Austrian Metro Distributes Deos to Combat Heat Wave

Wednesday, July 18, 2018

While London Underground gave out free water to help travellers cope with its sauna-like trains in 2016, in Austria it appears the public transport company is more concerned with unsavoury odours. In Vienna, things have got so bad that the authorities have started handing out free deodorant on the city’s U-Bahn trains.

 
Metro staff handed out free deodorants to passengers on Vienna’s notoriously stuffy U6 line this week, and it appears the initiative was popular. The entire stock of 14,000 deodorant sprays was grabbed in a single day, and plans for a second distribution have had to be shelved.

 
The deodorants were “torn out of our hands,” Daniel Amman, a spokesman for the Wiener Linien public transport company said.

 
Temperatures of 35C have been recorded on Vienna’s U6 — just shy of the Central Line’s 35.5C, but still well beyond the EU limit of 30C for transporting cattle.

 
But the situation on most of Vienna’s U-Bahn system is considerably more comfortable London’s Tube. Most of the lines are air conditioned, and only on the ageing U6 do passengers still have to endure the heat.

 
Even there, half of the U6’s trains have air conditioning, unlike on London’s Central Line, whose 100-year-old infrastructure makes adding it impossible.

 
Where the Central Line gets so hot because it is deep beneath London, the main problem on the U6 is that trains run overground for sections, heating up under the Vienna sun.
Older trains have been fitted with tinted windows and ventilation grilles which the public transport company says will lower temperatures by as much as 4C.

 
Eight years ago, Der Standard newspaper recorded a temperature of 42.6C on a packed Vienna bus. Today, all the city’s buses are air conditioned and such hellish commutes are a thing of the past.

 
While climate change and the unusually hot summer have been blamed for the problem, figures suggest it may have more to do with a change in what passengers are prepared to put up with.

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