ATTENTION ILX LONDON BUS/TRANSPORT GEEKS: request for input/help!

have all the bus geeks gone home?

aw, you guys, you seem to love talking bus routes so!

Even Smoke has got in on the act of bendybusbanning.

Will go fill out your form now.

must....remember.....to......post threads .....about uk.....within.....office hours......

NO, NO, NO, DON'T START THE BENDY BUS WARS AGAIN!!! Have you seen what they do to the traffic in Central London?

How else can I share my love of Spider Maps and Countdown (and my dislike of bus maps and timetables)? And make my suggestion for the crazy and wacky idea that routes of bus maps should also be shown ON THE BUS ITSELF?

Rollercoaster canals! And subterranean trams under Oxford Street! When I was Queen, I made Eoarl Clerkenwell, oops, I mean Ed, Minister of Transport.

1) A lot of your questions have binary yes/no answers and should be presented with tick boxes/radio buttons
2) Several of your questions would be well served by likert scales.
3) you should ask the same question from different angles to clarify how people are responing; eg.:

If there is a interchange diagram, showing positions of bus stops, how easy to is it work out where you should go to catch your bus?

Not Easy at All, Moderately Easy, Easy, Quite Easy, Very Easy

How difficult do you find the interchange diagram to understand?

Not difficult at all, Moderately difficult, Difficult, Quite difficult, Very difficult

I've filled it in nonetheless.

Are you in town? drink next week?

you are my arch nemesis!

1) precisely the reason why i made the questionnaire like that was becuase the question you might assume to be binary, eg "are you a regular bus user", are not always!
2) i assume a likert scale is the one where someone draws a mrk and ou measure it off, and then can declare that such a person is 66% in agreement with such and such a statement. my tutor is going to force me to do this, but i will resist as long as i can. my argument is surveys that yield have quantitative values for subjective responses are no more useful than a series of comments. they only serve to ease the processing of data, and to "ensure" that the survey is staistically significant. As i am of the opinion that statisitics is utter, utter bollocks, i am not keen for such a philosophy to be reflected in my survey. I dont believe that a result such as "34% of respondents said they "strongly agreed" with the statement, "spider maps are difficult to read" doesnt really tell you anything at all. it doesnt tell you why they think they are difficult to read, in what circumstances they are difficult to read, or what would be better. when people answer such questions, which are supposed to be fairly definitive, i dont belive they are really thinking "do i strongly agree, or just agree?", they will just put anything. I fell that those involved in survey design think that the findings such surveys produce reveal something, or prover a theory they have, but personally i feel that they add nothing at all. i am far more interesed in collating a range of opinions, suggestions and thoughts about bus information, than this.

but dont understand sciene or maths, so thats why.

and eventually ill just have to do whatever my supervisors tell me.

just listened to radio 4's "in touch" programme for disabled listeners, there was a report on the 149 bus route that now has spoken bus stop announcements and something on the "screen" coming up saying the name of the bus stop.

a) has anyone seen this?
b) does it get v irritating after a while?
c) what screens? those tvs?
d) your impressions? could you imagien this being rolled out across the bus fleet?

This doesn't really answer your question in any way, but I just thought I'd mention it.

I like this thread.

its pretty deopressing how much weffort is put into something like that wioth so little output, or effect in the real world.

so, ken, does it not get irritating seeing as bus stops are relatively frequent?

if i were to design a system here i'd do the same, and the little LED display can change to show the next stop.

It's part of the whole depersonalised bendy bus thing (149 not RV1, obviously). What was wrong with having a chirpy conductor who'd shout out the major stops? (Oh yes, you had to pay him/her.)

No screens though. But I have an easy enough time ignoring those screens when they're showing Michael Palin in the desert, or whatever.

I'm saying, I'm all for it. I'm sorry (and perplexed) I missed Ambrose's questionnaire first time round though, notwithstanding Ed's critique.

Greetings all! Reviving this with a random but hopefully interesting question:

A friend here in the US is wondering about the easy availability -- or any availability -- of a particular kind of rear view mirror used on London buses, apparently. He included some reference photos:

https://scontent-b-sjc.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn2/v/1454472_10151733578231643_1401193862_n.jpg

Said friend has a Doctor Who bent, and the desire for the mirror is to create an appropriate costume, thus:

https://scontent-b-sjc.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn2/v/1464956_10151733578356643_452762939_n.jpg

So, just throwing it out there!

Bah, I just noticed the links don't work, so my apologies there. But if this rings a bell at all for anyone, let me know -- thanks!

For most of the past 50 years London buses were Routemasters, so you'd be after one of their mirrors I suppose. The buses have almost all been sold off, but they are much loved and I doubt scrap parts will be easy to get hold of.

was going to, and still might, xpost this to Transport in London is shit thread. but this one seems ideal.

if i wanted to, say, go on the docklands light railway (because i never have) on the cheap how much of it could i do on a single ticket? i reckon i could go to the 'end' and back and nobody would really know. ok, it'd look like it had taken me an hour to go one or two stops but otherwise... secondary question, are there any nice bits of the DLR?

same trick would work on normal tube too i guess. going from, say, w12 to w1 via wembley...

