People would need more space on the escalator to walk so this would reduce the overall escalator capacity. There would also be some people who couldn't or wouldn't walk, which would always break the double lane walking and revert the system to how it is currently.
Agreed that they do present an opportunity to get a little exercise though, which would be missed in the "everyone stand" world.
One could argue that this does help everyone when it's particularly busy because it reduces the glut of people waiting to get on the bottom of the escalator, which can slow you down even if you want to walk up.
I suppose from TFL's point of view, the average time take is exactly what they want to optimise too because it everyone through the system quickest.
Personally, I really like walking and I guess I'd be a bit frustrated at not being able to even if it was for the good of the whole. Or even for me personally (time-wise)
The thing I love about these old illustrations that predict the future from long ago in the past is not what they get right but what they get wrong.
They focus on a singular aspect of future technology but due to the limitations of their imagination aren't able to predict other entirely new revolutionary technologies and so default to their current ways of interacting with the new tech.
So for example, they predict the cross-continent visible and audio interaction but use the large unwieldy gramophone style microphone to capture the speech being unable to imagine capturing audio from a tiny electronic device.
In other examples I've seen [1], you see a farmer with his auto-farming machinery but he's using enormous levers to interact with it. And then there's the frequent use cast iron to build some of this "future tech" when of course, not much is made from cast iron these days.
It makes me wonder what things we literally can't imagine about the future now. Or how different technologies that we can imagine could come together to produce entirely new things.
Taking measurements will usually prompt questions of "how do I change the results over time?" So, although the difficulty of improving the thing doesn't change; the chance of taking action to improve the thing does change for the better.
Measurements will usually encourage attention and effort to change in a way that non-measured things are unlikely to.
On that basis, I'd argue that even things that are very difficult to measure quantitatively would benefit if a suitable proxy was found that could be measured.
Of course, you do have to be careful that your proxy is suitable!
I'm suddenly reminded of my experience of the Chromosaturation installation by Carlos Cruz-Diez that I saw at the Hayward Gallery Light Show Exhibition. [1]
This was a trio of rooms which were saturated with either blue, red or green light. On entering each room everything appeared tinted with the colour of the light. However, after 5 minutes the brain had restored the perceived balance to normal. You could entirely forget that you were in a colour saturated room.
When moving to another of the rooms the effect began again but with everything tinted whatever colour the new room was saturated in before gradually adapting back to "normal".
I think this supports my above hypothesis. The brain takes some time to adjust to new light sources and will skew perceived colours for a short time after changing the ambient light source.
From my quick accidental experiment, I think that what you see is related to your visual experience in the preceding minutes.
I too was looking at this and thinking, "How can anyone say that that dress looks white and gold?" I could only see blue and black.
I went outside to get lunch, came back, got yet another dress picture in my social feed but lo, it was white and gold...!
My immediate assumption was that I had seen a doctored image but having gone back to this post, where I previously could only see blue and black, I could now only see white and gold.
My hypothesis is therefore that the type of light you've recently been experiencing influences how your brain interprets the colours in the dress image.
Going from daylight into artificial fluorescent lighting gives White/Gold. But, after some time under fluorescent lighting it turns Blue/Black. For me this hypothesis is somewhat supported by the fact that now that I've been back inside for 20 minutes the dress is Blue/Black again.
You could argue that companies like Rembrandt are the only way that indie patent holders can hope to compete with the likes of Samsung. Unfortunately the patent game appears to usually be one that is won by whoever has the largest legal budget.
It costs huge amounts to create, file and protect patents and any errors will mean that a patent is worthless once the opposition's lawyers get stuck into it.
Large companies in patent heavy fields all have teams of lawyers filing patents as quickly as they can and then defending them and attacking others as hard as they can. The little guy doesn't stand a chance.
Perhaps a solution could be to have government take the place of a company like Rembrandt so that independent patent filers can get the heft behind them required to support their patent.
Agreed that they do present an opportunity to get a little exercise though, which would be missed in the "everyone stand" world.