"James Farrar" wrote in message
...

We *do* have foot messengers for small jobs to local addresses, but
that's a small minority of the work we do.

Not to mention large scale deliveries. As I was leaving work this
morning we had 50+ reams of paper turn up. How are they supposed to
deliver that without a lorry?

Get them to email it - 'paperless office' anyone...

Paul

In article ,
Paul Scott wrote:

"James Farrar" wrote in message
.. .

We *do* have foot messengers for small jobs to local addresses, but
that's a small minority of the work we do.

Not to mention large scale deliveries. As I was leaving work this
morning we had 50+ reams of paper turn up. How are they supposed to
deliver that without a lorry?

Get them to email it - 'paperless office' anyone...

Just feed 50 reams of blank paper into the scanner, email it, and it
comes out the other end !

Nick
--
http://www.leverton.org/ ... So express yourself

Dave A wrote:

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.

I (still) hate the spider maps.

I'd like bus shelters to bear accurate mathematically distorted geographical
maps, where, for instance, distance from the centre of the map is
proportional to the square root of the actual distance on the ground, and
any super-long routes have an arrow at the edge of the map listing further
destinations. Each group of routes which serve the same local stops would be
shown as a single coloured line, which then branches into the different
routes towards the edge of the map.... this would be similar to the way that
the tube map on the wall at Holborn shows you instantly that there are four
platforms for four types of journey, and only by examining the edges of the
map do you realise that there are multiple destanations from three of the
four platforms. Routes which zigzag around crossing and recrossing other
routes from the same stop would have to be given their own coloured line to
prevent confusion.

On Feb 20, 2:40 pm, "John Rowland"
wrote:
I'd like bus shelters to bear accurate mathematically distorted geographical
maps, where, for instance, distance from the centre of the map is
proportional to the square root of the actual distance on the ground, and
any super-long routes have an arrow at the edge of the map listing further
destinations.

How do you handle the case where two bus routes share the same stretch
of road, diverge, and then rejoin at another point? These need to
intersect on the map, but both the mileage on the ground, and the time
taken to get there will differ.

--
Abi

In message , Nick Leverton
writes
Just feed 50 reams of blank paper into the scanner, email it, and it
comes out the other end !
The problem here is that Doug might take you seriously, I know he picks
up on snippets he know nothing about, I've made up one or two myself and
he's bitten and "quoted me" pretending it was a thought of his own.
--
Clive.

Clive Coleman. wrote:
In message , Nick Leverton
writes
Just feed 50 reams of blank paper into the scanner, email it, and it
comes out the other end !

The problem here is that Doug might take you seriously, I know he
picks up on snippets he know nothing about, I've made up one or two
myself and he's bitten and "quoted me" pretending it was a thought of
his own.

No Doug in this group AFAIK... I would rather this little paradise were not
infested by the news:uk.transport custom of ensuring that every thread is
either started by Doug or has his name in the subject line.

In article ,
Clive Coleman. wrote:
In message , Nick Leverton
writes
Just feed 50 reams of blank paper into the scanner, email it, and it
comes out the other end !
The problem here is that Doug might take you seriously, I know he picks
up on snippets he know nothing about, I've made up one or two myself and
he's bitten and "quoted me" pretending it was a thought of his own.

I'm not actually sure why this is a problem ;-)

Nick
--
http://www.leverton.org/ ... So express yourself

On Mon, 19 Feb 2007 23:57:05 -0500, David of Broadway
wrote:

Paul Terry wrote:
In message , David of Broadway
writes

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

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.

While I agree in principle, it would simply not be possible in central
London where there can be as many 15 routes (plus night buses) passing
along one street. Either the map would have to be enormous, or there
would have to be considerable topographical distortion to fit in the
number of differently coloured lines. The alternative is the style of
the quadrant maps which you say (and I agree) are not all that clear.

True. I was neglecting what might be termed the Oxford Street factor.
We don't have anything close to that in NYC.

I'd still be interested in seeing a London bus map in NYC style, but as
a practical matter it would probably be a dismal failure for this
reason. Oh well.

I think Oxford Street, Regent St and Park Lane would obliterate the rest
of Zone 1 on the map!

Interesting points.

If I might suggest some additional (though related) reasons:

Although London's rail network has pretty wide coverage, it has limited
capacity in comparison to NYC's. Our trains are wider and longer and
most of our major trunk lines (and some of the minor ones, too) have
four tracks. Given how crowded our trains get, if we had to give up our
express tracks and shorten and narrow the trains, the buses would become
a lot more popular, by necessity.

I'm a tad taken aback by your comments on the relative capacities of
London's rail network vs NYC's. Now I'm certainly not an expert on your
subway or rail network but surely your rail network (not subway) is but
a mere shadow of London's?

From memory PATH is only twin bore into both WTC (as was) and 33rd
Street. Metro North is twin bore into Grand Central or is that 4 tracks?