TIL there is a maximum journey time: https://tfl.gov.uk/fares/how-to-pay-and-where-to-buy-tickets-and-oyster/pay-as-you-go/keep-within-maximum-journey-times

How much you can do on a 'single ticket' (assuming here you mean one tap in with Oyster or bank card and not like a literal paper ticket if they even still sell those) mostly depends on your appetite for light financial risk. The risks are a) that you get ticket inspected on an incongruous part of the journey (like you tapped in at Shadwell but you are travelling back towards Shadwell without having tapped out somewhere) and b) that if you go a long time between touching in/out at a single station (e.g. start and end the journey at Shadwell) TfL's autofare system will get confused about your journey and charge you default max daily fare. Having said that, I have no idea if ticket inspectors are able to tell which specific station you tapped in at, or if their readers just say 'did this person tap in somewhere y/n'.

Unless you're keen to visit Woolwich in zone 4, DLR is all max zone 3, so you'd be capped at what, like 8.60 pounds for a whole day of travel?

Nice and/or interesting bits:

- Cutty Sark
- City Hall and docklands 'beach'
- Custom House/ExCeL is not particularly interesting imo but there's an elevated footbridge you can reach from there, which will take you from the north to south side of the docks, with great views to see the sheer scale of them, as well as views of some typical docklands-style 80s residential architecture and Millennium Mills
- Thames Barrier Park is neat and it's overlooked by a wonderful cruise ship-like block of flats - that's near Pontoon Dock
- The journey from Canning Town to London City Airport is interesting for the scale of development that's happend in the last decade. Think you can also still see the Tate & Lyle factory from the tracks. Note there's more new build resi on the Beckton arm but much of it is very windswept; not sure there's much point in going beyond Custom House on that side, and certainly not as far as Beckton unless you like retail parks.
- Bits along Isle of Dogs are interesting for some more of the 80s docklands architecture and public realm - South Quay to Mudchute-ish, plus Mudchute Farm if that's your thing
- Poplar has some post-war architecture and Chrisp Street market, apparently the UK's first purpose-built pedestrian shopping area

It's worth scaling Beckton Alp at least once. Actually I haven't done that for so long now perhaps you can't even see the Gherkin anymore.

given i have to go to leytonstone next saturday anyway i think i might just take the scenic route back via stratford and greenwich or the docks and then back onto normal tube at bank and home. i don't need to get off anywhere, really. might just see what turns up first at straford!

do the DLR station have Labyrinth plaques or were they limimted to 270 tube stations?

> TIL there is a maximum journey time

time was when you could sit on the circle line for an entire day

Agree with all of the above from salsa shark.

If you're going to Leytonstone for the reasons I think you may be, I'm sad to say I'll miss you - I'm covering the repeat show in Faversham the next day.

(faversham was announced first and i looked into going but it wasn't cheap or easy from here...)

today's trip, shepbu market into town via, potentially, wembley. Queens park 40 minutes in...

South Kenton just on the hour, heading back in now. didn't see what i wanted...

checked out at Paddington at 1h29m. will hang around the platform for 15 minutes or so before continuing.

Paddington mainline was locked down, problem in Reading. got the bus into Paddington and walked from there.

my card has been charged a penny so far - my bank texts me every time i use it. i guess i will know tonight.

anyway the point of all this was trainspotting - people i follow on Twitter are always going on about this and that but everything that was around when i was a kid is now heritage with the exception of 37s and 08s. and there were meant to be some 08s in wembley area. only you can't see wembley depot from the tube. kenton was interesting though because there are 6 lines there - two for tube and overground and 4 for the mainline trains. Paddington was all GWR hitachi 800s

Ah, the magic of the old locos. Supposedly some still in use for passenger service out of Marylebone? But all you tend to see are 59s and 66s on freight duty (far too modern) or, very rarely, a 1960s 73 (that can run off third-rail power). I blame the 17yo for this late middle-age rail revivalism.

hilariously there are also a couple of 43s, hst power cars, on freight duty as well. seems wrong. (the rest apparently sold to mexico)

Cheltenham and the GWSR good for heritage diesel it turns out. and Loughborough figures highly - the Brush factory by the railway station was quite important. (was born in the former, uni in the latter)

£7.35, two tubes and a bus

ok, so on the way back from leytonstone i drove the DLR from Stratford to Canary wharf, which was short but sweet, much more up and down than usual trains and a surprisingly tight 270 into CW. then a really clumsy transfer from there to Elizabeth line (like through one shipping centre over the road to a different, largely empty shipping centre, down two floors, much of it not signposted) and from there to Paddington and another clumsy, entire-length-of-the-station transfer to H&C and to wood lane for Westfield for stamps and the new Wire.

DLR surprisingly empty but i guess a lot of that part of the world is empty at weekends, or does it just not go to the right places?

(say hi to Robin and Antony tomorrow if you get the chance, Mike. just mention mbv at Leicester Poly and you'll be fine...)

that DLR route seemed to be part industrial estates, part building site around CW, but there was like 100m where none of that was visible and instead it seemed to be brought modern train pootling through a woodland glade. i need to go back and do it properly.