One of the complications is the abysmal topography of the station itself. Much as I dislike Paddington for its noisy atmosphere (as mentioned above) including incessant beeping vehicles you can usually find a seat by the information desk with a good view of the screens, and the Arrivals board helps working out where your train will go from. Then there is just a single row of buffers for the long distance train platforms at which you can see the trains coming and going.
KGX in contrast has a big concourse which has no view at all of the trains at P 0 to 8 which makes pax nervous from the very outset of their journey, very poor psychology. And all the while ppl have to thread through the assembled multitude to get to P 9 & 10 (P11 RIP)
UCL have a facility called
PEARL (Person-Environment-Activity-Research-Laboratory) for investigating people flows in public places but it doesn't seem as though anything like this was used before the big rebuild.
I commuted through Kings Cross most of the way through the rebuild, which was completed not long after I finished commuting. There is a lot of misunderstanding and hindsight here.
The design of the current Kings Cross station was produced more than 20 years ago. It was in the days before smart phones, when long distance rail thought it should run like air travel, and way before the existence of PEARL.
One of the objectives of the design was to separate departing passengers and arriving passengers, like in an airport. 20 years ago that's what the railway thought the travelling public wanted. In that framework, it doesn't matter that the departing passengers can't see the trains, in the same way that, in an airport departure lounge, it isn't necessary for the passengers to be able to see the planes.
The way this was supposed to work was for the barriers at the buffer stops to be for arrivals only, with arriving passengers exiting onto the piazza or onto the southern end of the western concourse.
Departing passengers were supposed to enter midway down the station, through the barrier to what was then platforms 9-11, or at the mezzanine level to platforms 0-8. That's why the bridge only has one escalator to each platform, usually running downwards. Departing passengers were supposed to wait on the mezzanine level (I always do this on the few occasions that I use Kings Cross) or at the northern end of the western concourse.
And is the First Class Lounge still next to the mezzanine barrier? It is also why the signage in the Underground walkways directed exiting passengers to their northern concourse, not up onto the piazza end of the station.
The relevant stations for comparison are Eurostar, especially Paris Gare du Nord, which, when I last used it (a long time ago now), also had departing passengers entering at a mezzanine level.
In the subsequent 20 years one of the main things that's changed is the smart phone. That isn't just about people being able to look at online departure boards and maps for trains and platforms at Kings Cross, it is also about online sources documenting short cuts through the Underground passageways, so fewer people follow the signs to the northern end of the western concourse.
I can't remember to what extent, if any, that the new design took account of Thameslink, but it probably didn't foresee the future increase in the number of ECML trains.
But what the new design definitely didn't foresee was the child wizard phenomenon, and that the station would become a tourist destination in its own right. Now crowds queuing to have their photo taken pushing a trolley through a wall, and to get into the shop, take up a lot of the space at the north end of the western concourse, that should have been for departing passengers.
Taking all these together, various long distance operators have abandoned any attempts to operate the station in the way it was designed.
