Quick Note: the Experience of Train Stations
I was at a ReThink event about Penn Station the other day; it didn’t talk about through-running but about Penn Station redesign, as Richard Cameron presented options for rebuilding the station in-place, of course without expansion a block to the south. The presentation was interesting, and I have no strong opinions about the architecture, certainly no objection. But something said in there, I forget if by Richard or one of the other presenters, irked me: the presenter was complaining about the Penn Station rebuild of the 1960s saying that the station makes people feel irritated, whereas European train stations are grand and make people feel like they stepped through a gateway into the country. And that part lost me, because my experience of train stations in Europe is rather utilitarian, and so is the experience of rail riders here who I speak with. In fact, in a key way – namely, connections to the subway – I do not see a difference between those stations and Penn Station as it exists today, as an entirely subterranean complex without natural light.
Case in point: three weeks ago, I was visiting Rome for 2.5 days. I wrote about the train trip, which was rather slow as long sections have not been upgraded to high-speed rail standards, but not about the stations. Now that I saw the ReThink presentation, it’s worthwhile talking about the stations – Berlin, Munich, Rome. (I also connected at Verona and Bolzano but these are small stations in small cities.)
Roma Termini, in particular, is supposed to be a gateway station, exactly the kind in a European capital that Americans are supposed to love. Except, I didn’t get to experience any of the façade, because my ultimate destination was not within walking distance, so I connected to the metro, entirely indoors and underground. Lines A and B meet at Termini, and I spent far longer between when I got off the Frecciarossa and when I got on the subway navigating the passageways to this station than getting to appreciate any grandeur. Most of the other people in my car didn’t even do that, but rather hopped off one station before, at the more utilitarian Tiburtina, saving themselves the slow terminal approach and connecting more directly to Line B.
Berlin and Munich, which I’m more familiar with, are rather utilitarian. These are large complexes, in which it’s well-known that passengers can take some time getting from one set of platforms to another. They are also extensively daylit, and Berlin in particular has good sight lines for a five-level cruciform station, but their purpose isn’t to make people feel at ease; in fact most users scramble for a connection to the U- and S-Bahn, where form entirely follows function.
This experience also generalizes to the Parisian stations I’ve used. Gare de l’Est looked nice, in the one minute I spent there between getting off the Métro and getting on my train to Saarbrücken; I appreciated how fast this was, especially since I had booked a nonrefundable day trip and showed up at the station four minutes before my train departed, but I wouldn’t say any of this experience put me at ease. At none of these stations did the architectural details matter very much, and at none of them did the main entrance matter at all, because like virtually everyone else in Paris, I got there by Métro. Berlin Hauptbahnhof, at least, is modern enough that it understands this and doesn’t try to build the entrances as a cathedral to the power and wealth of the institution that built it.
Rather, what I think makes Americans feel differently about Europe is that when they’re here, they’re on vacation. The train stations make them feel relaxed, because they’re on vacation and relaxing anyway. The architecture puts them at ease, because they’re on vacation and have time to stop and admire the details. The walkable cities are pleasant, because they’re on vacation and their goal is to find things they don’t get at home to buy or eat or photograph; this way, I see American urbanists extoll the walkability of small towns with farmers’ markets even when those towns have rather American modal splits and the local residents do all of their shopping at hypermarkets. Europeans can be pretty solipsistic, but I at least don’t see people here talk about some aspect of Florida or Las Vegas is inherently psychologically relaxing.
This matters, because there are real advantages to European rail and urban planning. These aren’t just operational; for example, Stephen Smith and Mike Eliason have more or less singlehandedly imported single-stair point access blocks into American policy discussion. In rail planning, I wish the agencies using Penn Station came to Berlin and saw how a 21st-century major city station looks. But none of this can come from trying to psychologically project one’s own vacation experience. Europe is a place of production and not just consumption, and it’s critical to see what this production looks like from the inside.
Pedestrian Observations 
Isn’t there some utilitarian-aesthetics crossover in station design? I mean, having to wait in a well-lit, clean station will make the day a tiny bit better even for an utilitarian user (or at least intuition tells me that). There must be some science on this.
There is, though beware of the replication crisis in this area of science. This is closely related to places where science hasn’t been done right – there has been a lot of science that was done wrong and it is hard to know if the science is really there or if it is another case of setting up a study to get the results you want.
The vast majority of people in a station are not tourists – they have been there hundreds of times before and so are not going to be inspired by any art – they have seen it already. Even if you change the art they are going to follow their habitual path and not stop to look at it. If they stop at all it is for a bathroom (they will notice if these are bad), or to read a next train sign. Those who need a bench will look for one on the platform so that they can get up in time to get on their train. (they sometimes need a rest in between in a large station – this is a good reason to not make the station big if you can avoid it). There is no point in making these stations memorable – not matter what you do they will fall into the mundane. (don’t make them depressing)
There are a handful of exceptions. At Disney World everyone is a tourist. Their stations are for people who have never been there before. Art is something people will stop to look at. They have no idea where the platform for their train is. They will remember this station, so make it a memory worth remembering. The needs of these stations are very different from normal stations.
