Well the whole point is that the vestibule (or the open space in front of the doors) eventually get congested and there is a need for crush load passengers to access the other parts of the car.
If the one "vestibule" is crush loaded, then likely the two adjacent ones - which also have doors, will also be crush loaded. If they are not, you simply walk between the sections - as if the vestibule is not fill, people won't tend to gravitate to stand in the narrow sections.
On a high floor LRV or our current subway, the layout affords this.
Our current high floor LRV cars have similar narrow sections, which are worse, as you do have to walk through them to egress the vehicle.
If the car is as narrow as an LRV, a high floor car like the Mk II Skytrain cars in Vancouver or the new Montreal metro cars (which are also in the 2.4-2.65m width range) just have 2 + 1 seating and provide a much bigger corridor space for standees to spread around.
All the subway cars used since the 1960s in Montreal s had 2+2 seating. Walking between sections has never been a problem. The new cars don't have 2+1 seating because of walking through sections. But so they can cram more people onto the subway car. More standing, less sitting.
Of course, we can't do that with 100% low floor LRVs because the trucks have to be symmetrical, and hence you have to have 2 + 2 seating with a narrow corridor.
If I recall correctly, the low-floor Flexity vehicles that Bombardier was running on the Olympic line in 2010 had 2+1 seating. I don't think 2+2 is a requirement.
On the CLRVs where they converted the rear to 2 + 1 seating, movement in the back is much less of a problem.
It is. But on these cars, there is a lot of reason to move through the long distance from back doors to the rear of the car. This won't be as problematic with the new LRVs, as there will be little reason to move through the car, unless everyone tries to all file in in the front door, or the rear door.
I'm not sure about the efficiency of back-to-back seating (where 4 seats face each other). Anecdotally, they are always the last seats to fill up in cities where buses (usually Novas) have them; people often prefer to stand than to squeeze past the kneecaps of 3 people.
Yes, that might get interesting. But from the pictures, the spacing doesn't seem particularly tight. Now, on crammed streetcars (imagine the ones leaving the Ex after an event) will people be trying to stand between the knees of the sitting people?
I'm not sure these pictures illustrate the seating well. It actually appears tighter than the legacy LRV vehicles, which are actually narrower. This is from the mock-up of the new TTC legacy vehicle - it's a very similar anger to the new picture of the Metrolinx LRV, which I'll put below
In my mind, the most interesting thing in this new mock-up, is that it's in Metrolinx green, instead of TTC red.
