On Tue, 3 Jul 2007 23:50:07 +0100, "John Rowland"
wrote:

Paul Corfield wrote:

I cannot fathom TfL's
approach to bus information at all and I find the absence of decent,
high quality travel centres to be bizarre.

Unless they've closed recently, there are decent bus information centres
dotted around. Harrow bus station, Turnpike Lane bus station and North
Greenwich spring to mind. I've always found the offices at Liverpool Street,
Victoria and Euston useful. Canning Town too.

To be strictly correct they are little offices with a person stuck
behind a sheet of glass - if someone is in the office. My local bus
station - Walthamstow - is not too bad and they do have some little
racks outside the office that they stock up with the quadrant bus maps.
Plenty of people pick them up but this seems to be a local initiative.
I have yet to see anyone at the North Greenwich or Turnpike Lane offices
so therefore it's impossible to get at any of the information they may
have. Stratford sometimes has a person in the office but they prefer to
ignore you if you want something but they'll arrest you if happen to
point a camera at a bus. Harrow and Canning Town I've not been to for a
long time so cannot comment. The other places you list are TICs and
again the whole presentation of these places is unfriendly.

London has nothing on a par with the best of PTE or even bus company
practice where there is something like a shop that is well laid out with
easy to access information and an open counter area where people are not
imprisoned behind glass. I appreciate there may be legitimate security
issues at some locations but not at all of them. I've been to the West
Midlands several times over the last year and found the Centro offices
to be very good with excellent leaflet and map displays and helpful
staff. Other PTEs are also good in this respect and make a decent
effort in their new bus stations to provide such facilities.

I used to work in a Tyne and Wear PTE Travel Office many years ago and I
know how popular that facility was. We had loads of regular customers
and not just for coach and excursion tickets. People used to ask when
new timetable books and maps were being published and we would have
queues of people waiting to buy them. We often ran out of such
publications and kept having to get new stock in. I know life has moved
on a bit since those days but I remain convinced that personal service
and convenient provision of information in a wide range of forms is the
best way to communicate with your customers / passengers. "Having a
relationship with your customers" is one of the marketing buzz phrases
these days - well way back in the 1980s we had that in Tyne and Wear.

You might imagine that TfL might have decided to dedicate some space at
the LT Museum shop to provide a good quality information outlet for TfL
services but no. The shop itself is nicely done given the constraints
of the site and clearly there is a push to exploit the LT / TfL brand
for all its worth - shame it doesn't translate into the approach of
"selling" the core business of buses, tubes, DLR and trams.
--
Paul C


Admits to working for London Underground!