Articles

Defining Connectivity

For a long time, stations have been regarded as mere points on a line where passengers get on and off. They are not destinations but a means to an end, where people seek to spend as little time as possible. In essence, a great station is one which channels passengers through it as comfortably and as quickly as possible. As a result, stations can become utilitarian parts of our built landscape, under pressure to deliver faster rail services at higher frequency and with greater capacity.

Yet rail is only one link in the chain of any door-to-door journey - stations need to deliver seamless transfer to other modes of transport, but many stations are also landmarks and need to connect to the places they serve.

High-quality transport, seamless interchange and placemaking – combined, these form an ideal of rail connectivity.

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Lessons from Europe - The ‘Cathedrals of a New Era’

Utrecht Centraal Station in the Netherlands. Following regeneration in 2016, it is a colossus spanning almost 30,000 m3 of floor area, dubbed a ‘Cathedral of a New Era’. It is not only the most important transit hub in Utrecht, but the whole of the country, with 16 platforms that serve some 88 million passengers per annum. This is projected to rise to 100 million by 2030. With an impressive undulating roof, the station also sits atop the world’s largest cycle parking area with a total in excess of 29,000 bicycle stands today in 2025. The last iteration of this article stated that it had 12,500 stands, which was already considered extraordinary.

It is integrated with two bus stations, two tram stops, and is directly linked to a large shopping centre. Although there are the usual level differences, the station has been carefully designed with a full outfit of elevators to allow access to all areas for all people at the same level of ease and convenience.

The concourse has been deliberately stripped of most of its commercial outlets, particularly those that typically sit in islands between the gates and the accesses. This may seem like the station is also limiting its potential for commerce, but it creates a spacious concourse and wayfinding is both efficient and easy. The design also goes above and beyond immediate rail provision by including thought-out pedestrian links to the wider city which are not the sole use of rail passengers but serve the whole city. A footbridge links the eastern and western sides of the station, preventing the rail lines from causing severance between communities and discouraging any given area from becoming the ‘wrong’ side of the track.

Previously that distinction used to be starkly defined. The back lands of the station were becoming notorious for drug trafficking and prostitution. However, the station development provides a dual frontage, cleaning up the ‘other side’ and the city has reversed several poor decisions of the 1960’s, in particular reinstating the canal and removing the ring road that covered it. This has created new active waterfront and cycle routes through the heart of the city, new green landscape, and carbon sinks.

Utrecht is not an outlier. Its design was based in part on Shinagawa Station in Tokyo, and Utrecht forms part of a package of stations known as the New Key projects: The Hague, Rotterdam, Arnhem, Breda, and Amsterdam South, now all but one completed. These are projects which not only seek to improve rail services, but also the station surroundings more widely. They seek to create identity and vitality, with iconic stations buildings not only of, but for, the city.

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Lessons from Asia – What is a Station?

Thinking about stations is quite different in Japan compared to the UK. While there are many commuter stations similarly designed to move people swiftly, and which are fundamentally only railway stations, many more are designed to cater to much more than transit. Not just commuter nodes, but urban destinations in their own right, designed to attract people and to value the station as a dynamic heart within the locality, becoming cultural symbols, social communication hubs, and business centres.

This is encapsulated within the concept of the ‘ekimae’; the station front.

The ekimae is the face of the station, but there may be multiple. All wayfinding in Japanese stations is broadly homogenised – rather than directing primarily towards local roads as in UK stations, which can be confusing to those unfamiliar with the location, passengers are directed towards compass directions. East Gate and West Gate, for example, additionally numbered where necessary. This allows for immediate orientation (especially when emerging from underground) towards active parts of the town, with those areas forming an identity accordingly, with reduced severance, as gates are often set back within the station, allowing for a public concourse through it.

The ekimae will provide transport interchange facilities such as bus stops and taxi ranks, mapping and cycle parking, but also social interchanges such as tourist information, postal services, banking, and police stations. These may be clustered around or within the station itself. The ‘ekimae’ may not merely be external but symbiotic with the rail use; tendrils of activity for other purposes permeating from the town centre, even as far as the paid side of the ticket barriers, down to the platforms themselves.

The station building may be high rise. In the UK, we’ve managed to go so far as to put hotels over stations; Japan goes further, putting cities within the city in their major rail stations - shopping centres, food courts, supermarkets, cafes, retail opportunities on each side of the ticket barrier. These can transcend the typical European offer of a chain fast food or coffee shop and a convenience store. While those uses are prevalent, Japanese stations may include a gourmet offer that is highly localised and limited time, event space, pop up markets, designer goods, or other high-end retailing activity. The premise is that you want to go there, for the sake of being there. You want to meet your friends there, and you want to linger.

