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This paper will unfold affordances of the material setting in the Copenhagen Metro and its role for passenger movements and “capacity issues”, zooming in on the role of platform escalators at the underground station of Nørreport. The analysis will focus particularly on “congestions” as causing friction for the vision of the Copenhagen Metro as a “travelator of continuous movement”. However, friction can be understood as equally an  impeder  and  enabler  of movement, and although the platform escalators are not innocent, they are also not  determining  congestions to happen on the platform in a top-down manner. Such situations are equally staged bottom-up by passengers’ embodied practices and their motivations, metro “literacy” and ways of managing the presence of others in the metro. However, the movement possibilities afforded by the material setting can be hard to negotiate for passengers with lesser able bodies or lesser metro literacy. Through empirical examples, the paper contributes with nuanced understandings of “capacity issues”: rather than a pure quantitative mismatch between the amount of platform sqm’s and the number of passengers, capacity issues reflect the multiple affordances of the material setting and how these are negotiated through the agency of human actors in mobile situations. Connecting these insights to design, this paper suggests a dual approach to “solving” capacity issues that simultaneously makes the Metro increasingly well-functioning by  reducing  the movement impeding friction from the physical setting, while  allowing  the friction of passengers’ embodied practices as a good accessible and inclusive public space.

Congested metro materialities: how platform escalators afford “friction” in the Copenhagen Metro