be extremely testing, patience is wearing very thin. Interestingly, at a couple of depots where I know the stats there’s now more people off with non-C19 reasons than C19-related (including shielding). Certainly in my neck of the woods people are becoming very worn down by it all, which doesn’t bode well going forward.

I bet it’s the same for people living and working in honeypot locations now too. The way this situation has been handled has created a sickly combination of some people trying to get on with their work in challenging circumstances, whilst meanwhile another subset of the population is on what is clearly to some a rolling bank holiday, and in the process making life much more difficult for the first group. No doubt places like Brighton feel this has been dumped on them in the same way as transport staff.

Longer term, it’s hard to see social distancing being possible on transport as more of the economy opens up, especially the retail and hospitality sector. And at some point, we will have to open up to tourists from overseas as they are a major contributor to the economy.

As a teacher, I am fully expecting to be back in school full time with much of the current social distancing rules relaxed.

It isn’t viable - even if more shops open then there’ll be the situation of queues snaking into each other, for example. The only saving grace might be that as more people return to work there’s actually less pressure on places, as fewer people will have time on their hands. How many people would, for example, be prepared to queue for 5 hours at Ikea if they were having to dovetail that with a full week of work?

Part of the reason for bad atmosphere in many places in no doubt that those who have worked right through this are in many cases not just doing their own work, but being expected to pick up that of others’ too. Couple this with something like LU’s traditional people-skills-lacking and confrontational management style, and it’s easy to see why we now have people literally walking out. Being quite honest, I don’t blame them.

Very saddening to read, I have a relative who works in a GP surgery and her experience is very similar. Indeed her view at the moment is that sooner or later she’s probably going to lose her job as a result of patience running out and exploding at someone. Again, total lack of support from above. All this going on, and all a certain person can do is tell people to go out and have a sunbathe or cycle ride, with now predictable results in places like Brighton.

It’s such a depressing take on today’s Britain that through this we’ve seen panic buying, a completely irrational obsession with stockpiling toilet rolls, the prime minister health secretary CMO and heir to the throne inflected including one of them in intensive care, phone masts being torched, and now the latest thing being piles of nappies and disposable barbecues on beaches. Some of the scenes from beaches from this weekend are utterly disgusting, and not forgetting that workers will have been tasked with having to clear up behind them.

I hope I haven’t veered too far off topic, but it is at least slightly comforting to know that other sectors are in the same boat and equally peeved.

The issue with transport is a very difficult one to solve. It’s completely understandable that people want to use transport for certain things, however for as long as distancing is an issue then there is simply going to have to be a priority list. Ultimately this is still very much a national emergency situation (although looking at beaches or national parks one could be forgiven for thinking otherwise!), and we currently have a situation where a significant proportion of the population is not back to work. One reason for this is concerns regarding transport capacity. It seems hard to escape the fact that crowded public transport must be an environment where spread risk is heightened.

Ultimately this is an incredibly difficult problem to solve, as ultimately work-related journeys *have* to take priority - this is in everyone’s interest as ultimately the longer this economic limbo lasts the greater damage is going to happen, and ultimately a destroyed economy would eventually mean we can’t sustain some of the things we collectively rely upon, not least the NHS.

Unfortunately, elements of the population simply can’t be trusted to make the right judgements. We saw packed trains before the lockdown, and elements of this were repeated last weekend. The deputy CMO’s words were very appropriate, urging people not to tear the pants out of the guidance. I know for a fact there’s railway staff who can recount horror stories from this most recent weekend - people cramming themselves into seaside-bound trains and then moaning that it’s too busy to distance, but failing to realise that their actions were the cause of the problem. It is these people who are souring it up for everyone, including those who would be more sensible about their travel decisions.

So much will fall into place once the majority of people are back where they belong - at work - as we then simply won’t have this bunch of people with ad-lib leisure time on their hands, but how we get to that point is very difficult. The weather is said to be turning to some extent from the middle of this week, and most years there’s generally a decline around now with the “return of the westerlies”.(*)Perhaps something as simple as a few grey days might just reduce tensions all round a little.

(* a recognised pattern in U.K. weather where spring sees easterly winds bringing calm weather and blue skies, but around June this naturally reverts to a more normal westerly pattern bringing weather systems off the Atlantic).

As others have spotted, social distancing will rapidly become unworkable on the tube once the Government concludes the balance between health risk and economic damage has changed and recommends people get back to work and non essential stuff can resume.

OK that decision may be a few weeks off, but is it credible to assume the lockdown can continue much longer given increasing public non-compliance especially in the face of stupidly ill thought through actions by people who should be assiduously setting the right example.

Yes the CMO (Chief Medical Officer is still advising caution, but his focus is correctly only on managing health risks rather than than practicalities of running public transport. So have we already reached the point where TFL should stop spending on social distancing signage etc which is basically trying to do the impossible?

The WHO continues to recommend only a 1 metre safety distance (which was based on admittedly ancient 1920's? research) but that found that the vast majority of any droplets emitted by typical coughs and sneezes fall well inside that distance. However if you double the safety distance you do not halve the risk of a virus spreading, but you do make compliance vastly more difficult.

As others have noted on public transport the whole thing falls flat the moment someone sneezes into their hand and then grabs hold of a handrail on buses/tubes or escalators or taps on a screen/keypad to top up their oyster. Sadly direct contact is likely to provide more effective virus transmission. Hence the most important advice remains to wash hands regularly and avoid touching your face. Obviously if you want to be totally safe then you probably need to be recommend a separation distance of well over 30 metres to be beyond the range of some of the more extreme sneezes.

Whilst many people vehemently dislike the idea, perhaps the right answer is for everyone travelling on public transport is required to wear a mask, at least until the experts conclude this virus is no more.