Congested metro materialities: how platform escalators afford “friction” in the Copenhagen Metro

ABSTRACT

This paper will unfold affordances of the material setting in the Copenhagen Metro and its role for passenger movements and “capacity issues”, zooming in on the role of platform escalators at the underground station of Nørreport. The analysis will focus particularly on “congestions” as causing friction for the vision of the Copenhagen Metro as a “travelator of continuous movement”. However, friction can be understood as equally an impeder and enabler of movement, and although the platform escalators are not innocent, they are also not determining congestions to happen on the platform in a top-down manner. Such situations are equally staged bottom-up by passengers’ embodied practices and their motivations, metro “literacy” and ways of managing the presence of others in the metro. However, the movement possibilities afforded by the material setting can be hard to negotiate for passengers with lesser able bodies or lesser metro literacy. Through empirical examples, the paper contributes with nuanced understandings of “capacity issues”: rather than a pure quantitative mismatch between the amount of platform sqm’s and the number of passengers, capacity issues reflect the multiple affordances of the material setting and how these are negotiated through the agency of human actors in mobile situations. Connecting these insights to design, this paper suggests a dual approach to “solving” capacity issues that simultaneously makes the Metro increasingly well-functioning by reducing the movement impeding friction from the physical setting, while allowing the friction of passengers’ embodied practices as a good accessible and inclusive public space.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobilities design
• urban design
• metro (transport)
• capacity issues
• affordances

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Aalborg University, as a doctoral study. The data from the thermal cameras were retrieved and processed with great help from research assistants Bolette Dybkjær Hansen and Malte Pedersen, both from the Visual Analysis of People Lab at Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Aalborg University. However, all illustrations and analysis produced for this paper are by the author. Metroselskabet are to be thanked for fruitful collaboration in the empirical studies. Ole B. Jensen and Ditte Bendix Lanng are to be thanked for useful input reflected in this paper.

Disclosure statement

The Copenhagen Metro has funded part of the empirical data collection, but all analysis has been carried out independently. No further conflicts of interest are to be reported.

Notes

1. In this paper, “Metro” with capital M is referring to the Copenhagen Metro, where “metro” is referring to the metro as a form of transport on a general level.

2. During the empirical studies of this paper, only the M1 and M2 lines were in operation, why this paper focuses on them. A third M3 line opened in September 2019 and an additional M4 line in March 2020.

3. However, here, a phenomenological understanding of the specificities of human experience will not be abandoned entirely, contrary to a pure ANT point of view.

4. Thermal cameras record temperatures that are converted to greyscale images, where people are represented as warm, light objects on a cold, dark background. Through algorithms occupancy and movement patterns of passengers can be identified.

5. Mobile eye-tracking are worn like “glasses” and record eye movements projected on a world view recording, thus representing what participants look at. Cf. the “eye-mind hypothesis” this overlaps greatly with what they see, i.e. what they process cognitively.

6. Contact with the participants was made beforehand through social media and network.

Additional information

Funding

The authors have no funding to report.