Personal space when we are travelling

The recent reports of disturbances on flights where passengers have had some robust "disagreement" over reclining their seats made us think about the meaning of and need for personal and personalised space when we travel.

There is a desire to be able to adjust our seat and space to fit us and what we want to do (eat, sleep, read, etc).  This also reflects the varying sizes and shapes we come in and is part of what attracts us to our cars - the ability to adjust the seat in many different respects to accommodate us as individuals.

The problem on crowded transport is that the adjustment one person makes potentially infringes on the space of another passenger.  And social norms in this area are often not as clear and globally transferable as some people would like to think.

The response of some operators has been to remove the adjustability - especially for things like short haul flights.  This has been the norm on most trains which generally also have shorter journey times.

However, this doesn't meet our needs as passengers and doesn't match what we get in our cars when modal shift is required.  So the challenge seems to be how can adjustability be provided that doesn't affect other passengers, is reliable so seat mechanisms don't fail and can work operationally.

Whilst thinking about this piece we came across one potential answer developed by Seymour Powell - the Morph seat - which is a finalist in the Innovation by Design Awards.  It seems to tick many of the boxes although we wonder if the usual race for the arm rest might get replaced by sneeky narrowing of your neighbours seat whilst they are asleep!!

Railway stations as a destination

At the recent Railway Terminal Conference in Vienna, the focus was on what can railway stations learn from airports and how can the passenger experience be enhanced?  It is clear that railway stations, at least the mainline stations, have come a long way from being the dirty, unattractive places of years ago.  With the opening of St Pancras International and the new King's Cross concourse in London, the integration of iconic architecture and historic buildings are providing wonderful spaces to start or end journeys.

But many of the speakers at the conference suggested that the next step was to make railway stations a destination in their own right rather than just part of a journey.  Making them more meaningful in terms of their place in the city - something that airports can't achieve.  The intent is to bring more people into the station who actually don't get on a train.

But there was little insight into how this improved the passenger experience.  Making stations a "destination" seems to translate into different and varied "commercial offers" - i.e. shopping.  Whether its eating and drinking or buying stuff, this seems to be what the operators want (you can see the financial rationale!).

What this seems to fail to acknowledge is that this adds little value to the travelling passenger.  In fact the risk of all these shoppers and retail outlets cluttering up the stations seems to be significant.

What was totally absent from the discussion, was how you enhance the door to door experience of the railway passenger.  Not much has changed in this area other than being able to buy tickets in advance on-line.

Where is the innovation?  Next door at the airport Passenger Terminal Expo, everything was about changing the experience of for the passenger.  Sure there was plenty about retail but loads more about self-service check-in, bag drop,  security, boarding etc.  In other words doing things differently.

So what can the railway industry do to enhance the passenger experience other than designing majestic stations?

Improved Passenger Experience with Smartphone Technology

Alongside improving the design of airports, providing simpler wayfinding, and making the security process less stressful, the ever present smartphone seems to be the battleground for providing better information to the passenger at a number of points on the journey.

This article from the Amor Group presents a good summary of the current applications and uses for smartphone technology.  Worth a quick read:

Smartphones as an Enabler for Improved Passenger Experience

Report into Heathrow Winter Resilience

The recent enquiry report into the response at Heathrow airport to the recent winter snow raised many interesting points about communications in a complex control environment and responding to difficult situations.

The report highlighted the problems in managing real-time communications between different groups and functions all trying to collaborate.  We often see this in our control room design work - the resource required to disseminate information is often too much so only partial information is shared.  We have been looking at a number of projects recently where shared systems automatically enable visibility of information held by other functions so reducing this problem - providing communications in parallel rather than serial.

This kind of information sharing is important for different teams to retain the "big picture" overview of the situation, one which is often changing rapidly.  Good situational awareness is critical for the right decisions to be made at all levels of crisis response.

The report also flagged some interesting issues about the physical location of controls in relation to the events going on (many of the control rooms involved had no visibility of the airfield to give them that important contextual information) and in relation to each other.  Co-location of control rooms has its problems but it can be effective in short-cutting some of the communication flows.

One final point of note was the importance given to managing passenger needs during the crisis. Inevitably the focus of many operations during events like this is to focus on restoring the service as quickly as possible.  But if all resources are directed on this then the operation ignores supporting the passengers during this stressful experience.  It was good to see recommendations covering passenger welfare both in terms of provision of regular, up to date information and in providing temporary facilities in the airport.

Transport chaos and the passenger

As the snow comes down so the UK transport system descends in to chaos. Given the general irregularity of heavy snow perhaps this is understandable.

But, as a group concerned with people, what stands out when watching the news reports is the number of people stuck at airports and train stations saying "we've been given no information".

How can this be so?  It would appear from the ground that so much of the organisations and operators' focus goes into sorting the problem that not enough effort is paid to informing the customers.

In these difficult situations, people need a constant flow of updated information.  Organisations are looking at using more technological solutions like Twitter to support this.  But this never replaces a well informed member of staff who can deal with questions and actually answer them.

I saw a piece last night on the news where trains had been cancelled at Peterborough and there was the usual chaos with uninformed staff, a lack of replacement buses ready to go and a total lack of organisation to help passengers know where and when to get the bus.  This suggests a lack of contingency planning on behalf of the operators to know what they are going to do when faced with difficult circumstances when things go wrong.

Transport is key to our economy.  In a civilised society we should be able to run a transport system that is passenger or user focused.  This means responding effectively to passenger needs for information when things go wrong.

Making air travel even more unpleasant?

Over recent years, air travel has become a less and less enjoyable passenger experience.  Notably the increase in security at airports has meant queues and hassle; budget airlines have given us low cost but the pay off is a scramble to get a seat, paying for loads of extras, etc.

Now it seems that the industry is making moves to make it even less comfortable with this new concept in seating called the SkyRider that is proposed for short flights of less than 3 hours - see http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS293848794420100913. As you can see the official photo doesn't look too bad.

However, these images of the demo seats suggests it would be a pretty unpleasant experience and probably not tolerable for most people.