Transit executives in the US drive everywhere. Their only experience with transit is Disney world and other memorable stations. They think this is important for all stations.
When I looked into it because of our discussions on cost and overbuilding it seems that historically city centre stations were visually stunning but the suburban/rural ones were not.
That does extend to relatively unimportant places like Norwich and Exeter – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwich_railway_station and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exeter_St_Davids_railway_station
But even large suburban stations like Highbury and Islington and Clapham Junction are pretty boring – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highbury_%26_Islington_station and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clapham_Junction_railway_station
The vast majority of people in a station are not tourists – they have been there hundreds of times before and so are not going to be inspired by any art – they have seen it already.
The social experience of the last 60-75 years are a direct refutation of this argument. Pre-war architecture and spaces remain beloved and well used, while mid-century brutalist and modernist spaces are consistently criticized and – when there is the option – underutilized and avoided. Fanueil Hall vs Boston City Hall, Grand Central vs Penn Station, Le Corbusier’s Radiant City vs Jane Jacobs’ Greenwich Village – over and over again people reject or recoil from modernist/brutalist design’s devoid of decoration and prefer more traditional styles.
This does not necessarily mean structures and spaces have to be wildly ornate – Victorian architecture is more decorative than art deco, and Colonial/Federalist architecture is simpler still. Also as I have noted elsewhere in the comments, the issue in some cases may not be ornamentation as making design “fit for purpose” (entrances/lobbies should open up past the transition, circulation spaces/corridors should be wide enough for the load and have height increase to match, areas of congregation/intersection should be larger with good sight lines). What would opinions of Penn Station be if the first four floors of PENN2 were open to the concourse below, with balconies hosting an Apple Store, etc.?
The fact that Alon claims to not notice the design of train stations when passing through does not mean that the spaces are poorly designed or not nice. As the old saying goes good design often goes unnoticed.
There is a large space that is still cheap but not brutalist. Good design should go unnoticed, and therefore there is no point in spending a lot of money on art or details that nobody will notice. Paint is cheap.
Paint also lets you let to local community produce art for the walls which can be pretty fun – and it gets them involved in the project.
Good design should go unnoticed
You have this backwards. “Good design should go unnoticed” isn’t an imperative to make things plain/simple because it is inherently better, it is an observation that well designed and beautiful things can be used with the design and beauty in the background as people go about there day, while poorly designed or ugly things draw attention and distract people.
I will note I have said that “good design” in this case doesn’t not have to be ornate, but can in many cases just mean providing adequate headroom for large spaces or thinking through passenger flow. But just doing everything plain or basic isn’t automatically good design. And indeed many undetailed spaces that are not brutalist (government offices from the 70s, many “International Style” buildings, etc.) are considered equally soulless and avoided by people.
Europeans can also make similarly misguided comparisons between places where they work and places where they vacation. For example the complaints that everyone in Paris is always stressed and in a hurry, people elsewhere in France are more relaxed, as if this were about something inherent in the Parisian psyche.
And in general, this tourist effect leads everyone to overvalue a country’s high-speed network and undervalue its network density. Spain, Italy and France are great when you’re going from Paris to Marseille or Madrid to Barcelona, but try living in a small city or town without a car.
Actually… Spanish small cities need to improve their pubic transport, but they are usually good at having lots of services at walking distance. The car multiplies your choices when looking for a job, so you have one if you can, and once you have it you can use it for shopping a bit cheaper at the hypermarket. But once you retire, dropping your car to cut unnecessary costs is a perfectly reasonable strategy.
I would agree that Spain overinvested in marginal high speed lines. At the very least come up with a more intensive operating plan before building out to Galicia.
But the big city high speed market is where you’ll find the most ridership. As Jordi points out, there are structural factors which make public transport hard to succeed in small towns. Very often, the best that a small town can offer is buses on 30 min headways with a timed transfer at the rail station. Still quite inconvenient when your trip is only 20 min long. So most people get a car and once they have cars the land use becomes more car oriented and there’s less stuff to do at the rail station and more at the highway interchange which is served by maybe 1 bus line. (Even in Spanish compact cities there are malls by the ring road like Puerto Venecia in Zaragoza).
What sometimes works against these headwinds is being a valley town that can be served by one frequent line and where there aren’t that many opportunities to sprawl.
The Oxfordshire buses are decent enough. Each town of ~10k has a bus every 20 minutes in the daytime.
That’s of course decent for small towns (areas with lots of students do tend to overperform) but 20 min is still bad frequency if your trip is 20 min.
People say this about big cities everywhere in the world. For example, a “New York minute” means a very short period of time, due to the idea that everything is hurried in NYC. There’s probably some truth to these perceptions.
Indeed; big cities have the “the mines” effect. Their population contains disproportionately many young adults — there is a significant constant migration of newly-minted adults to cities, and a more diffuse outmigration (not necessarily out of the metro area, but at least into the suburbs) of established adults seeking e.g. cheaper floorspace/land for a growing family, or outright retirees.
On the other hand Parisian landlords love retirees because they have a stable income and it’s really hard to evict tenants.
