Are your passengers sitting comfortably?
More comfortable train seats mean happier passengers. But what does ‘comfortable’ really mean and how do you know when you’ve achieved it? Our new guidance makes it easier to answer these questions and put more bums on seats.
Everyone wants rail passengers to have the best possible experience, whether it’s planning journeys and buying tickets or using stations and boarding trains. Comfortable train seats are a significant part of that experience, making up 5% of overall customer satisfaction, according to National Rail research. But until now there’s been no consensus of what is, and what is not, a comfortable seat.
The issue of seat comfort has climbed up the agenda since the pandemic, owing to an increase in discretionary and leisure journeys. The happier these new rail users are with their experience, the more likely they are to keep travelling by train and not drift back to their personal vehicles or switch to other modes of transport. That even applies to commuters, says RSSB Director of Standards, Tom Lee: ‘They now have a degree of choice about whether or when to travel. That makes seat comfort more important than before. There’s an increasing need for rail to provide an attractive environment or passengers.’
The industry already has a target to move passengers satisfaction with seats from the 66% reported in 2020 to 90% by 2035. But the 2021 Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail added urgency to the issue by making seat comfort part of ‘a new deal for customers’. The plan criticised today’s ‘ironing board seats’ and promised new design standards to make new trains ‘more comfortable than their predecessors’, though it stopped short of actually defining ‘comfortable’.
That leaves rolling stock companies and operators with a conundrum when it comes to commissioning or refurbishing trains. As Tom says: ‘Passengers are young and old, come in all shapes and sizes, and travel on a train for anything from 15 minutes to three hours. Those are very different experiences.’ So how do you design a seat that’s comfortable for everyone?
With new rolling stock and seats lasting as long as 20 years, the decision to switch from a current seat design isn’t one to make lightly. But new RSSB guidance promises to make that decision better-informed. Research has helped set out the main factors that add up to a comfortable seat, while a new scoring method makes it easier to test and rate a seat design, whether for short city trips or longer inter-city journeys.
In 2019, RSSB researched international best practice and worked with experts in product design, ergonomics and human factors to come up with design parameters for the key features of train seats. The result was findings on everything from the height, width, depth and angle of the seat itself, to the thickness and hardness of seat and back pads, the height of armrests and the distance between them, and how to position accessories like tables and sockets.
The new guidance builds on this with a method for assessing and scoring seats, aimed at those specifying, designing and validating seat designs. It helps them evaluate designs against the target score included in the specification for new and refurbished trains. Tom explains: ‘The guidance takes account of all the different factors and the context of the journey and brings a degree of objectivity to measuring seat comfort. While the document Taking Safe Decisions helps us answer the question how safe is safe enough?, the logic behind this work is to understand how comfortable is comfortable enough.’
The method for assessing seats adds together scores for seat dimensions, seat pad and backrest thickness and compression. It also defines comfort in terms of categories.
Categories include:
Postural: features of the seat that let passengers relax their leg, back, arm and neck muscles
Sensory: the feeling of pressure between the passenger and the seat
Ride: measures that isolate passengers from shocks as the train moves
Visual: the design of the seat and its surroundings.
As well as giving a clear steer to engineers and designers, the guidance should also mean less need for consultancy in developing and procuring new seats. And it should increase the chances of getting good return on investment from new or refurbished rolling stock. ‘Seats last for a minimum of 15 to 20 years, and could last longer, so decisions made now have an impact over many years. Once you’ve fitted a seat, its lifetime means it’s very difficult to do anything other than replace it,’ says Tom.
The new guidance has already got a warm welcome. Paul Griggs, of ALSTOM Engineering and Services, said: ‘It’s a huge step forward in terms of achieving an acceptable level of comfort on UK rail seats. There will need to be some fine tuning and calibration after it has been in use in industry, but this is to be expected. The outcome is so much more straightforward and value-added when compared to ISO24491, for example.’
Read the research report Defining the requirements of a seat comfort selection process (T1140).
Read the report
Read the guidance Assessment of Passenger Seat Comfort.
Read the guidance
