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

Andrew wrote:
Motorists who feel aggrieved by the extension of the London charging
zone have some positive assistance this week with the launch of a new
easy-to-read bus map for London.
Easy-to-read? It gives me a headache.

I don't like it.

Or, download a super-simple version from:
http://www.quickmap.com/downloads/q20supersimple.pdf

Super-simple?

Not really.

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 real issue is that New York's bus system is a fair bit simpler than
London's. I have used it and "studied" it from bus maps. Your use of
and familiarity with your grid street pattern must also assist in
comprehending the bus network. The use of "uptown", "midtown" and
"downtown" as commonly understood descriptions of areas of Manhatten is
also a further help. IIRC many services are described in this way as
they run N-S or E-W (Crosstown?) - this must also help people know which
way a bus is going. We really only have West End and City plus some
district names which are very familiar like "Victoria".

I know the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn are more involved in terms of
service provision but your overall number of regular NYCTA routes is
still relatively small. I know there are commuter express services as
well but I believe they are advertised separately.

You tend to have only one route on many main corridors which assists
with map clarity hugely - in Central London that is pretty rare. We
often have 3 as a minimum and up to 10 or so on the very busiest
streets.

I will say that your spider maps are much easier to read and much more
useful than the maps we have posted at bus stops.

They are fine if there is a direct bus from the stop you are standing
at. They are hopeless if your journey requires interchange to another
service at some point. There is no sense of there being a network with
spider maps which I believe is counterproductive when you have a network
which is as dense as London's and where the move to shorter routes over
the last 4 decades means changing services is much more of a necessity.
There is little to guide people as to how to accomplish such journeys if
they are relatively unfamiliar with the bus network.

The one advantage they do have is that they make an attempt to show you
exactly (for the immediate area) and approximately (wider radius from
origin) where bus stops are. That is a help.
(snip)

My impression of bus use in London is that it is broadly confined to the
use of single routes from origin to destination - ISTR a statistic that
only 4% of journeys involving buses, involved changing from one bus to
another. However, I have no source for that, so don't quote me! Maybe
I'll see if I can dig it out somewhere.

I think buses become particularly attractive when they are direct -
whereas with the Tube, people aren't anywhere near as put off changing
lines (because it's relatively easy to find your way around a Tube station).

Putting information on making onward connections by bus could make the
diagrams overly complicated, just to serve a fairly small proportion of
passengers. The only way I can think of to make a clear diagram like
this is to combine the spider and the traditional bus map - by using the
traditional map as a base, and overlaying buses from the current
location as individual coloured lines.

The problem with that is that where there are long routes that can be
shrunk in a spider diagram but will not fit into a traditional map -
this is the case for many routes on the central London traditional map.
The most useful connections will be those outside central London, which
wouldn't be represented by the map I describe.


--
Dave Arquati
www.alwaystouchout.com - Transport projects in London