In the previous entry “On ‘A Streetcar Named Development'”, I noted ‘The more important concern is revealed by the closing quote from Teresa Wernecke, director of the Downtown Minneapolis Transportation Management Organization. ‘“With rail, you know where you’re going,â€? Wernecke said.’
I am here to tell you, that in London, on rail, you don’t know where you are going. Yesterday, returning home from Imperial College on the District Line, I boarded the Wimbledon-bound train at the South Kensington Station. The District Line roughly forms an 3–C Shaped network (all distorted though), The Edgware Road branch and the City branch come together at Earl’s Court (the two branches of the “C”), and then lines split again for Wimbledon, Richmond, and Ealing (the three prongs of the the “3”).
Well, before the train reaches Gloucester Road station, the conductor announces the train has been redirected to Ealing Broadway, and all passengers bound for Wimbledon (or points in-between) needed to change trains at Earl’s Court.
While this is not a big deal, walking from one train on the platform to another across the platform, it created a lot of confusion. Native Londoners were asking me (a newbie) what was going on.
Those dynamically rerouting the trains had a good reason for this (another Wimbledon-bound train was already at the Earl’s Court platform, one for Ealing must have been held up somewhere upstream), trying to balance service or flow of trains.
If this had only happened once, one might say, “that’s strange”. But in two months of semi-regular commuting this is the third time this has happened. I missed the announcement once and had to backtrack. This does not happen with buses.
The point is that (A) when you have a complicated system, this creates opportunities to dynamically reroute (on a single line system, the exercise would be meaningless), and (B) there is not something inherently more secure or informative about rail over bus, and may be found more on rail than on buses (I have yet to be on a bus which suddenly changed which route it was traveling on).