Paul Corfield wrote:
On Sun, 5 Nov 2006 18:37:45 -0000, "Tim Roll-Pickering"
wrote:

David of Broadway wrote:

How wide are the islands though? Leaving aside the shops on those
platforms, the available space for moving down them is so narrow that
most of the time passengers need both sides to move down, especially if
you're trying to get round a buggy. And how exactly would you construct a
TfL users only sealed route from the eastbound Central Line to the DLR
platform?
Fairly wide. These should give you a rough idea:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/triborough/92363857/

These look as if they are made by Cubic as they resemble LU second
generation gates very closely.

The new PATH turnstiles (installed in 2004 and 2005) are indeed Cubic,
following in the path (excuse the pun) of New York City Transit, which
installed the Cubic-based MetroCard system in the 1990's.

http://www.nycsubway.org/perl/show?22191
If I read those images correctly, that's much wider than the Stratford
platforms. No way could a barrier setup like that work there.

What is not visible (and I don't know the NYC location) is how long the
platform is and how many gate arrays there are. The other factor is
train frequency and the volume of people transferring. Some London
locations can get between 8 and 12 car trains at 1-2 headways which
would require very high numbers of gates to clear those alighting before
the next train arrives - that is before you get people transferring in
the opposite direction and any accumulated crowds who have been unable
to get on their connecting train. If we take Stratford as an example it
is not unusual for people to be unable to board the first Central Line
train at the height of the peak and thus you need standing room.

Nit: The location is Newark Penn Station, not NYC.

Newark Penn is a stop along the NJTransit Northeast Corridor Line and
North Jersey Coast Line and along many Amtrak intercity trains between
Philadelphia and New York, as well as the terminus of most NJTransit
Raritan Valley Line trains. Aside from the Raritan Valley trains,
nearly all of these trains continue to New York Penn Station in Midtown
Manhattan.

PATH is a subway-style service (albeit operated by a different agency
than the one that operates the NYC subway system, and, obviously,
extending outside NYC boundaries) that begins at Newark Penn and runs to
the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan. (There are other
branches of PATH, but this is the relevant one here.) Pretty much
everybody who commutes on NJT and works in Lower Manhattan transfers
here to PATH, which is both faster and cheaper than staying on NJT to NY
Penn and taking the subway downtown.

I don't know exactly what the ridership numbers are, but peak PATH
headways at Newark are 4-5 minutes.

Nonetheless I still think it is rather academic as you simply could not
create such installations at almost all LU to NR "within one station"
interchanges as things stand today.

I agree that it would be a challenge.

In many cases, probably the only way to install barriers would be to
eliminate cross-platform connections and force connecting passengers to
go up or down to a mezzanine solely to touch in or out -- and that, of
course, would be extremely inconvenient and would introduce new crowding
and passenger flow concerns.

Years and years ago I dragged round a set of consultants from KPMG to
explain how the fare validities work and what that means for ticket
validation requirements at the most complex interchanges. Now, if
anything, it has become much more complicated with TOC specific
validities as well as what has happened with TfL fares. While I can see
other cities can obviously spend the money and have the space to install
inter-system checks it won't work in London unless someone chucks
several hundreds of millions of pounds at reconstruction of key
stations.

The system in the New York City area is simpler only because we have
essentially no inter-system fares.

MTA New York City Transit has one MetroCard-based fare system for its
subway and bus system, with free transfers available between the two. A
collection of NYCDOT-subsidized private bus companies had a fare system
integrated with NYCT's, but they were recently swallowed up by MTA Bus.
MTA Long Island Bus and MTA Staten Island Railway also use the same
fare system, including free MetroCard transfers to and from NYCT services.

The MTA also operates the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North
Railroad, but these two agencies have independent ticketing systems
(i.e., independent from each other and from NYCT). It is possible to
obtain a monthly train ticket that also works as a MetroCard on NYCT
services, and there is a slight discount for those who buy the combined
ticket, but that is the extent of the coordination.

Outside the MTA umbrella, two of the systems operated by the Port
Authority of New York and New Jersey -- PATH and JFK AirTrain -- also
accept MetroCard, but they do not accept NYCT unlimited cards and there
are no transfer privileges with NYCT services.

The Bee-Line bus system in Westchester County (north of New York City)
will soon accept MetroCard, but I don't know if free transfers and NYCT
unlimiteds will be part of the deal.

NJTransit has its own ticketing system, completely independent of
anybody else's. (It also has the slowest, most difficult-to-use ticket
machines on the planet.)

Amtrak, the intercity rail carrier, has yet another ticketing system.

And those are just the big players. There are lots of smaller transit
operators in the region, each of which generally issues its own tickets.
--
David of Broadway
New York, NY, USA