During the evacuation of Kabul, a United States Air Ford C19 Globemaster transport aircraft set a new record by carrying 823 passengers. Although C19 can be fitted with palletised seating modules, to pack in this number the passengers sat on the cargo deck, each row squashed up between the legs of the row behind. Not so much full and standing as full and seated.
What’s this got to do with railways (I had wondered – Ed)? It makes the point that you can squeeze a lot of people into transport vehicles, but it is not necessarily a comfortable experience for those concerned.
For rail commuter services, a measure of overcrowding is Passengers In Excess of Capacity (PIXC). The PIXC percentage can also be expressed as the number of standing passengers per square metre of floor space. One example equates a PIXC of 40% to five standing passengers per m². Table 4 puts the cold numbers into context.
As anyone who has just squeezed into a tube train will know, at this level of PIXC, you can barely move. Ambiance is not an issue.
INTER-CITY
Now consider an inter-city or interurban train, where ambiance has always been a selling point. This is even more important as the operators seek to woo the only potential growth market, the leisure traveller.
With many people still nervous about Covid, and the divide between the masked and unmasked, a full and standing train can be a deterrent to making more journeys in future. Apart from that, aisles and vestibules crowded with standing passengers and their luggage hamper movement along the train, whether it is for a visit to the buffet or toilet or for the catering trolley to come round.<…
