[teampractices] Interesting logistical experiment in London Underground

[Kevin Smith]

The underground experiment is interesting, but it's critical to understand
the context. They targeted escalators that are so steep and long that
people were choosing not to walk up them. Thus, there would be many unused
half-steps on the walking side, which is clearly wasteful.

At every BART station I have been on, the walking side is as crowded as the
standing side. Changing the walking side to a second standing side would
clearly reduce overall throughput, AND frustrate people in a hurry. That's
a lose-lose proposition.

The other plausible argument in favor of having everyone stand instead of
walk would be safety, but the experimenters didn't seem very interested in
that.

Tying it back to software development, I guess I would take away this
lesson: Look for, and eliminate, waste. It's hard to go wrong doing that.



Kevin Smith
Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation


On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 3:34 PM, Katie Horn <khorn at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Thanks for the link! Interesting stuff,
>
> Aside from being another example of counterintuitive realities about
> bottlenecks in complicated systems, I don't really know how this helps or
> adds to the conversation other than being pretty neat, but I recently heard
> this was also a thing:
>
> http://www.technologyreview.com/view/412632/first-rule-of-ant-traffic-no-overtaking/
>
> -Katie
>
> On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 11:59 AM, Grace Gellerman <
> ggellerman at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>> An experiment in the London Underground yielded a similarly
>> counterintuitive result to the Kanban tenet that we finish more by working
>> on less at any given time.
>>
>> The Transport for London was able to substantially increase throughput of
>> passengers exiting the subway by converting the walking lane on the left of
>> the escalators to an additional standing lane like the traditional one on
>> the right.
>>
>> The experiment sought to change entrenched behavior as it tried to tackle
>> bottlenecks.  Given that the capacity of these subway stations will be
>> challenged to process larger populations as technology improves (more
>> frequent trains, larger doors), finding a solution in behavior could be
>> more attractive than addressing one through infrastructure.
>>
>> TL;DR : not unlike the work that we do in developing software.
>>
>>
>> http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jan/16/the-tube-at-a-standstill-why-tfl-stopped-people-walking-up-the-escalators
>>
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