Disgressed

Unless you live in London you won’t have seen the ’London Programme’ piece about injuries to standing passengers. As a matter of fact, I missed it myself, but the main point, it seems, was that a computer simulation had shown that standing passengers (surprise, surprise!) were three times as likely to be injured as seated ones.

I’ve wondered before where the Health and Safety Executive was in all this. I was sort of joking when I said the official view would be that trains would only be safe if tightly packed, but reportedly the HSE view really is that standing passengers will serve as safety padding for each other (if they start introducing special zones for soft, fat people, my advice is not to stand there). According to the simulations, carried out by Advanced Simulation Technology, the padding approach only works if the train is absolutely packed with people to the point where movement is virtually impossible.

Browsing around, I found this document (pdf), produced by the Association of Train Operating Companies, which sets out standards for Vehicle Interior Crashworthiness. Nothing here about packing in tightly; in fact, hardly anything about the possibility of passengers standing up at all. The only reference to this possibility appears to be in the following passage, not unrepresentative of the general style:

The speed of an impacted vehicle and its interior components reduces very rapidly, whilst the speed/velocity of a projected passenger remains relatively constant in ‘free flight’. The risk of serious injury is lessened, therefore, by reducing the length of excursion occupants make along the vehicle. The shorter the excursion the less likelihood of severe secondary impact with interior features or other occupants, since the velocity of the passenger relative to the vehicle at impact will be less. It should not be assumed that all occupant movements will be parallel to the longitudinal axis of the vehicle and that all passengers and staff will be seated.

Elsewhere, however, it is assumed that passengers are seated. Appendix B, which sets out test procedures, gives considerable detail about seats, and the posture to be adopted by the prescribed Hybrid III ATD (Anthropomorphic Test Device), which is to be male, and either 95th or 50th percentile in size (depending, to put it brutally, on whether you’re testing the damage to the furniture or the passenger).  The ATD’s position is carefully specified – point (b) of nine points, for example, requires that

The ATD’s hands shall rest on its thighs with its elbows touching the seat back. The legs shall be extended to the maximum and then lowered so the heels shall touch the floor. The feet shall be pushed 10 mm rearward and shall be adjusted so the foot lies flat on the floor. The heels shall be adjusted so they have the same X co-ordinate. Knee separation shall be 170 mm.

Point B3.2 specifies that:

The ATD shall wear shoes of an Oxford type with smooth soles and heels.

I’m not sure of the reasoning here – are we testing the worst case, with smooth-soled Oxford shoes the most dangerous of footwear? Is it meant to be a typical case (as the use of exclusively adult male dummies might suggest)? Or is it that the kind of shifty character who wears slip-on shoes basically deserves all he gets?

Basically, in any case, to meet the crashworthiness standard, great care must be taken over the design and testing of seating: but so far as standing passengers are concerned, nothing need be done at all. In fairness (if this is fairness) I suspect part of the reason is that there are no standing-up ATDs available, so the only available method is by computer simulation. Yet new trains are already appearing with more standing room and less seating, and it is acknowledged that more and more commuters will have to stand. The inevitable result is that even small incidents, which in the past would have been inconsequential, will increasingly lead to a considerable number of injuries.

We must remember, as the crashworthiness standard says:

The effective mass of the impacting body region is also important. For example, if a passenger’s head impacts some part of the vehicle interior, the injury will be less severe if the contact force is only decelerating the mass of the head. If the head is being followed by a substantial proportion of the body mass, or, in the case of a chest impact, where the chest is stopped but the head is not, the neck is stressed. Thus it is important to control the trajectory of the passenger in an accident, the passenger’s orientation at impact, and to minimise the relative movement between body segments caused by rapid deceleration of one but not the other.

When your head departs on an ‘excursion’ down the carriage, think about whether a substantial proportion of your body mass ought to follow it: but at the same time, try to minimise relative movement between your body segments.

This is Elizabeth’s Weather Stone, designed to provide meteorological information. How does it work? If the stone is wet on top, you know it has been raining.

I thought this elegant concept was entirely original, but although Elizabeth may have come up with it herself, this is by no means the first or most elaborate Weather Stone in the world (though I think it may be the most cheerful).