This requires a certain level of land space and adjacent residential density, but it need not be limited to intensively metropolitan areas such as Shinjuku. Regional ‘bedroom towns’ also follow this model at more modest scales, which also helps support the continuation and commercial success of the railway. If most of your users are commuters, then who goes to the station in the middle of a weekday? These are dead hours and revenue losing time in many European cities, but Japanese stations, with their more dynamic and ambitious range of uses, can remain busy throughout the day, and sit at the top of the local hierarchy of urban destinations.

As a county, we are highly resistant to this idea of blending uses. We can see only the problems, the potentials for conflict, the potentials for inconvenience to simply moving people as fast as possible through and away. The rail station is seen more as a point to get into and out of, dispassionately, heads down, elbows out, and any offers made are cheap convenience, tiresome necessities squeezed into the slipstream hectic travel rather than things to excite and enjoy and dwell upon.

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British Stations – Room for Improvement?

The truth is that the UK has a number of world class stations that are worthy of being ‘Cathedrals’, with St. Pancras International perhaps first and foremost amongst these. Voted best station in Europe by Consumer Choice Centre (February 2020), St. Pancras has many of the hallmarks of what makes the Dutch stations so noteworthy:

·       Connections with a number of domestic destinations

• Connections with international destinations
• High-speed rail options
• Wheelchair accessibility
• A high-quality shopping experience
• Great signage and ease of orientation
• Ease of interchange with other modes

The wider King’s Cross rail development has also extended out into the local area, with integrated canal improvements, retail, commercial properties and cycle connections, and reduction of severance across rail track.

Paddington has significantly upgraded interchanges between national rail and London Underground, and has a glossy new retail offer within Paddington Square, which leads fluidly from the station. Waterloo is hurrying to catch up, with emerging new development to provide more of the ‘ekimae’ type experience, albeit as it is currently incomplete, this remains a little detached and liminal in space.

ur flagships are not limited to London either with stations at Birmingham and Manchester leading rail innovation further afield.

Yet there is a greater number of stations that have struggled to meet aspirations, and Europe is fast overtaking us. In 2024, St. Pancras had slipped down to 17th place in the Consumer Choice review, with London Bridge ranking highest at a modest 10th place. Five other London stations crawled into less prestigious end of the list, but no other British station ranked at all, in part due to not having the passenger numbers to qualify them for assessment.

It’s interesting to note the emphasis consumer choice places on diversity of facilities. Interchange forms three metrics for assessment, but the choice and range of places to shop and eat forms four metrics.

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British Examples – Try, Try and Try Again.

The redevelopment scheme of Cambridge Station, also known as CB1, was intended to give the city a landing pad that lauded both Cambridge’s heritage and its drive towards technology, as well as providing public realm and affordable housing arranged around a superlative interchange. Yet the development that has now emerged is different to those original aspirations.

CB1 provides an impressive cycle park; probably the best or one of the best in the UK, however, many more aspects appear less successful. Instead of locating buses at the station, stops have been dispersed along side streets. On the one hand, this reduces vehicle demand at the forecourt, but on the other can have the effect of making buses an ‘invisible mode’ from the point of view of rail passengers. Many British stations do this out of necessity – lack of space – but others opt to prioritise taxi ranks. A higher prestige mode, you nevertheless need more taxis to carry the same amount of people as a single bus. The station has also struggled to resolve the poor walking links to the city centre, and the new public park has been subject to a range of issues.

On its journey, CB1 faced some challenges with the 2008 recession. Original designs were not considered deliverable and the scheme took two years to achieve planning; this was followed by a slew of financial constraints and consequential changes to the original vision. Some plans were scaled back and amended citing the economic downturn in 2011, while the scale of development had to be increased. Perhaps to better meet timescales for delivery, the project was broken up into smaller plots designed in detail by commercial firms, rather than maintaining the holistic masterplan. The scheme experienced further misfortune when a fire in the former grain silo destroyed a key opportunity for historic and community uses.

Some of the biggest changes to the scheme were won at appeal, leaving the local council with a large bill and a wariness of being too involved or pushy in the remainder of the process, meaning that some later opportunities for improvement may have been lost.

The Cambridge Station development demonstrates several factors that can undermine the delivery of good connectivity despite good objectives and best efforts. Confusion of priorities (for example taxis over pedestrians and place-making), financial pressures leading to significant increases in the scale of development, delivery of elements in isolation, bad luck, and an inability for local government to lead opportunities are just some of the ways that big schemes can underachieve.

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What’s Stopping Us?

