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

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 have never been to New York or looked at their timetables, but I'd imagine
the difference between the cities is not one of philosophy but one of
frequency. If you're going to run 6 buses per hour down each major road, you
follow the NY model of running a single 6bph route down each road and let
people change at the junctions. If you're going to run 120 bph down each
major road, you run ten different 12bph routes down each road, with each
route going different ways at each junction so few people have to change.

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.

Except in Havering, Croydon, Harrow, Bromley and Waltham Forest, which have
reasonably self-contained bus networks.

Keep in mind that NJT does not publish an overall bus map.

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

Sheffield didn't have one when I lived there in 1993.

wrote:
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?

You either give them different colours, or you show them as separating and
converging like the Northern Line - whichever makes the map easier to
understand (which would depend on what else was going on in the map).

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.

On further inspection, it looks like I was lying my face off. The figure
I quoted is for all bus journeys in Great Britain. In London, it looks
like the figure is nearer 20%, which surprises me.

Source: TfL Interchange Plan (2002), Para 2.19 (primary source was
London Transport Planning in 1997)
http://cache.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/pdfdocs/inter_improve.pdf

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!

Perhaps it would be better to limit it to important destinations which
are reachable by bus within a practical time frame - say an hour
(average journey time to work for those travelling by bus is 39 mins
across London; 47 mins in central London). For example, from Notting
Hill Gate there are 10 daytime bus routes covering most destinations
reachable within an hour by bus from there, except a few which could be
noted in the way you suggest - e.g. Clapham Junction, Barnes, Holborn.


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

Paul Corfield wrote:

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?

By "rail network" he must mean only LU vs. NYCT. National Rail in the
southeast would surely dwarf LIRR+MNR+PATH.

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.

Hmmm, does it really compare that poorly with waiting for a train to,
say, a particular branch of the District line?
--
Michael Hoffman

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

I really like the spider maps, and find them incredibly useful when
trying to figure out if I can get somewhere I want to go from a nearby
bus stop. For an occasional user of a particular stop they are fantastic.

[David of Broadway]
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.

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

New Jersey is 14.3 times larger than Greater London in area. That'd be
one hell of a map. Of course maps of smaller areas would be useful.
--
Michael Hoffman

On Tue, 20 Feb 2007 23:13:13 +0000, Dave A wrote:

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.

On further inspection, it looks like I was lying my face off. The figure
I quoted is for all bus journeys in Great Britain. In London, it looks
like the figure is nearer 20%, which surprises me.

Source: TfL Interchange Plan (2002), Para 2.19 (primary source was
London Transport Planning in 1997)
http://cache.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/pdfdocs/inter_improve.pdf

Thanks for owning up ;-)

In my own experience I have to change buses quite a lot to make any
number of even quite local journeys. It is impossible for me to reach
the central area from where I live without changing buses - admittedly
only one change gets me onto a good spread of radial routes into zone 1.

My observations would also suggest that substantial volumes of people do
change buses in order to make their journeys despite the relative
richness of London's bus network. The easy availability of capped bus
fares via Oyster PAYG may inadvertently encourage this trend as would
the introduction of transfer tickets offering discounts. One simple
example of the extent of transfer between services is somewhere like
Silver St in Edmonton. Large numbers of people get off route 34 (east -
west) to change onto north-south routes at this point. This pattern is
repeated all over London. I'm actually surprised the figure is as low
as 20%.

Perhaps it would be better to limit it to important destinations which
are reachable by bus within a practical time frame - say an hour
(average journey time to work for those travelling by bus is 39 mins
across London; 47 mins in central London). For example, from Notting
Hill Gate there are 10 daytime bus routes covering most destinations
reachable within an hour by bus from there, except a few which could be
noted in the way you suggest - e.g. Clapham Junction, Barnes, Holborn.

The problem with your suggestion is that it relies on various parameters
that have different meanings to people. What is an "important
destination"? The destination for each individual passenger is
"important" to them and an awful lot of maps will not show such places -
especially if a change of bus is needed.

What is a practical time frame? - this must vary depending on whether
you are time rich or time poor as well as the activity that you will do
when you complete your journey. Finally a time based parameter will
unravel given the variability in journey times over the operating day
and it again does not deal with peoples' willingness to travel for a
long period by bus if overall they consider the bus to the best mode for
them given other factors like affordability.

I sometimes travel by bus even though "logic" would dictate that the
tube or a train would be more "sensible".
--
Paul C


Admits to working for London Underground!

Michael Hoffman wrote:

[David of Broadway]
Keep in mind that NJT does not publish an overall bus map.

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

New Jersey is 14.3 times larger than Greater London in area. That'd be
one hell of a map.

In the 1970s National Buses used to publish a bus map of England and Wales
on a single sheet. It showed all the routes operated by London Country,
Crosville, Potteries Motor Traction etc. It might have omitted town
services.

On Tue, 20 Feb 2007 09:21:58 +0000, Tom Anderson
wrote:

What's the typical deliver size? Or rather, what weight would you say 80%
of deliveries are smaller than or equal to? Would it be small enough to do
by bike (using a freight bike of some sort, rather than a courier's
panniers)?

Most jobs go in (as a minimum) an A4 box (i.e. a box that would
contain five reams of A4 80gsm.

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?

I assume you get your paper in quite big sheets - 50 reams of A4 at 80 gsm
is 125 kg, doable on a trike or 8-freight or something. If it's A0,
though, that's two tonnes, which i would certainly agree requires motor
power!

Actually, I got that wrong. It was 20 boxes of A4 which is 100 reams.
Plus some A3 and other stuff.

A0 paper comes in rolls - 200m long, works out to maybe 10cm across at
a guess. 24 rolls on a pallet.

On Tue, 20 Feb 2007 11:28:32 -0000, "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...

Lots is, though that's not much use for hard copy, not to mention
proofs!

On Wed, 21 Feb 2007 02:01:34 -0000, "John Rowland"
wrote:

Michael Hoffman wrote:

[David of Broadway]
Keep in mind that NJT does not publish an overall bus map.

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

New Jersey is 14.3 times larger than Greater London in area. That'd be
one hell of a map.

In the 1970s National Buses used to publish a bus map of England and Wales
on a single sheet. It showed all the routes operated by London Country,
Crosville, Potteries Motor Traction etc. It might have omitted town
services.

And more recently when Southern Vectis published the Great British Bus
Timetable that included a national map of bus services and for National
Express coaches.

I wish they would bring that book back but they probably never will.
--
Paul C


Admits to working for London Underground!