I don’t know what caused the interest in weather prediction, but we had talked briefly over Easter about the significance for the weather of rooks building high or low in the trees. There are lots of sayings and other stuff of that kind of course. Though that list looks a bit odd to me. If you see a rainbow at night, I think it probably means the Vogons are coming.

The other day as I approached the ticket barrier my attention was caught by a group of three people on the other side. There was something a bit odd about what was going on, but it was hard to put your finger on what it was. There was the custodian of the barrier (can you call them ticket collectors when they hardly ever collect tickets?), standing rather passively by; a smartly dressed man shaking his head, and a very tall man speaking volubly in a strange voice.

I shoved my Oyster card on the reader distractedly and it failed to open the gates: instead I got the message about seeking assistance. The ticket collector seemed to have his hands full at the moment, so I just tried it again (there was a woman waiting impatiently behind me): it paused and then the gates opened.

I walked slowly past the puzzling group: the smartly dressed man and the large one were both talking at the same time: in fact it sounded as if the larger man were trying to drown the other out by a constant stream of unintelligible nonsense in a strange voice. The ticket collector looked detached, as if he might walk away in a minute and leave them to it; but also rather serious.

“No.” said the smartly-dressed man, in quite a smartly-dressed voice, too: “There’s no need for that.”

It suddenly dawned on me that the large man’s strange voice was supposed to be a West Indian accent. Presumably he had been intercepted without an appropriate ticket, taken exception to being stopped, and begun aggressively mocking the ticket collector’s presumed ethnicity. The smart man had stepped in unexpectedly to challenge the ongoing harassment. Although it seemed bizarre when directed at the smart man, the large one evidently felt unable to give up his funny voice without losing face in some way.

I don’t come across this sort of thing very much. The travelling population of the London transport system is so varied and cosmopolitan that any regular, however narrow their horizons to begin with, will surely have any sensitivity to racial differences eroded before long. After a few years of Tube travel everybody looks the same. So when racially-motivated aggression actually appears, it’s actually rather hard to believe it’s happening.

I suffered the same incredulity many years ago when I witnessed the only comparable incident I’ve ever seen. I was leaving the platform at Cannon Streeton that occasion when the man in front of me suddenly went into an elaborate mime. The strange thing was, it was a really good mime, immediately recognisable not just as a chimpanzee, but as a stupid, confused, somewhat vicious chimpanzee. The bandy legged-gait, the strange wrist angles, the protruding lower lip: a lot of solid observation, careful thought, and let’s be honest, genuine talent had gone into this act: I just couldn’t for the life of me understand why it was suddenly being performed on a railway station. Then I saw the young (he looked about fourteen) ticket collector who at the moment was looking more green than brown, staring straight ahead and visibly having a very bad time indeed.

And here was a similar unpleasantness happening again. Perhaps this time I ought to intervene in some way? But I couldn’t be sure my interpretation of events was correct. If I plunged in and said “He’s right, there’s no need for that.” I might find the tall man turning on me with what turned out to be his normal voice and asking mildly “No need for what?”  Or could I go up to the group and say “Excuse me, would you just mind recounting to me what’s happened over the last ten minutes so that I can check whether I need to get involved?”

Anyway, their main problem seemed to be that they were stuck in an impasse. Neither of the two active parties was going to back down or go away. Neither, it seemed clear, was going to resort to violence (They’re probably both, in different ways, used to being able to simply over-awe the opposition, I thought - rather uncharitably). The smart man had to keep on remonstrating and the tall man had to keep on churning out the increasingly surreal stream of imitation black-speak. The ticket collector looked as if he just wanted the whole thing to be over; but he couldn’t very well walk off and leave the two of them to sort it out between themselves – and probably there was still the outstanding matter of a ticket to be settled.

I felt in my pocket for my own ticket, and it was only then I remembered that Oyster cards don’t work on my trains, only on the tube. No wonder the gates hadn’t opened at first. And then… the woman behind me must have put her own ticket in the slot, letting me through but not herself. If she had a season ticket she could just put it through again, but if she had a one-off ticket… I glanced back, and there she was, stuck on the other side of the barriers. Seek Assistance, they probably said. 

I turned my head and slunk away.