London Underground and other similar public transport providers devote significant resources to understanding and appraising the movement of passengers within stations. This facilitates the optimisation of station design and ensures the design meets with the appropriate standards. However, in general such work ignores the impact of such stations on the surrounding environment. Busy metro stations generate and attract huge volumes of people who are integral components of the streetscape. This study has aimed to redress this by analysing the impact of providing a new station on London's busiest shopping street. A number of different modelling techniques havebeen used to assess the level of pedestrian congestion on Oxford Street and to forecast the impact on congestion levels of introducing Crossrail services in 2016. The study has focused on the area of Oxford Street around Bond Street station. A count survey has been undertaken for the weekday morning, evening and Saturday afternoon peak periods to understand the existing levels of pedestrian flow and congestion on Oxford Street. This has been quanitified in terms of pedestrian levels of service. Analysis of this data has demonstrated that the morning peak period experiences relatively low pedestrian densities. By the evening peak, there is a large amount of additional pedestrian flow on account of the shops being open. Pedestrian flows in the study area were shown to be highest, however, on Saturday afternoons, representing the peak time for shoppers. A street network model of the wider area surrounding Bond Street station was constructed using thePedroute modelling tool to assess the dispersal characteristics of passengers from both the existing London Underground and proposed Crossrail stations. This was used to assess the likely split between the station ticket halls, and to model the impact of the additional Crossrail-related flows on the study area. The Pedroute model indicated which sections of pavement are most likely to be used by station customers. It also demonstrated thatthe fact that the two Crossrail ticket halls are to be located away from Oxford Street meant that there were alternative dispersal routes to their ultimate destination. As a result of this, the impact of Crossrail on Oxford Street was shown to be less significant than might be expected. Although some increases in passenger flows were demonstrated on some street sections, other street sections experienced a slight drop in passenger flow. Any increase in overall background demand is likely to be more significant than the introduction of Crossrail as a cause of pedestrian congestion. Dynamic visualisations of Oxford Street have been used to demonstrate how levels of pedestrian density will change. Such visualisations are proposed togive the transport planner confidence that new stations will not have an adverse impact on the streetscape. For the covering abstract see ITRD E145999
Samenvatting