Boarding ramps to stay at West Ham and Stratford stations

Kay Atwal, Chief Reporter Tuesday, September 25, 2012
1:00 PM

Boarding ramps introduced on some Underground tube stations duyring the Olympic and Paralympic Games will be retained.

Transport for London has said the ramps will be kept while a review is carried out.

The ramps have been used at 16 key London Underground stations, including West Ham and Stratford, where there is a gap between the train and platform, enabling customers using wheelchairs to board trains more easily, and they will continue to be used after the Games at all of these stations following positive feedback from customers.

Now a review will examine all aspects of their use, including benefits to customers, reliability, cost, level of usage and potential locations for future use.

Mike Brown, London Underground Managing Director, said: “The London 2012 Games has benefitted from the most accessible public transport system of any Olympic or Paralympic Games in history. Transport for London has invested hundreds of millions of pounds in making the transport network more accessible in the last few years, with improvements such as new lifts, trains, platform humps, wide aisle gates, tactile paving and audio-visual displays.

“However, we know there is more to do. For the Games we introduced manual boarding ramps at 16 key stations where there is a gap between the train and platform, enabling customers using wheelchairs to board trains more easily. These ramps have proved to be very useful for our customers and we are going to continue to use them after the Games while we review whether they are permanently viable.”