Overcrowding at Central is mainly due to poor timetabling of trains.
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From:
Critical Report
Liverpool Central
The proposals for dealing with overcrowding at Liverpool Central appear to be clutching at straws. If the station is so desperate for space that supporting pillars have to be removed to salvage just a few extra square metres, surely this points to the urgent need for a fundamental redesign? The Draft mentions the tentative possibility of a new station (page 82) but I am quite surprised that a glaringly obvious solution has been overlooked. The excavation of a new underground station near to Paradise Junction on the Northern Line would directly serve the Liverpool One retail site, the very heart of the new relocated city centre. There must be a strong economic case for such an idea, and an extra station would certainly help to disperse passengers more evenly. This option must be appraised as a matter of urgency.
However, in the short term,
at least some of the overcrowding can be addressed in a much cheaper way: by revising the crazy timetabling of Northern Line trains through Liverpool Central and Moorfields. Given there are three northbound destinations (Southport, Kirkby and Ormskirk) and each is served by fifteen-minute frequency departures, common sense would dictate that trains should leave, evenly-spaced, at five-minute intervals. Not so. The Kirkby train departs at 5 minutes past the hour; the Southport just three minutes later at 8 minutes past, with the Ormskirk hot on its tail at 10 past. All three within five minutes, followed then by a ten-minute period of silence. If all outgoing passengers are required to be on the platforms in the same five-minute period, is it any wonder the infrastructure is so stretched? The situation is exacerbated further by the Kirkby service using Platform 2 at Liverpool Central, since this leaves the Southport train (from Hunts Cross) stuck in the tunnel behind (there is no facing crossover into Platform 1). Even a minute?s delay to the Kirkby train necessarily affects the Southport train, which in turn impacts on the Ormskirk.
This timetable came into being about ten years ago when the first private operator (Arriva) took over. Previously, there was an even service pattern: the Kirkby used Platform 1; the Ormskirk Platform 2. This arrangement had worked well for around fifteen years, until Arriva decided to run the trains in convoys (hard to imagine of a bus company). Apart from anything else, the skewed distribution of Stephen Harrison ? Individual response to the Merseyside RUS Consultation trains makes for a poor standard of service since waiting times are up to twice what they should be. I wrote to Arriva at the time, but to little avail. The present operators inherited this timetable and have chosen to continue with it. Why? The spread of trains is properly accomplished on the Wirral Line (i.e. one every five minutes) so it is perhaps unsurprising that these platforms are correspondingly less overcrowded. Unless the timetable can be revised, some of your other proposed solutions (such as persuading people to remain on the concourse before their train arrives) are rendered pointless.
I cannot accept that overcrowding is not an issue at Moorfields. Platform 2 always looks extremely busy, especially when viewed from the Kirkby train, because this Platform has been amassing passengers for the previous ten minutes. I would suggest taking a minute-by-minute look at this platform over the evening peak hours, perhaps by taking stills from the security cameras. This would help in assessing passenger movements more accurately.
Also look at:
Merseyrail Overview including negative points
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