On Mon, 19 Feb 2007, Dave A wrote:

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

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.

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.

Any idea if that includes night buses? I can almost never get home in the
wee small hours without changing.

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.

How about annotating the spiders to show interchange points, as on the
tube strip maps? So, for instance, on the Finsbury Park spider, the
Holloway Nag's Head stop on the 29/253/etc bundle would have a little box
saying "4 17 43 271 393", maybe with arrows pointing away on either side
labelled "Archway" and "Highbury & Islington" (or something, since not all
those routes go those ways). It wouldn't completely solve the problem, but
if you were at A, wanted to go to B, and knew what the routes serving B
were, you could look for a suitable C on the spider map at A. Even if you
didn't know the routes at B, you could perhaps make a reasonable guess
based on the destination hints. The key problem would probably be the
sheer number of boxes and arrows - there are a *lot* of routes in London!

tom

--
THE DRUMMER FROM DEF LEPPARD'S ONLY GOT ONE ARM!