As demonstrated by the Cambridge Station Development, redeveloping a station area is not straightforward with multiple factors that can undermine aspirations for good design. Other issues include:

1)      Lack of adequate funding

2)      Land ownership issues

3)      Multiple interests

4)      Lack of technical guidance

5)      Procedures and processes

The above are often cited reasons for why the UK cannot deliver more high-quality interchanges, yet sometimes a reason is just an excuse.

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Reason 1 - We haven’t got the money.

Nearly a £1bn was spent on the upgrade to Reading station. It is one of the UK’s biggest stations, handling more than 700 trains a day, 13.5m passengers a year (as of 2024) and the upgrade delivered 5 new platforms. It is impressive, yet the project was primarily an engineering one focused on tracks and trains in isolation. There remains no ease of public access across the railway line, and no solution to the existing severance, with the station itself remaining a blockade.

Compare this to Utrecht where the design was made to allow movement via a separate bridge, with connections onto pedestrianised streets, plazas and cycle connections.

Or Omiya in Saitama, which allows the public to filter through the large concourse, which effectively acts as the lobby of the (high-revenue generating) shopping centre and uses built over the rail.

There are a few hundred cycle stands provided at Reading, which seems commendable, but these are spaced around and look to be neglected within the masterplan, included as an afterthought. Cycling has not been considered as an interchange properly, but for like an item to be ticked off a list. The concourse is crowded on the ground floor, with lots of commercial outlets on the new first floor.

Was there really a lack of funds to provide better connectivity for pedestrians and cyclists, and to better connect Reading station to its surroundings? Arguably, no. It was a matter of different priorities.

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Reason 2 - We don’t own the land.

There can be competing interests in terms of land ownership, which can be to the detriment of connectivity to the wider area. Transport corridors such as a rail lines divide can divide transport interchanges from the town centres and community hubs that they serve, as well as in the wider area, forming a barrier to convenient pedestrian movement. The land on either side of the severance is rarely within one ownership, hindering the delivery of the most direct routes.

Additionally, in the case of development projects next to railway lines, Network Rail will seek to recover a proportion of the uplift in value from the scheme promoter, also known as ‘shared value’.  The financial implications of this can also therefore have an impact on the best solution being achieved in terms of connectivity.

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Reason 3 - We haven’t got the drive to co-operate.

Different landowners, Local Authorities, national government, rail operators, Network Rail; all these parties are typically involved in rail development but are generally wedded to their own interests. Network Rail understandably want to protect their assets and focus on rail. Rail operators are keenly concerned with keeping the public happy and their rolling stock moving on time. Local Authorities are obliged to fight for ancillary items which might not be appealing to commercial developers – community centres don’t generate the same profit as luxury flats.

Yet at the end of the day, all of these parties would benefit from a quality project. The publicly accessible 24-hour concourses through many stations in Japan, connected to local retail and restaurants, makes stations places people actually want to visit, meet at, and spend time at. It means that the station is active and secure even off-peak, overseen by the users and businesses adjacent to it, and these are stakeholders who will fund and buy into station development. The example above, Omiya Station, is jointly operated by three rail operators, and was originally developed in the 1960s in conjunction with the large commercial property now occupied by the Lumine department store.

“The conventional wisdom used to be that creating a strong economy came first, and that increased population and a higher quality of life would follow.  The converse now seems more likely:

Creating a higher quality of life is the first step to attracting new residents and jobs.

The New Rule:

‘Businesses are attracted to a place where people want to live’”

Jeff Speck, 10 Steps to a Walkable City.

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Reason 4 - We haven’t got the technical guidance.

The UK has until very recently lacked any kind of overarching technical guidance for rail development at the national level. The Interchange Best Practice Guidelines (2021) provided by TfL are somewhat overlooked and the previous guidance which this document replaces from 2009 was rarely implemented. The 2021 guidance represents a step change and is much more comprehensive, including dedicated focus on permeability, urban realm, and push for joined-up planning between rail, housing and commercial opportunities. But what of the rest of the UK?

Network Rail’s Station Design Principles were updated in 2024, superceding the 2015 guidance, and now include reference to multi-modal interchange, and for over/adjacent development, although the latter is a shopping list of potential reasons not to do it.

Nevertheless, it is good to see that guidance is evolving and developers should take note of this. The documents referenced above are, by nature, somewhat more focused on the internal design of the station, but the Netowrk Rail guidane now includes the concept of the Station as a place and that it should have a part to play in wider urban masterplanning.

With this reason falling away, this should push for a brighter future for rail interchanges.

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Reason 5 - We haven’t got a set procedure or process.

