Tag: tube

Giving up your seat

So the wife has done a kind of sociological analysis of who offers seats to baby-carrying people on the London Metro. Based on the data points she’s collected over the last three months we’ve been in London, she concludes that people who are most willing to give up their seats are those who have been beneficiaries of similar actions in the past – basically a social capital kind of argument.

I don’t have such an overarching thesis on who gives up seats, but one major observation based on my collection of data points. Most of my train rides with Berry have been between Ealing Broadway, the station closest to where we live, and St. Paul’s in Central London, close to Berry’s nursery and Pinky’s office.

The Central Line, which I take for this journey, is typically crowded in both directions, since most of my trips are during peak office commute hours. However, my experience in terms of people offering me a seat (I’ve never asked for it) has been very different in terms of where I’ve boarded.

What I’ve found is that people have been far more willing to give up their seats when I’ve boarded at St. Paul’s (or anywhere else in the city), than at Ealing. In fact, in about 30-40 train rides originating in Ealing when I’ve been carrying Berry, I only recall one occasion when someone has offered me their seat. On the other hand, it’s rare for me to board at St Paul’s and NOT have someone offer me their seat.

I have one major hypothesis on why it happens – on what goes into getting a seat, and a sense of entitlement. Essentially, Ealing Broadway is a terminus for the tube, and thus an originating station for journeys into town. And I’ve seen people work hard in order to get a seat.

So you have people who leave multiple trains in order to find one where they can find a seat. They get to the station well in advance of a train leaving so that they can get a place to sit. And having invested so much effort in occupying the seat, they feel entitled to the seat, and don’t want to give it up so easily.

On the other hand, St. Paul’s is right in the middle of the Central Line, and people who have seats when the train arrives there are typically those who got them somewhere along the way. Now, while there exist strategies to figure out where a seat might fall empty, and grabbing it, finding a seat in a non-empty train after you’ve boarded is more a matter of luck.

So if you think you got your seat by sheer luck, you feel less entitled to it, and are more than happy to give it up for someone who might have need it more!

Feel free to draw your own analogies!

Platform as a platform

This afternoon, as I was getting off the tube, I looked at the railway platform, and wondered how it compared to “platforms” as we now know in the context of “platform economics“. For those of you under a rock, platform economics talks about the economics of “platforms” that bring together two sides of a market to interact.

In that sense, Uber is a platform connecting drivers to passengers. Ebay is a platform connecting buyers and sellers of used goods. Paypal is a platform connecting people who want to pay and those who want to receive payment. And so forth (these are all textbook examples nowadays).

So is the railway platform a platform? And if not, is it correct that we refer to entities that run two-sided markets as platforms (arguably, the most intuitive meaning of the word “platform” in the last hundred or so years has been in the railway context)? These were some of the questions I grappled with as I walked along the length of the platform at Ealing Broadway.

For those of you who’re not in the know, I’ve written a book on market design. The Takshashila Institution is publishing it, and the book should be out fairly soon (manuscript is complete, but there’s still plenty to do). In that book, I have a chapter on taxi marketplaces such as Uber/Lyft/Ola, and how they’ve transformed the efficiency of the taxi market. Before I introduce these characters, though, I draw the history of the taxi market.

In that, I talk about taxi stands. Taxi stands work in the way of Thomas Schelling’s focal points. Passengers go there because they know empty taxis will go there. Taxi drivers looking for passengers go there because they know passengers looking for taxis will go there. This way, rather than waiting at a random place looking for either a passenger or a ride, going to the taxi stand is rational. And in that sense, taxi stands are a platforms.

In a way, railway platforms are platform in the same sense. Think of a train that wants to pick up passengers, and passengers who want to travel on a train. If there were no designated pick up points, trains would stop at random places, which passengers would have to guess. While engine drivers could see passengers waiting by the side, stopping at random places might have meant that the train would have had to go empty.

From this perspective, railway platforms act as platforms – they are focal points where trains and passengers come together. Passengers wait there because they know trains stop there, and vice versa. And helpfully, there is an actual physical platform that elevates passengers to the height of the train door so they can get on and off easily!

Isn’t this a wonderful way to have complicated a rather simple concept?

BrEntry

So we moved to London yesterday. The wife has got a job here, and Berry and I have tagged along as “dependants”. My dependant visa allows me to work here, though it has been mentioned rather complicated as “Restricted no doctor/dentist training no sport”. Basically I can do everything else. The five-month old’s visa stamp simply says “work permitted”! Go figure.

This is not the first time I’m living in London. I’d very briefly (for the length of a mid-MBA internship) lived here twelve years ago, and as luck would have it, our cab from the airport to the temporary apartment passed under that office on the way (that employer has moved offices since, I’ve been told).

London welcomed us with some fabulous weather yesterday – I actually considered getting my sunglasses out! Wasn’t too cold (one jacket was enough) and mostly didn’t rain, so despite being sleepless and tired from our journey, we ended up setting out to put beats and meet some friends. While we were waiting at the bus stop, though, it did drizzle a bit, making me reconsider whether we should really go out. Then, my wife reminded me that we weren’t in Bangalore any more, and poor weather is no excuse to put NED.

We took Berry in her stroller yesterday. Walking around with it was peaceful – for the large part, footpaths exist, and though not as smooth as Hema Malini’s cheeks, there are no problems at all with taking the stroller around. It’s not a problem on buses either, but the tube is a real bitch. Most stations don’t have elevators, and you need to carry the strollers up or down stairs. And we haven’t yet figured how to hold it while climbing down escalators, which left little Berry rather scared as she got on for her first tube ride. Henceforth, when a tube ride is involved, we’ll most likely put her in her baby carrier rather than the stroller!

Keeping her warm is a challenge, though. As a good South Indian kid, she refuses to wear any warm clothes and we need to endure significant screaming when we make her wear a warm jacket. We also need to figure out a strategy for the rain. We’ve got this plastic cover for her stroller, but a different strategy is required when carrying her in her carrier (the carrier is also hard to wear when wearing a coat of any kind).

Finally, a note about coffee. Firstly, it isn’t that expensive – a typical coffee at Costa is around £2.25 (I’m still conditioned to thinking GBP/EUR = 1, though I realise I need to add 15% to convert pound prices to Euros, which I’m used to). But the coffee at Costa itself was disappointing.

They promised a Cortado, which is a Spanish concept where very little milk is added to a shot of espresso, giving a rather strong coffee. Costa advertised at their door that they served some three kinds of Cortado (a travesty in itself). And the cortado itself had way too much milk for it to be called a Cortado!

I hope to continue to make pertinent observations, unless I join an employer where continued blogging might seem too dangerous (I’ve worked for those kinds of employers in the past but don’t want to take chances again)! And you might remember that this blog “took off” in terms of the number of posts the first time I was in Britain!