That is true in the US. In other countries families live in big cities and do fine. In the US dense cities have many features that would make families move out. Even if suburbs were twice as expensive as the dense city (about the opposite of today where the dense city is about twice as expensive as suburbs) families in the US would still try to move to the suburbs because of the other hostile features of a dense city. There is nothing about density that forces that hostility though, but it currently is anyway. Maybe dense cities in the US will change, time will tell.
Europe (generalisation of course) integrates production and consumption. The things you need to do for work are still ‘nice’ and have an element of enjoyment. Long-distance rail termini do serve leisure and business travellers alike so the two sets of preferences and behaviours aren’t segregated.
There is often a substantial access/egress % on foot and by bike amongst daily commuters, so the ‘destination factor’ or station architecture isn’t just for the benefit of overseas tourists. Good stations serve as shopping centres or leisure destinations for non-passengers too and having a diverse range of customers enhance the overall experience. I often stop at the pub in King’s Cross on my way home. If a station is ‘nice’ and well integrated into urban surroundings then people will stop in a cafe or pub after a business meeting before taking their train home.
Comparing tourist experiences overseas with commuting / work experiences at home isn’t as invalid as some people think (I think I’m agreeing with your point Alon).
Penn Station has the grand architecture referred to here for intercity rail: Moynihan Train Hall. The rest of the station could definitely use better signage and platforms, but saying it needs a grand hallway ignores the one across the street.
The platforms at Grand Central don’t have natural light and no one complains about Grand Central. No one complains about the subway’s lack of natural light. And no one complains about the lack of natural light, anywhere, at night.
Not exactly natural light per se, but the vaulted high ceiling’s of Harry Wesse’s design for the Washington Metro is almost universally acknowledged to be a deliberate counterpoint to the feel of the low ceiling NY subway with it’s claustrophobic height and many columns.
As I write below, I think Alon is over thinking the “grandeur” bit and associating it with decorative architecture when what people are really looking for space that feels like it is sized for it s scale and purpose. From this perspective, although the platforms at Grand Central do not have natural light, there is no comparison to coming up from those platforms to the Main Concourse versus coming from Penn platforms up to its public spaces.
I’d love to ask anyone who loves the high ceilings of Washington Metro, to tell me how they feel about going down a single flight of stairs and being on a platform of an approaching NYC local subway train.
For every “high-ceiling” station built, we don’t build one or two low-ceiling stations.
@Marin
Access time to deep stations is a valid issue and one discussed a lot recently regarding East Side Access and some other projects. However, as a practical matter most metro’s have more than a single flight of stairs to platform level, regardless of how they are laid out. As I remember it, even the famously shallow hand dug Paris Metro at most stations had one stair to an abbreviated mezzanine and another to the platforms. Opening that space up so you can see the platform from the mezzanine (i.e. making the mezzanine a balcony) doesn’t make things deeper.
Also, the single flight of stairs to platform really only works with side platforms under the sidewalks and tracks under the street. This precludes island platforms, which are generally preferred for other, different, access and circulation issues. If you are luck enough to have a station with local and express tracks you are probably going to need a mezzanine to get to everything almost by default.
Oh, really? Someone should immediately tell them!
This is true but much of metros stock of underground stations were tunneled in the bedrock for one reason or another. (We need not debate that choice here.) The few cut and cover stations that do exist (say gallery place) have very fast ingress to the mezzanine even if the escalator is out.
Building/fire codes and pain-in-the-ass inspectors exist for many many reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire
And universal access means the baby carriage can get in and out of the elevator just like the wheelchair or stretcher.
I’ve been pushing baby carriages for quite some years and they normally require less space than wheelchairs (unless you buy a single carriage for two babies). I’d say the biggest accessibility barrier, rather than the size, are the old lifts that have a door that you have to hold with the hand while you go in and out.
That’s not a good example. The UK building regulation system is just an incoherent mess (i.e. a typical UK mix of stupid politcised micromanaging and discretionary vagueness). That along with the contempt of the UK system for the propertyless particularly if in London and not-white.
That the U.K. is an incoherent mess ( which is likely a feature not a bug ) doesn’t make single stairways a good idea.
If they had installed sprinklers Grenfell would have never happened. The reason they didn’t was that the costs of the renovation project got out of control.
Having sprinklers inside the building doesn’t stop the flammable cladding from igniting the flammable insulation. Or vice versa. I don’t know or care. Or why other countries require refrigerators that are less likely to turn into a ball of flame either.
Having sprinklers inside the building doesn’t stop the flammable cladding from igniting the flammable insulation.
Actually, they probably would. Sprinklers are not designed or advertised to put out fires, just delay spread to give time for evacuation and the fire department to arrive. However they end up putting out about 95% of fires when they work properly (itself a 90% probability). Even if they don’t put out a fire, they do an amazing job at slowing fire spread and saving lives,. With sprinklers, the kitchen/refrigerator fire would likely never have spread outside the room before the fire department got there, or if it did it is likely that windows being sprayed with water would not have broken from the heat preventing the fire from reaching the flammable exterior.*
The risk of death in a sprinklered building is only 10% of a non-protected building. There has never been a fully sprinklered building with multiple fire deaths, unless the sprinkler system was defective/inoperative. There are cases of buildings with sprinklers that ultimately ended up burning to the ground (remember, sprinklers are not designed/guaranteed to put out fires), but only after everyone safely evacuated because the sprinklers slowed the spread of fire and kept the evacuation routes safe. Matthew Hutton is correct that with sprinklers Grenfell would have never happened.
