Meet the man making the Tube a kinder place

Fernando Solis is recalling the moment he decided something needed to change. It was 2015 and he was asked to give up his seat on the Tube. The 34-year-old had recently undergone surgery and his resulting stoma meant he needed to sit down. So he pointed at another passenger to give up their seat.

“Then I realised I was victimising someone as well,” says Solis, pictured below. “I was part of the problem. I made an assumption that the person in front of me didn’t need their seat.”

Happily, it was a problem he was able to address. Solis is the Product and Industrial Designer for Transport for London and the brains behind the capital’s new “priority seats” on the Tube: a bright set of sloganed seats on the Jubilee line emblazoned with messages such as “Be prepared to offer this seat” and “Not all disabilities are visible”.

This is Solis’s point: “People think that accessibility just means wheelchairs, but it’s far more open than that.” When he had a colostomy bag, he looked like a “relatively healthy young man”, which made it difficult to ask for a seat.

“I was met with hostility,” he says, describing how he felt forced to lift his shirt to answer passengers who wondered why he needed to sit down. The experience was “frustrating” but he realises it’s even harder for those who are more vulnerable, such as people on the autistic spectrum.

“The best thing for them to do would be to sit down but because of their condition they cannot bring themselves to ask for a seat.”

Solis wants his priority seats to start a conversation. The colours (black, a neutral grey, a warning red, and the same blue that’s used on safety signage and disabled badges) were chosen to contrast with existing seats and messages were designed to “disrupt behaviour”.

Currently “the moment we step on to a Tube we just put our headphones in and ignore everything else”, he explains. Most people just sit on that seat because it’s comfortable. More often than not, we ignore the fact that it’s a priority seat.”

By putting bold messages on the fabric, Solis wants people to pause and think — “For you to go, ‘Oh, actually, this seat has a different meaning.’ It doesn’t hurt just to say, ‘Hi, are you OK? Would you like to take a seat?’ The worst-case scenario is that the person says no.”

Solis’s priority seats have been more than 12 months in the making. After an internal TfL competition last year he was awarded £25,000 to test them on the Jubilee line, and the hope is they will one day be rolled out on other lines, too.

Now he wants to improve access for wheelchair users. Last year Solis spent a week living in a wheelchair as part of a test and found the reality “astonishing”.

Travelling around London took “astronomical amounts of planning” and everyday life was a struggle. Shopping in Selfridges was “difficult” because the counters were the wrong heights; in Waitrose he found the card readers impossible to reach and when he took his cat to the vet the building wasn’t wheelchair accessible.

“It’s tiny little things like this that normal people don’t notice,” Solis says.

His aim is to reach a state of “turn up and go” for wheelchair users “to enable disabled people to just turn up to any station and go where they want without having to plan ahead so much — just like any able-bodied person would”.