.jpg)
Designing the perfect queue is no easy task—and the mass of people snaking through London is no ordinary queue. But help is at hand—from the behavioral science of queue theory to tricks of the trade more commonly used at theme parks, it’s possible to keep hundreds of thousands of people in order. Especially when most of them are Brits—a people famed for their ability to stand obediently in line.
“The perfect queue is one that doesn’t take longer than 10 minutes,” says Eric Kant, founder of Phase01 Crowd Management, a Dutch company that manages events—including long lines. (A 2017 study from University College London suggests that Brits get antsy when they wait longer than 5 minutes 45 seconds.) “From this perspective, it is not a perfect queue,” says Kant. But it is a well-prepared one, with meticulous planning, pinpoint precision, and wild logistics. In short, it’s a queue fit for a queen.
At its peak, the queue has snaked 5 miles across the capital, with an estimated 14-hour wait. When it reached capacity and closed on Friday, people defied government advice and formed a separate queue for the queue. Such scenes are remarkable—but they’re not unprecedented. When George VI—Queen Elizabeth II’s father—died in February 1952, 300,000 people filed past his coffin in St. George’s Chapel over the course of three days.
Up to 750,000 people are expected to see the queen over the course of her lying in state. At any one time, 30,000 to 40,000 people could be standing in line, according to crowd safety consultant Andy Hollinson, who worked on other aspects of the plan to honor the queen after her death, called Operation London Bridge, but who was not involved in the lying-in-state element. Such estimates are conservative and based on an orderly queue in which people are standing three abreast. The queue in London is more of an orderly blob than a line. “Nobody’s ever seen a queue as long as this before,” says Hollinson.
But despite the unprecedented nature of the queue, prep work has been ongoing for years. “I can see a lot of similarities with the plans I developed 10 years ago,” says Keith Still, visiting professor in crowd science at the University of Suffolk, who, in 2011, was among those asked by London’s Royal Parks to develop a queueing and security screening system for events like a royal funeral. “Wherever the bottleneck is, you work back from that,” says Still. That, in this instance, is the security screening area at the entry to Westminster Hall.
Designing the perfect queue then involves looking at two variables: how quickly people join the end of the line (the arrival rate) and how quickly they get through it (the service rate), says Still. The arrival rate is dictated by the capacity of London Underground and the mainline rail network.
The service rate is trickier to calculate, because it depends on how quickly people pass by the queen’s coffin. Different people choose to mark their respect in different ways, which can take different lengths of time. One person’s quick walk past with a glance to the side is another person’s pause for reflection. Ideally, you want to ensure the service rate is equal to or greater than the arrival rate—if it isn’t, then the queue will grow. So far, the arrival rate has outstripped the service rate. With typical British understatement, the UK government’s website warns anyone wanting to visit to “please note that there will be a queue.”
“There’s a significant amount of math and formulas that has been written about this over the years,” says Still, “but that doesn’t take into account psychology.” There are both positive and negative elements at play when it comes to the psyche of this particular queue. Almost no one within it will ever have waited as long for something in their lives, meaning they could quickly become frustrated.
But for die-hard royal fans determined to pay their respect, there’s another risk. “One of the concerns that has always been foremost is that if people are standing for 20 hours, then they may push themselves beyond their limits,” says Still. Three hundred people in line have been given medical assistance, with 17 taken to nearby hospitals, according to the London Ambulance Service.
While Kant says that the queue can’t, by definition, be described as perfect, the 14-hour wait times are not as bad as you might think. The government’s queue-tracking livestream, which gives the estimated physical and temporal length of the line, provides transparency about how long people can expect to wait. It means anyone can go in open-eyed about the challenge ahead of them—even if it has had its hiccups, including directing people to start queueing in North Carolina. The queue tracker is augmented with regular updates on social media that tell people where to start lining up, or indeed not to bother as the queue reaches capacity.
The queue is a challenge for infrastructure, too, with more than 1,000 people—including 779 stewards and 100 volunteer marshals—ensuring no one cuts in. Along the queue route, 500 portable toilets have been installed, while a wristband system is in operation allowing people to leave the line to get food and drink and not lose their place. A separate, shorter queue for those with disabilities has stewards checking anyone who is flagging in the main line, then siphoning them off to the shorter one.
For the accessible queue, the UK government has borrowed a model from theme parks, many of which offer timed return slots and priority access for paying customers, with a limited number of timed slots available every day. They’ve also borrowed another element from the likes of Disney: entertainment. BFI Southbank, a cinema run by the British Film Institute located on the last mile of the line before it arrives at the Palace of Westminster, is showing archive footage of the queen on giant screens outside its building.
Setting expectations is also vital, and another lesson learned from theme parks. Estimated wait times make the world of difference, says Still. “Queueing systems such as at Disney, Universal, and Six Flags all consider this,” he says. “It’s all about keeping the crowd entertained, informed, and distracted.”
Another concept borrowed from theme parks are the snakelike sections that double back on themselves to allow more people to be crammed into less space, which are visible not only at Southwark Park but also Potters Fields Park, around one-third of the way into the line, and closer to the conclusion of the queue. These need barriers and staff to help make them work.
“It’s just fortunate that this has happened now, after the summer,” says Collinson. “In the middle of the festival season, when it was in full swing, it may have even been harder to get the infrastructure and the stewards.” Such ways of lining people up make the queue seem shorter than it is—a clever psychological trick to try to ease frustrations.
But one surprise has been the comparative lack of disquiet about standing so long in line. Rebellion hasn’t materialized in the form of cutting in or complaints about delays. If anything, people have been more annoyed about not being able to join the line in the first place. The queue for the queue is evidence of that. “I just call it determination,” says Kant.