*As a separate issue the design of the exterior with non-fire-resistent panels and the installation without blocking or fire stopping creating a fire chimney was grossly negligent and in full violation of British code (of everywhere’s code, for that matter).
Sprinklers would have prevented Grenfell. Not using flammable cladding would have prevented Grenfell. Either of these would have been much cheaper than requiring multiple point access, which likely would NOT have prevented Grenfell.
All quite sensible. If you believe that the point of Building and Development control in “the country” is to like help people live well.
But the architecture did its job, make living in London terrible and risky so that true GREAT BRITONS, stay in their decaying Steampunk towns and property values nationwide continue to rise above incomes just Great British Socialism and Thatcherism intended.
I was speaking to a friend about the Welsh valleys. And one of the challenges is that if you own your own home there then managing on benefits/a bad job is manageable just about.
But that if you moved away to say Bristol, then you would need to own a street of homes in the valleys to buy/rent one in Bristol. This means it is a huge risk to move away for work.
I think the approach of improving the infrastructure to e.g. the Welsh valleys is a better way of spreading economic prosperity.
The most effective way to ….deploy…. sprinkers is to not use them. Spend the few extra pence it costs to make the appliance less likely to engulf the apartment in flames. Then spend a bit more on effective enforcement that would stop idiot council management from wrapping the building in fuel.
Adirondack is correct but it is more fundamental than he implies. The reason for the Grenfell fire is exactly the same cause of out-of-control costs of infrastructure in the Anglosphere, like Alon has described for transit. No surprise that Australia’s hi-rise buildings are riddled with the same fire-prone cladding. It is because government has washed its hand of any responsibility for almost everything. All this stuff has been outsourced and worse, building certification is structured to fail. As George Monbiot noted:
In Australia following several similar fires and deaths in newly-built apartment buildings, most notably the Lacrosse tower (21 floors), enquiries were set up. The Australian public broadcaster did a doco on it which revealed the wondrous Catch22 of how these certifiers work. They found one certifier, now-retired, who explained on camera how it worked and this has been summarised nicely by a journalist below:
That’s right. The certifiers never actually step inside, or outside, the building that they are certifying meets all structural and health & safety regulations. Naturally a certifier is unlikely to cause trouble for a construction company or developer if they ever want another contract with that company.
But actually the worst thing is that none of this is going to change. Oh, the architects and builders might pay a bit more attention to what is in the building but the self-regulation won’t change because the entire edifice of how “modern” government works would require fundamental change. In the Anglosphere that is not going to happen. Indeed in the US it is about to get a lot worse under Trump and Musk et al.
This isn’t remotely true. Half a century or more of data on fires and sprinklers directly contradicts it. Fire happen, due to faulty design/manufacture, or negligence, or malice, or just plain bad luck. A few pence to make the refrigerator “less likely” to catch fire doesn’t mean it would never catch fire. With sprinklers those people would live, without sprinklers they died.
Not having a fire in the first place means the sprinklers don’t get used. Not using them is the most effective. If you want to apologize some more for the lousy fire safety enforcement in the U.K. go right ahead.
Not using them is the most effective.
This is like saying the best policy is to not wear a seat belt and just not get in a car crash. While technically true it is not possible to guarantee you won’t get a crash, while you can control wearing a seat belt and be safer if a car crash happens. Same with fires and sprinklers. To how this discussion started, a second staircase would not have helped at Grenfell tower. The fire broke through the window about one minute after the fire department entered the initial apartment on fire, and once on the outside it shot up too fast. Once smoke began to enter the stairwell and lobbies people were trapped – a second smoke filled stairwell at the other end of a smoke filled hallway wouldn’t have helped anyone.
But sprinklers would have helped by slowing the spread of fire, even a 5-10 minute delay in the fire breaching the window would have meant the fire department would have extinguished it before disaster.
Spend the few extra pence it costs to make the appliance less likely to engulf the apartment in flames.
Should also note the the refrigerator in question as well as other identical models were inspected and it was determined that there was no design defect and no recall was initiated. The working theory is that a power surge led to overheating and a short circuit. The local authority had previously paid damages to people who had other appliances damaged due to power surges.
So much for your “could have avoided this with a better fridge” theory.
Keep on apologizing.
@Michael, I was on the board of directors when I lived in an apartment and I know a few other people who lived in ex council houses.
The people who got the best value for money for repairs were places where the residents cared and they controlled the board of the management of the block and you had a fully private sector management company to do the nitty gritty.
The people who got the worst value for money were people who lived in council owned blocks, with unaccountable large private sector blocks sitting somewhere in between. The former I think replaced 3-4 windows in a flat and it was more than £10,000. I got one window replaced last year and it was under £500. Now sure for the council block you would have needed a cherry picker or scaffolding, but they aren’t that expensive. Even a really expensive tall cherry picker is only £5k a day.