I think that LIRR and NJT into Penn Station is 4 tracks under the river.
Now OK some of your trains are pretty long but overall frequencies and
distances covered are nothing like the density of service that we have
on networks like Southern, South West Trains or One from Liverpool
Street. I've observed Grand Central and Penn Stations in the rush hour
and certainly large volumes of people are shifted but it didn't feel on
the same scale as London's main line networks.

I confess I don't know how many people are carried on LIRR lines that
terminate in Queens and Brooklyn.

On the subway you do have much longer and bigger profile (than our tube
stock) trains and the benefit of express lines. In my (albeit limited)
experience of the NYC rush hour you get pretty high frequencies on
common sections of route served by multiple services but if you want a
particular letter / number then frequency drops noticeably compared to
almost all of London's tube service pattern.

I'm interested to get your feedback on what I've not noticed about NYC's
trains compared to ours here in London.

Fully accept the point that if the subways weren't there then people
would need to use the bus system.

Also, most NYC neighborhoods not near the subway developed in the
automotive age. Most people in those neighborhoods use their cars for
all of their trips except into Manhattan. In those neighborhoods, the
only major demand for bus service is to the nearest subway station.
(And to nearby schools.) From what I've read here, London has a lot of
local travel by bus outside the central area.

I think we're sort of back with history here in that the rail and subway
networks are typically strongly radial links with little local traffic
(relative to flows into the centre) and virtually nothing offered for
orbital flows. Buses have always had a strong purpose given those gaps
in the rail network.

In older times when we had less congestion many bus routes were very
much longer than today and lengthy radial journeys were also possible
into the suburbs or across the central area. Sadly this is now
relatively rare with few radial routes stretching from Zone 1 to beyond
Zone 2. There are more longer radial routes in South London that North
of the river - probably reflecting the influence of the tube network
north of the Thames.
--
Paul C


Admits to working for London Underground!

On Tue, 20 Feb 2007 00:17:18 -0500, David of Broadway
wrote:

Paul Corfield wrote:

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".

True. It seems like London is very much organized around specific
points of interest, while New York is organized around streets and
overall directions.

I'm not sure London is particularly "organised" - it just "is"! I
think far more thought was given to the layout and development of New
York. Don't know which I like best though.

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.

I'm impressed with your knowledge of our bus system!

Well I do like to use the public transport network in a city -
especially when it is both similar and yet radically different to the
one I use everyday.

I also like to study maps which is partly why I have some understanding
of the bus system in the 5 boroughs and the limited links between them -
another interesting factor which is not really noticeable in London.

But the same goes for our bus stop maps. We don't have systemwide (or
borough) maps at the bus stops; we just have individual route maps.
Except that yours are easier to read. (Yours are also customized for
the bus stop, while ours cover the entire route.)

I hate our stop specific info panels - they are next to useless and in
some cases utterly untruthful. The one at my local stop is most
certainly incorrect for early mornings - one time when you need it to be
right if you are not to stand waiting for a very long time.

We no longer have area maps at our stops. We have bloody stupid and
unhelpful spider maps that tell you very little.

Each bus stop in the city has a four-sided Guide-a-Ride box. If only
one route stops there, one panel has the map, one panel has the
timetable, one panel covers general information, and one panel has a NO
STANDING sign. If two routes stop there, both maps and both timetables
are posted. If three routes stop there, typically only one timetable is
posted -- invariably /not/ the timetable for the least frequent route
(i.e., the one whose timetable would be most useful). If four routes
stop there, forget about timetables. I can't think of any single bus
stops shared by five or more routes (typically they'd have staggered
stops in such a situation).

Something tells me people have not really thought your bus stop
information provision through correctly. TfL's can be variable but
you'll usually have all the route information available at the stop.

Keep in mind that NJT does not publish an overall bus map. For most
routes, the "approximate geographic representation" is all there is.
And, in my experience, it's completely useless.

I was unaware that there was not a system bus map. I consider such
things to be essential.

For instance, look at the map for the 319:
http://www.njtransit.com/pdf/bus/T0319.pdf

It certainly looks to me like there is a simple transfer between the
train and the bus in Atlantic City. Nope! The train station and the
bus station are several blocks apart, not signposted. Although the bus
passes closer to the train station, the only stop it makes in Atlantic
City is at the bus station itself.

Which is somewhat crazy.

I will say, most transit agencies in the U.S. do post detailed
timetables. If anything, New York City Transit is the exception; on
many of the more frequent routes, notations like "Then every 6-8 minutes
until" are common.

Well we get marvellous things like that. Even when buses are every 12
minutes we get "buses every 12 minutes" - have a look at this for
unhelpful.

http://journeyplanner.tfl.gov.uk/use...__00001fda.pdf

Now tell me what time a 34 leaves at about 10.00 on a Sunday morning or
in fact what time it leaves at any time other than 0541, 0556, 0009,
0021, 0033, 0045 or 0057!

--
Paul C


Admits to working for London Underground!

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.

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!- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Tom writes ......

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. 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.

Steve