Interchange development appears to be approached haphazardly, often in a reactive manner (such as hastening to improve rail capacity ahead of forecast crowds when the situation is already a problem). There is no strong hand overseeing the process and development can become piecemeal, pulled in contrary directions by different interests.

This would be resolved by insisting on masterplanning, treating stations as part of a holistic area, together with a strong Local Authority supported by appropriate technical guidance. We do appear to be starting to do this more, with opportunity areas and more local masterplanning, but rail is still considered something separate to the town, without those clear fingers of integration. It is hopefull that with the broad update to guidance set out above, this reasoning should also fall away, but the onus remains on Local Authority to take the opportunity to join together rail and other development opportunites into holistic masterplans.

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So, what do we do?

The five ‘reasons’ above have formed a barrier (real or otherwise) to good interchange to date and some (like landownership) are not easily remedied. However, none of these are entirely insurmountable and there are certainly many good examples worldwide of good processes we could evolve for a British context. What we need is to take a more proactive stance and design a system of interchange development that gives us greater resilience against leaving the quality of our most crucial public spaces to chance.

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The Changing Role of Government in Public Affairs

Most things stem from the top. The type of leadership and the goals of that leadership can make or break any aspiration, and there is a spotlight to be played on Government and the example that they set. The ground can be smoothed for progress where national leaders are willing and vocal in their support for real change and quality infrastructure. The role of government and industry body leaders includes, but isn’t limited to:

• Regulation: establishing the regulations and formal rules
• Facilitation: giving way for others to act and develop
• Stimulation: enabling development, through financing, better regulations etc.
• Equality and Equity: allowing for different forms of leadership and appreciating that different goals require different voices.
• Good Leadership: setting the standard by leading through example.

One good example of leadership in action is Eindhoven. Another Dutch station, Eindhoven is not considered one of the ‘Cathedrals’, but nevertheless a notably successful city in terms of its transport. Much of this was delivered by a partnership brought together by the Mayor between local government, Eindhoven University and developers.

In Japan, most rail stations are owned and operated by private rail companies, but stations are developed closely with city governance, and private development.

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The 15-Minute Neighbourhood

The principle of the 15-minute neighbourhood in urban development is that policy actions can provide residents with access to most, if not all, of their needs within a 15-minute journey of their home. In this approach, urban spaces are transformed into connected and self-sufficient neighbourhoods. Stations can be a catalyst of the development of 15-minute neighbourhoods by enhancing connectivity within a local area and through providing ancillary community services and retail outlets as part of their development. It is similar to the ekimae formula, and what’s more, we know it can deliver significant economic and public health benefits by enabling people to cater to their daily needs on foot or by bicycle, shopping more frequently and forming social connections more locally.

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Conclusions – Aspiring to More

Those involved in the creation of Utrecht Centraal foresaw a programme of work which would be required not only to improve the operation of the rail infrastructure but also to integrate the station with the surrounding city and ensure that it became a connector rather than a barrier. It needed to perform all the basic functions of an interchange but achieve more than just the necessities.

The examples we have presented see stations as social projects to an equal extent as engineering ones. The goal at Utrecht was to bring the back land to the rear of the station into the town centre itself and improve social equity. The station had to become a legible, convenient place that celebrated connectivity, rather than being only a technical solution for transport. In Omiya, they are working with a railway from the 1800s, cutting through the centre of an emerging modern city; investing in rail to become one of the area’s greatest interchanges meant also developing the station as the heart of the city centre, a ‘city within the city’, with many faces and functions.

Crucially, those in charge had a radically different goal in mind. When asked what it was that they wanted to achieve above all other things with the Key Projects scheme, the mayor of Utrecht replied ‘healthy citizens’. Not a rich economy, not world-class rail, nor even connectivity, but an improvement to public health. All other benefits came to life as a result of setting that one simple goal – to create a city which helped rather than hindered people’s individual health.

Saitama City announced its new ‘Omiya Grand Central Station Vision’ in 2022. It’s simple – to create a great interchange, but just as importantly, to be ‘the face of Saitama City, a place of omotenashi’. This word loosely means ‘hospitality’ but is much more. It’s a welcome; a promise to treat you well, and anticipate your needs. To make you effortlessly relax and enjoy yourself. Writing in the Transformation Plan for the station, the Mayor of Saitama City writes, ‘We want to create a town that everyone can boast about’. Town. That’s the way the station is seen. As a whole urban ecosystem in itself.

In this day and age, it’s clear that good rail interchange is considered the baseline for stations to deliver, and the UK, if it wants to be serious about rail investment, needs to start thinking more broadly about stations and what they do for cities, what they are to people, and what they should be.

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By Andreas Markides,Co-written by Sarah Chapman.