Given Grenfell clearly had a very well organised community if it had been managed fully privately that would have given you the best value for money. You would have ended up paying similar prices to homeowners for work (i.e super low)
Michael reads the Guardian i.e. the Telegraph with more steps. So he vicariously lives as a Great British Landed Elect in the service of the Grand Old Cause of enforcing 1940’s Britain’s socio-economic order forever.
Council housing and HAs are terribly run. The thing is that because there is such a UK (esp SE) wide shortage of quality affordable housing that the state can afford to be an absolutely terrible landlord*. Even before Thatcher, you saw these problems, cheaply built and cheaply maintained because where these people supposed to go (especially since a majority of social housing was deliberately built in location to separate tenants from jobs, amenities and where councilors live, irrespective of party).
*Very much like the old Marxist-Leninist camp or present day Singapore/HK which systemically underinvest/restrict housing supply in order to tax/control the population in the service of the ruling group’s ideological goals. This is because the systemically gerrymandering of UK politics to create minority rule at every level means its very very easy to local council estate tenants out of government. Red Vienna required decades of SPO-OVP coalition governments. None of the British fans of Red Vienna would accept a single grand coalition.
Red Vienna was a single-party SPÖ government, hated by the rest of Austria, which was one of the causes of Austrofascism.
Postwar Vienna was governed by SPÖ, which had an absolute majority until the 1996 election. It got its majority back in 2005, and then lost it in 2010 but the left kept its majority, leading to red-green and now red-NEOS coalitions.
Yeah. But Vienna is poorer than the rest of Austria for much of the Postwar period, so Red Vienna is dependent on access to power at the centre. But the Federal aspect I do think is something UK people should also learn, London would have the politics and resources to fund substantial social housing. But we are inferior human being who must live in hovels so that “Hero Voters” in Sunderland or Glasgow don’t get Negative Equity. (Which is happening in Carinthia).
One of the aspects that power both FPO rise and SPO decline is the rise of Vienna since the 1980’s thanks in large measure to immigration and above European integration of Eastern Europe.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
If someone receives the task to build thousands of housing units, the default thing that happens is that they look for a single site where all of them can be built as a single project, simply because that is less work to project-manage. But, of course, a single site large enough for that isn’t available anywhere with a well built up urban fabric (unless you’re doing slum clearance, or sometimes if you are recycling ex-industrial land). Therefore the next step, because these bureaucrats have good intentions, is to plan a fast and high-capacity transit extension to the site, so the residents can get to jobs. But then, due to various organizational hiccups, this ends up not happening, and a stampede of buses is provided instead. (The organizational hiccups rhyme with “they aren’t allowed to spend the housing budget on transit construction”, “they lack the capability to assemble the rights for linear construction”, “the transit agency gets to decide on the matter and actually they vetoed the idea”. Or at best(?), “they crayoned a metro, not knowing/caring that it would be too expensive, but metaphorically they stapled this crayon to the front door of all several thousand flats, now nobody dares to come out and say that the crayon is cancelled, thus the buses (sometimes trams) have to maintain the plausible deniability that they are temporary, they cannot be improved into a fast tram because that would obviate the planned metro while being seen as lesser than a metro”.)
The city I live in (not in Britain) has multiple large-panel-construction large-site estates, in a rough approximation of a ring (inner-/mid-suburban). They have exactly this problem. Effectively all of them had plans for either extensions or completely new metro lines to serve them from the day ground was broken on the houses. In the intervening half a century or so, one of them received a line (at WTF prices — Budapest line M4).
Keep on apologizing.
@Adirondacker
Apologizing for what? You said that single access stairs were a bad idea because of Grenfell. I pointed out that if the Grenfell stair became impassible due to smoke, adding a second stair of identical construction that would also be impassible wouldn’t help anyone. I also noted that deaths in buildings with fire sprinklers are almost unheard of, and that the timeline of Grenfell supports that even if sprinklers only provided a few minute delay in fire spread it would have been enough for the fire department to put the fire out before it rapidly spread. How is any of this an apology, and what is it apologizing for? If anything it is a critique of the fact that 1970’s British code didn’t require sprinklers, not an apology.
Alon thinks single staircases are a good idea. I think that “Building/fire codes and pain-in-the-ass inspectors exist for many many reasons.”
Sprinklers are a last resort. People can find many many many ways to be stupid. There were multiple ways multiple people were stupid and preventing the stupidity anywhere along the way would have stopped it. Since people can be very very creative when it comes to being stupid my first choice would be to not-wrap the building in fuel and then protect it from the weather in fuel.
@adirondacker12800 Alon thinks single staircases are good because US code essentially forces a lot of single family houses. See the following link for details. https://www.centerforbuilding.org/blog/we-we-cant-build-family-sized-apartments-in-north-america
The big question then is US fire code really better. There are a lot of complications here and I can conclude I am not qualified to pick between the different arguments. I am qualified enough to say a lot of people talking are also not qualified (Alon for example clearly has not looked into this enough to know).
Fire code and inspectors exist for many reasons, but some of those reasons are invalid. If Europe style single staircase really is just as safe (perhaps in some situations) then I want the US to change codes. However I do not know. If US codes really are safer then I’ll accept single family houses as a necessary evil.
