Tom Anderson wrote:
On Mon, 19 Feb 2007, David of Broadway wrote:

James Farrar wrote:
On Mon, 19 Feb 2007 08:59:02 -0500, David of Broadway
wrote:

Then again, London's bus maps aren't designed to make it easy to
trace a route, which is the style I'm used to:
http://www.mta.info/nyct/maps/manbus.pdf

I'm not sure if that style is genuinely easier to read or if I just
find it easier to read because I'm accustomed to it. Has it ever
been attempted for London?

The closest we have are the quadrant maps:

http://cache.tfl.gov.uk/buses/pdfdocs/centlond.pdf
http://cache.tfl.gov.uk/buses/pdfdocs/n_east.pdf
etc

Which are, er, not very close.

Not close at all! At a junction, I can't tell which bus routes go which
ways without matching a number over here to a number over there. I
can't simply follow a colored line.

And there is the central London tourist
bus map:

http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/pdfdocs/cen_bus.pdf

Which is very limited in scope, and only shows a subset of the routes in
the area it covers anyway.

That's more along the lines of what I'm looking for, although I'd like
to see a proper map, superimposed on a street map. (I have nothing
against diagrams per se, and I think they work wonderfully for, e.g.,
the Underground, but I think a basic bus map works better in reference
to the surrounding street network.)

I'm not convinced it would work; London is a somewhat less organised
city than NYC (especially north of 14th Street)!

You want disorganized? Maybe I should have linked to Brooklyn instead
of Manhattan:
http://www.mta.info/nyct/maps/busbkln.pdf

My dear fellow, you really should look at a map of London some time.
Even Brooklyn is a paragon of geometrical order compared to this place.

Oh, certainly, Brooklyn vs. London themselves. (I've been to London
several times and I have A-Z's dating back to the black-and-white days.)
I thought Mr(.) Farrar was referring to the bus route networks, not
the street networks.

It seems like there's a basic difference in how bus routes are planned
in the two cities. In New York, they're largely planned to run along
a series of streets, and in the process they happen to run past a
series of origins and destinations. In London, it appears as though
they're largely planned to run past a series of origins and
destinations, and in the process they happen to run along a series of
streets. I'm sure there are numerous exceptions in both cities, but
the basic approach may set the tone for the style of map.

Possibly. There are also a lot more areas of parallel streets in New
York, even in the outer boroughs, than in London.

Unquestionably. So street-oriented route design might not make much
sense in London.

Also, your Manhattan map shows a measly 42 routes; a quick,
semi-automatic, examination of the list on londonbusroutes.net indicates
that we have 612 bus routes in London, not including night routes but
including school relief and non-TfL routes. Not all of those go through
zone 1/2, which i'd say is our equivalent of Manhattan, but i would
imagine more than 42 do.

Good point -- the bus route network is much denser in London than in
NYC. I wonder why that is.

We have a total of 207 local and 36 express routes in the MTA New York
City Transit bus network, plus 46 local routes and 35 express routes in
the MTA Bus network (recently established to take over the private bus
operations mostly in Queens and the Bronx).
--
David of Broadway
New York, NY, USA