Japan stops measuring train crowding by ease of newspaper readership Japan's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism has changed the way it measures crowding on trains, abandoning decades-old newspaper- and magazine-based metrics. The Ministry publishes regular reports detailing congestion rates in major metropolitan areas. Those documents have previously used the charming …
Supporting the sardine.
But, having had both the pleasure to travel in Tokyo's rush hour and the displeasure doing the same in London (and other major city in Europe and the western hemisphere), for the latter I'd suggest to optionally use a metric measuring the ability to escape the rotten sardine smell emitted from fellow passengers.
Honestly, until the British train companies improve the metrics for trains-actually-turning-up, trains-getting-to-their-destination-vaguely-on-time, and trains-not-turning-into-a-bus-replacement-service-half-way-through-the-journey, then I'm not so interested in the train-overcrowding one.
Britain seems to have a unique desire to spend large sums of money to make railways services worse.
HS2 will, in the end, further reduce rail capacity between London (well, Wormwood Scrubs for the foreseeable future) and Manchester which means higher fares to deter travel to manage the consequent overcrowding.
Also in Manchester, the Ordsall Chord (a short, but expensive piece of railway, originally proposed in the 1970s, allowing trains from Victoria Station to loop back round to Piccadilly) was supposed to provide better connectivity and a wider choice of routes through the city. It's largely unused because the necessary improvements to the Castlefield Corridor weren't made and therefore any additional trains would simply delay the existing ones.
It's almost as if politicians had no concept of public transport outside London.
200 percent There is a lot of pressure from physical contact, but you can still read a weekly magazine;
At first glance I read this as "...There is a lot of pleasure..." which hit the cognitive emergency brakes.
Given the subjects of the Chrysanthemum throne have a few quaint traditions some involving sharp implements and exposed bellies I had to reread this to allay my misgivings.
Otherwise I might have suggested the rego unit might be Jollies with 200% = 1 Jolly but clearly at 2.0 Jollies the ability to still read a magazine is extremely unlikely.
Well, there's plenty of room to grow here on Mars! And our top-notch quantum teleportation public transist system never runs at that 250% spin packing level of entangled green tentacle superposition ... but then again you're not always sure where you're at until someone opens the doors!
Oh yes, the economy, the thing that matters most for an American.
But what about quality of life? Living with the Nature and being part of it instead of being totally disconnected? Having time with the family rather than hours in commuting? Growing your own food rather than buying industrial junk? Just to name a few.
My technique was to fold the newspaper (The Japan Times obviously) vertically and then read it like a concertina. That worked up to 200%. Have to admit I've never seen that info-graphic but had a few commutes that must have topped 250%. The contents of the train becomes one solid mass of humanity helpless against the G-forces.
How about "Average Exit Latency", defined as the number of stops required to get from the average passenger position to the outside of any exit. When it gets above about 2, the crowding near the doors increases non-linearly because people are trying to get position before all of the next three stops although two thirds of them don't want the current one.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