If US fire codes are safer then you would reasonably expect US fire deaths to be lower than other equivalent countries.
There isn’t one national standard and in many places building codes are folderol for those nasty city folks so nothing is enforced. So are fire departments.
It’s a 100% iron-clad safe bet that a worthless troll who has had the 24/7/365 time to reflexively post non-stop incoherent irrelevant grade-zero bullshit for decades doesn’t have the even the most remote knowledge about child-rearing nor of maneuvering babies and their carriages under any circumstance, ever.
The US has a higher fire death rate than the UK; this source says the age-adjusted fire death rate in the US is higher than in every Western European country.
Because most of them live places where the regulations are lax or non existent.
The regulations against new single-stair apartment buildings in the United States are strongly enforced, and the handful of exceptions are not where you think (Seattle recently legalized single-stair midrises).
Most people in the U.S. live in single family.. housing units. Single story house on a slab doesn’t have any stairs. Get back to us when Seattle eliminates single family only zoning.
Those figures are bad. Worse than the Philippines and Vietnam. Jesus.
That data is an example of how to lie with statistics. Those who write fire code in the US point out that they don’t compare pre vs post modern fire code and claim that new buildings that follow the modern two stairway firecode (which also have sprinklers and other fire protection/prevention features as well…) do much better than the older US building. That is if you compare only modern building the US looks better than the rest of the world.
I don’t know how to verify the above, but it is something that really needs to be brought out every time that chart is bought out. The US has a lot more old buildings made of wood, and those burn more often than the old buildings in other areas made of brick. But that doesn’t make brick better overall (it does in this one area but brick has other issues)
Yes, and then Stephen and others point out ways in which the two-stair requirement reduces safety (and thus modern condos in the US have no safety benefits over the rest of the world). For one, the long corridors mean that the distance from an apartment to a staircase is longer than at point access blocks. For two, fire departments often respond to fires at such buildings by venting smoke through one of the staircases, and then they don’t communicate to residents clearly enough which staircase is safe and which isn’t, leading to deaths from smoke inhalation; in contrast, the point access blocks don’t require this because the staircases usually have an exterior window.
And the vast majority of people in the U.S. never go anywhere near a high rise. People dying in a fire in a single story building doesn’t tell you much about tall buildings.
The important point I’m making is all I see is overall country data. Who is right – I’ve never seen any evidence. Just people (on both sides who should have expertise in this area) who claim their way is better. Some of those people have data, but they are not sharing it, and in any case they are all drilling down differently so we cannot compare.
I don’t know who is right. There are some neat things single stairways allow in building designs that I really want (without it family apartments in dense area are impossible!) . However if they are really less safe once you really drill down to the correct data (which may not even exist) then I cannot in good conscience advocate for them. As adirondacker12800 said, when your data is combined high rises and single family houses you cannot say anything about just high rises.
Every dual stairway building I’ve ever seen includes windows in all the stairways. So once again possible ventilation cannot be an issue. The design of a stair at each end of a hall makes the stairway on an exterior wall (in most cases) and so a window is added by default. Single staircases make it more possible that the stairway is in the middle of the building and thus there cannot be a window (again, doesn’t mean you can’t place them so there are windows, just that the few I’ve seen don’t have done – but the few I’ve seen were built in the 1800s and so not up to modern code anyway and only relevant as examples of the hazards dual stairway prevent and not how you could do it right)
The insurers have detailed information. It’s part of the information used when codes get changed/updated.
For two, fire departments often respond to fires at such buildings by venting smoke through one of the staircases, and then they don’t communicate to residents clearly enough which staircase is safe and which isn’t, leading to deaths from smoke inhalation
This is so wildly and fully untrue it leaves the farthest reaches of the realm of fiction and plants itself squarely on the throne of the kingdom of farce. Firefighters NEVER (EVER) vent smoke through an evacuation staircase, for many reasons:
The idea that two stairs at the ends of long hall might be less safe than a stair right outside the door has more validity. As mentioned fire burns up so the best route to safety is down. Euro-style single stairs means you can start heading down as soon as you leave your apartment. If instead there is fire on your floor and you have to crawl underneath the smoke down a long hall to the stair you might expire before reaching it. I’m not sure this is an actually true; many hotels in Europe (and everywhere) are built with rooms either side of a long hall, so unless they have a worse fire death rate the risk is theoretical.
*Doors to fire evacuation stairs obviously only swing into the stairwell, and there are limits on the force to open them so seniors and disabled people can reach safety. Sometimes “enough air pressure to keep the smoke out” bumps up with “not so much air pressure the door can’t easily open” in a tricky situation for the HVAC engineer.
**Codes to limit fire spread via stairs may have indirect societal impacts. Building stairs used to be open, centrally located and highly decorated, because they were the primary means of moving floor to floor. You could see each floor and people on it as you walked past. Now stairs are closed off with walls and doors to stop fire spreading, and the two-stair requirement means one at each end of the building. Since stairs are closed off, they do not get decorated. The result is that no uses the stairs because they are ugly, out of the way, and require opening multiple doors to get in and out – instead everyone only takes the elevator. This has health implications, instead of a small stairmaster workout each day, people are more sedentary standing in an elevator. There is also the social issue that people are less likely to bump into each other in an elevator with a few people than they would walking a few flights of stairs and seeing everyone else going up or down plus people on each floor. Thus the kind of chance encounters that Steve Jobs thought were so important to creatively are less likely to happen.
