More passengers, more problems?
As passenger numbers rise, so does the risk of overcrowding. Have you developed your crowd control plan? asks Michael Woods, our Principal Operations Specialist for Research.
The latest ORR figures show passenger journeys from April 2023 to March 2024 increased by 16% to 1.38 billion. That’s 93% of pre-pandemic levels. Industry welcomes this steady growth. But with it comes busier trains and stations, as well as the resurgence of overcrowding risk.
Cast your mind back to 2023, and you may recall incidents of crowd congestion at London Bridge in January and London Euston in the summer. A couple of years before that, on the Underground, there was an incident at Canning Town. Incidents involving crowding seem to have started once more.
Fortunately, none of those resulted in serious injuries. But there is always a possibility for such situations to get out of hand. The uncontrolled evacuation of a train at Clapham Common in May 2023 is a case in point.
RAIB observed that passengers perceived a significant risk to their safety from fire and became increasingly alarmed when the train’s doors remained closed. They believed that London Underground staff did not give them suitable information or take effective action. They therefore escaped onto the narrow island platform. This increased their risk of falling onto the track and being exposed to conductor rails and trains approaching on the adjacent southbound line.
There’s a lot industry can do to reduce the risk of these incidents happening or escalating. A key solution is to develop—and practise—contingency plans. The Rail Delivery Group is leading on this area and held an excellent seminar on ‘Resilience in Rail’ in February.
There is also a wealth of research to support companies, station managers, and train service planners with forward planning and preparation. Invaluable insights on how to analyse crowding in the built environment is also available. These cover new and existing stations, as well as day-to-day management processes.
Our most recent research on this subject investigated good practice to provide industry with updated guidance on crowd management. Our findings suggest that operators and designers should concentrate on health, safety, and wellbeing by design for infrastructure and rolling stock.
Other priority areas include staff competence, attitudes, and situational awareness, as well as the importance of undertaking dynamic risk assessments featuring wellbeing and crowd psychology indicators. Better communication on the spot and via social media channels is highly recommended, too. These research findings were used to review and update our guidance on crowding.
As we, as an industry, strive for higher passenger numbers, I urge you to bring our research to the attention of your station managers. They can contact us for information or advice to assist them with the specific challenges they face.