London Banter - View Single Post

Tom Anderson · February 21st 07, 05:37 PM posted to uk.transport.london

On Tue, 20 Feb 2007 wrote:

On 20 Feb, 01:05, Tom Anderson wrote:
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.

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!

Absolutely, but not only are there buses, but also tubes and trains and
streets too.

None of which i'd show. Well, tubes and trains would get an icon, as on
current spider maps, but that's easy; i wouldn't bother trying to show the
railway lines on the bus map. Not terribly integrated, i know, but i think
the railway lines are well enough mapped (and well enough generally known)
that they don't need to be laid out on the bus map.

You can't easily mix tube style diagrams (as seen in NYC or with spider
maps from TfL in London) with tubes or trains which also use this type
of diagram. theres only so many colours so spider diags are local
before all the colours are used. Thats why the bus map (Quickmap) being
discussed here is so useful/different. Getting all london on one sheet
is mega difficult but if you've got one in your pocket it allows you to
always get off the tube (when its not working) and immediately onto a
bus going in the right sort of direction.

True - i'm talking about an improved local map, rather than a new global
map. To be honest, i think the London bus network is complicated enough
that a map of the whole thing just isn't going to be generally useful.

tom

--
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a
simple system that worked. -- Gall's Law