This also leads to a subtle critique why modern fire stairs might be less safe. Buildings used to have fire escapes, but now never do. Studies showed almost no one used outside fire escapes, instead in a panic people instinctually went the familiar path out – which was the main stairs. Thus the drive to enclose stairs in fireproof walls. But now that enclosed stairs never get used, the critique is that people in a fire will cluster at the elevators out of habit, or get lost/waste time trying to find stairs they have never seen. I am skeptical of this argument, as others have noted the fire safety of modern buildings is excellent and as a tragic real life test some 14,000 people successfully evacuated the twin towers on September 11th. Modern technology (fire alarms for advance notice, illuminated backup lights and exit signs) has eliminated conditions that caused panicked rushes during early 20th century fires.
On the other hand, I have noted the incredible effect of fire sprinklers. Although I’m sure the data set is limited, it would be an interesting study to see if buildings with open stairs but full sprinklers are safer than buildings with modern fire stairs – or at least no less safe because the sprinklers are doing the work (there are also automatic doors/curtains used at elevator lobbies but almost never at stairs because of cost – the fire code requires them for elevators but they are optional at stairs). This would be the best of both worlds: a high degree of fire safety from sprinklers and an intuitive escape route, with all the health and social advantages of stairs people will use when going a floor or two.
I would be absolutely shocked if the US housing stock wasn’t more modern than the British housing stock, and yet our homes are substantially safer.
And the safest countries in the world like Singapore have tonnes and tonnes of apartments.
@henrymiller74
I can agree that the fire death data might be skewed, sort of how the UK has the “highest rate of violent assault in the world” because they report a single category of assault where every other country reports simple assault (a shove) separately from aggravated assault (beating someone with a pipe). Ditto for Sweden and reporting sexual assaults (i.e. groping) as rapes and having the “highest rate of rape.” However, while you have a good argument that the safety of modern buildings might be the same in both areas (fire codes are mostly similar around the globe), without some data you cannot claim that modern buildings in the US are more safe than elsewhere.
I wonder how much the rebuilding of European cities to modern code post 1945 affects this, compared to the amount of tenement stock from the 1910s/20s remaining in older US cities. Or as Adirondacker notes, the prevalence of wooden single family homes in the US, when masonry apartment buildings are likely to be safer due to both construction and code requirements.
@Matthew Hutton
US housing stock might be newer overall, but if fire deaths are concentrated in old wooden apartments while the UK has old brick apartments, it could make a difference in the countrywide totals.
Places with mostly new apartments like Singapore should have the safest housing. Large apartment/condos are the buildings with sprinklers, centralized fire alarms, firestopping/fireproofing, pressurized evacuation stairs, etc. Wooden tract housing gets a smoke detector with some AA batteries, dry insulation exposed in the attic, and turpentine sitting on shelf in the garage.
I’m not making any claim about where modern buildings are safer. I’ve been consistently claiming ignorance and pointing out that most other urbanists are equally ignorant yet confidently making claims pointing to data that obviously does not back up their claims.
I would like what urbanists say to be true. The geometry of two stairways makes it impractical to build more than 2 bedroom apartments in the US (you can fit a few 3 bedrooms in, but most must be less). This is one of the reasons families with any money at all are forced to move to single family houses and in turn means the US cannot build much high density – the vast majority of people will refuse the compromises it forces. If we can build single stairway apartments that opens up a lot of possibility to build family friendly density. However if dual stairways really are safer I will not compromise safety and ridicule Europe for their lax safety standards in new buildings – but I don’t currently have enough information to make any claims. (building framing type, fire sprinklers are two other variables in safety that are important as well, and I’m sure someone who is in this area will know of more details I don’t)
There have been proposals to require sprinklers in new single family homes in the US.
Also, the requirement now is to have not just a smoke detector, but also a carbon monoxide detector.
I certainly think there are categories of deaths like dementia where some countries are doing surprisingly well so it’s difficult to believe there aren’t reporting differences.
But a fire death is a fire death.
The original comment may be related to the Vincent Scully quip, “One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat” when referring to the difference between the old and new Penn Station.
Sure, but the presentation went beyond that and one of the speakers called the old Penn Station the Gateway to America and expressed hope a rebuilt station could be that (the actual gateway to America is the JFK immigration line).
If there was ever a rail terminal that was the gateway to America, it was Communipaw, millions of people coming through Ellis Island would get a train there to practically everywhere in America going west.
From what I’ve seen through blogs and videos, it’s a similar experience with bicycle users in the Netherlands. Because they actually have sizable cycling mode shares, if the bicycle parking facility is integrated, then bicycle users don’t get to use the main entrances that people walking use, but instead have to navigate out of the usually underground facility after parking their bicycles.
The advantage Midtown has though, at least with the status quo (including the fact that CitiBike bike share docks are on the street), is that it has a very high walking mode share. Although a ✨monumental✨ front entrance is probably not necessary (Midtown has so many skyscrapers and straight streets), some street-level elegance and decency would arguably still pay off well. To clarify, I think it should have curb appeal, but shouldn’t be the next Empire State Building, able to drop jaws from 10 blocks away or whatever.
