The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Saturday, June 04, 2005

Transports of Wonder

My local Tube station is a masterwork of British design. There are two entrances, one which leads to the main street where most of the passengers come from, and one which does not. If you go in through the entrance which is not accessible from the street, you encounter the ticket machines, the kiosks and the electronic barriers, in that order. This means you can purchase your ticket, place it in the slot on the barrier and have it sucked in and electronically read, whereupon the barriers open and you can go downstairs to the platform.

On the other hand, if you go in through the entrance which is accessible from the street and which is used by perhaps ninety per cent of the people entering the station, the order is reversed. First you pass the stairs to the platform, then the barriers, then the kiosks, and finally the ticket machine. This means that one cannot purchase a ticket without first going through the barriers, while the whole point of the barriers is that one needs a ticket to go through them.

London Underground's original policy was simply to leave the barriers open. Passengers would walk in off the street, go through the open barriers, buy tickets, about-face, walk through the barriers again, proceed to the platform and continue their journey in London Underground's accustomed cleanliness, comfort and quiet. Since most stations are so constructed that one cannot usually get out unless one gives the barriers some paper to eat, attempting to travel without a ticket is at best a fairly pointless gamble. Nevertheless, as the vicious and hooded among you will already have surmised, open barriers constitute an opportunity to get onto the platform without first paying for a ticket. This is intolerable.

In recent months London Underground has instituted a new intolerability prevention policy, which apparently has been conceived specifically to augment the surreal genius of the station's construction, as well as providing previously unheard-of opportunities for queue augmentation. They have closed the barriers and stationed three or four customer journey facilitation operatives about the place. When you enter the station from the street, you simply queue until you come face to face with one of these operatives and then inform them that you wish to purchase a ticket. The operative will then open the barrier so that you can join the queue at the machine or the kiosk and purchase the ticket, whereupon you can then go back to the barriers and be electronically permitted to pass through in the other direction.

This policy is, of course, applied largely (for all I know, solely) on weekdays during the morning rush, so that its benefits can be felt at their most emphatic.

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