[stdbrouw]

I lived in London for a year or two and I rarely saw an escalator "at capacity" for walking. You can do all of the napkin math you want, but ultimately, as the article says:

> The one escalator at Holborn that allowed you to walk up the left side during the trial had a total of 115 passengers per minute, but the standing-only ones knocked that up to 151. This was only the case during peak times though – when you’ve got under 100 people on the escalators, it doesn’t really make much difference. Either way, introducing standing-only escalators meant that they only had to SHUT THE GODDAMN GATES AAAHHH once during the trial, whereas it was happening almost daily before.

[wikfwikf]

I have seen lots of escalators at peak capacity for walking. Perhaps you didn't travel a lot in rush hour. People (for obvious reasons) are much more likely to walk up escalators in the morning rush hour than in the evening.

The escalators at Holborn are somewhat exceptional as was noted in the linked article, and the anecdata provided by station staff is not particularly convincing. If the station was extremely congested in the morning, it is hard to imagine that very few people chose to walk straight onto the left side of an escalator rather than queue at length to stand on the right.

'Shutting the goddamn gates' really only happens at stations like Holborn in the evening when people are trying to get out of the city centre. The up escalators at Holborn are conversely at their most busy in the morning, so this is a confusing claim at best.

As for the accusation of 'napkin math', I was simply responding to the clearly wrong napkin math which was widely cited in favor of this change. This purported to show that even at capacity, a walking left side was wasteful of escalator space. Without this flawed claim the main consideration simply becomes that if the left side is being used a lot for walkers it should be kept for walkers (obvious) and if not, not (also obvious).