Zürich HB is a bit of an illusion in this respect. It’s a modern through-running rat warren underneath a palatial stub-end terminal. If you are just visiting you’ll appreciate the top part. But if you spend a month there you’ll realize most of the trains you need to ride are down below.
Except this “rat warren” features underground cross-passages up to 35m(!!!) wide.
Americans simply can’t even imagine how design for humans might look.
Even the underground parts of Zurich HB are rather nice. The Löwenstrasse platforms with their brass-colored roofs are even stylish, bright and open. The contrast to the dark back-alley feel of Penn and Grand Central couldn’t be starker.
(Referring to the platforms at Penn and Grand Central.)
I hear very few complaints about the newly renovated sections of Penn Station, which are bright, clean, and much easier to navigate with clear signage. Similarly, I’ve never heard American urbanists complain about almost entirely underground stations like Shinjuku.
The agencies that use Penn Station should tour Tokyo Station in peak summer heat and torrential rain, and be given missions to visit various buildings in the area, and then ask themselves whether it’s better to walk in like a king or scurry in like rats. And even outside of aggressively antagonistic weather conditions, only a tiny minority of passengers bother with the grand historic entrance aside from those who want to take photos of it.
In Detroit, the beautiful Michigan Central train station has been rebuilt for use by Ford. The downside is that trains don’t use it anymore. In case you wonder what it looked like before Ford stepped in, a number of dystopian movies used it for filming (THE ISLAND, ROBOCOP, the TRANSFORMERS series)
They are also extensively daylit, and Berlin in particular has good sight lines for a five-level cruciform station, but their purpose isn’t to make people feel at ease
I think you are answering your own question here. A “grand” station in this context (vis a vis Penn) doesn’t mean fancy architecture or gold leaf decorations, but rather than the space is designed appropriately for its use, size, and expected number of people. Leon Krier has a number of thoughts in this regard about form following function (like the US Capitol being only “five stories” tall – but one of those stories has a 180 ft ceiling because the purpose of the Rotunda requires the height). As I note to Adirondacker above, the platforms at Grand Central are not different than the platforms at Penn, and the subway connections are basically the same, but the Grand Concourse makes Grand Central beloved while Penn is reveiled. Or as Richard points out Zurich Hbf has underground spaces large enough to make it work entirely differently than Penn feels.
I’m not sure that daylight is an absolute requirement (underground spaces usually don’t get it regardless, and what about at night) but the steps taken to get some form of daylighting will likely lead to the civic sized spaces that do make people appreciate certain stations more.
Agree. Daylighting is not necessary but it does bring much benefit to the space. In HK we admire West Kowloon HSR station and the Admiralty station extension on its east. In mainland China we admire Hangzhou West (Hangzhouxi) Railway Station – all bringing daylight into the indoor.
You mostly talk about the arrival experience where there is indeed a tendency to immediately vanish underground. But for departure, I think a grand station makes a difference: you have to wait for the train, and it’s nicer to wait in a nice space. Sure, you might not see the outdoor station facade if you come by metro, but many stations look great from inside (including the Paris and several London termini). It’s obviously a better experience catching a train at Gare du Nord or St Pancras than at Montparnasse or Euston.
I don’t see the fundamental difference between continents but between individual stations. Grand Central’s main concourse is at the opposite end of the pleasantness scale from pre-Moynihan Penn station. (The platforms are equally drab and dark.) The U.S. has no shortage of stunningly beautiful historic train stations. It’s easy to find claustrophobic brutalist stations in Europe. Same with underground sections. Some nice, some nasty on both sides of the pond.
I don’t believe people’s needs for stations are purely utilitarian. A more pleasant space improves the overall transit experience, whereas an uncomfortable station frequently puts people off using trains.
The linked article on point access blocks sounds an awful lot like “midrise obesity crisis”. As in, it explicitly mentions building depth as a problem, at least as long as bedrooms are required to have windows (whether by residents or by regulators).
And in the translation, so to speak, a third pattern of construction got left out — the single-loaded corridor, with units getting light&air from both the corridor side and from the other side. This type can and indeed not infrequently does incorporate two stairwells. This is trivial to imagine for linear buildings (much Danchi and some WPact Plattenbau), but it also existed for large-project Late Euroblocks. They sometimes created strings of C-shaped buildings (with one O-shaped building usually at the end; sometimes in the middle with the Cs facing toward it) with units in the “wings” having windows overlooking the “neighbors'” courtyard. Often it was one of the windowless corners that housed the second stairwell (at the time of construction, oft described as “maids’/servants’ stairs”). Sometimes, elevators are original parts of the main stairwell, sometimes a later addition.
They waste density (FAR, setback, etc.) on a hallway, only to use half of its circulation ability.
I believe that they are most popular in regions where it is the norm for exterior corridors to be excluded from some or all density restrictions (e.g., FAR is calculated only on interior floor area), and in large scale projects such as public housing estates where the original density limits as written don’t matter since the rules would be rewritten for the project anyways.