Transport in London is shit

Anyone else seen how many 'new Routemasters' Boris is planning to replace London's 83 bendy buses with?

Five...

hackney podcast all about buses -

http://hackneypodcast.co.uk/2010/02/edition-17-buses/

Getting any bus at all up Kingsland Road is pretty much the worst public transport experience you can have in London so I am overjoyed about this.

Any line running from New Cross to Dalston via Shoreditch is going to reach hipster critical mass very soon.

It basically puts my best friend on tap. Capital work, London

Getting any bus at all up Kingsland Road is pretty much the worst public transport experience you can have in London

this is a nonsense, as there are so many buses. only had one horrendous experience with it since i moved back to Hackney borough.

The number of buses isn't the issue, it's the appalling traffic and the inevitable bottleneck. I don't think I've ever got a bus up Kingsland Road that hasn't slowed to a crawl not long after the Geffrye Museum.

I do it every day and that's a pretty rare occurrence

i have always maintained that the worst public transport experience you can have in London is taking the No. 30 anywhere

i have never even attempted taking a bus up the Kingsland Road because i bike up it in MY FIXIE of course*

*i do not have a fixie

This line is good for me. I was touting this as the hipster line at the weekend. It's not running at the weekends till later on in May though says Tfl.

i don't even know what a fixie is

i actually have ridden up kingsland road on a fixie.

And in May all you Nathan Barley types can come down to Crystal Palace and get yr heads duffed in.

Mayor of London fails to invite Mayor of Hackney to opening do

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQqmJUFVi1A

This would be a lot more useful if it tied in with a single big City station... although maybe the novelty is that it doesn't.

Selfishly, I'd get a lot more use out of a route from Hackney Central to NW London that didn't divert through bloody Stamford Hill or Fins Park...

(A bus, that is.)

More bus routes from NE London to N/NW London in general would be nice. I usually end up having to go into the centre somewhere and then back out again, like on the tube. I'm really talking about nightbuses tbh, I just get the tube most of the time if it's running.

That's what the Overground's for, surely. Shame it's not running until 2011, or so I've heard.

Overground closes not much later than the tube though. And is mostly only just outside the centre anyway

The new Shoreditch station is close enough to the City really, it's only a 5min walk to Liverpool street.

http://bnb.bpweb.net/londonoverground/

This will be amazing when it's finally functioning.

Would be very impressed if someone could now make a map with the Tube inside the concentric circles of the Overground, adhering to the 45deg angles of the Beck design.

also a map showing where the trains are updating realtime. i found a map for the Copenhagen metro which does this but it's almost certainly just based on the timetable rather than live.

Always loved the Brussels metro signs which have bulbs showing where each train is on each line serving your platform.

The trains' positions are already known and indicated on the "Arriving in (x) minutes" boards on the platforms, so I can't see how it would be hard to do.

Horrible new logo:

http://www.mayorwatch.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/cycle-hire-logo.png

Boris Johnson today announced he had sold the naming rights to his new London cycle hire scheme for £25 million.

Barclays Bank, which already sponsors the football Premier League, has agreed to pay the sum in a five-year deal that will see its branding used on the Mayor's 12 “cycle super highways” being created across the capital.

The bike scheme, which will be known as Barclays Cycle Hire, will launch on July 30 in central London. All 6,000 bikes will carry the Barclays logo.

the new east london line is fucked still

Yes, I'm hearing tales of unreliability, misannounced platforms, cancellations. But I think the novelty of getting to Brick Lane/Docklands/Hoxton in under 40min from Palace (and the fact that Oyster PAYG into Z1 from down here in SE19 is actually a quid cheaper via the ELL (changing at Canada Water or Whitechapel) than the old method of Southern into London Bridge) is outweighing the teething troubles at the mo'.

lol king's cross has a platform 0

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4031/4695003549_bd3547e3e3.jpg

Work at the station has recently uncovered these amazing advertising posters in non-public areas and that date from c1956 - 1959 when the station's lifts were removed and replaced by escalators. These are in an old lift passageway.

ELL train runs through its entire announcement vocabulary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct9COwWu69k

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

"The beast and his armies will rise from the pit to make war with God"

Really is shit today...Getting from Queensway to south London was a nightmare.

Transport for London has announced that it's lifting all restrictions on the commercial use of its data. The move could fuel an explosion in mobile apps that need access to the datasets, making them more attractive to developers who want to charge for their apps.

ELL train runs through its entire announcement vocabulary:

I tip my hat to the female voice artist - flawlessly consistent for every one of her recorded takes!

Work at the station has recently uncovered these amazing advertising posters in non-public areas

They're wonderful. A couple of years ago I snapped some late-'80s/early-'90s posters that were uncovered during a refurb at Oxford Circus, but nothing as good as the stuff linked to above...

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/149/370309428_88b1516794.jpg

still think they should have some MANnouncers on the trains (and buses) sometimes

Stations tend to have male voices don't they? Seem to recall somewhere between Holborn and Piccadilly Circus on the Picc Line having the station PA shouting all over the woman on the train. Would be good to go Barcelona-style and have them share sentences.

IIRC they use male for platform announcement and female for train so blind people can tell what is making the announcement. Similar in New York I think.

was there the other weekend, wasn't as sensible as that - train announcements were '(HIM) The next station is (HER) sagrada familia!'

in barcelona that is

I like that. Maybe one day he'll snap at her interruptions.

"Please move down inside the bus" drives me mad.

esp when the driver starts hammering on it 50 times in a row when the bus is already rammed and nobody can actually move

also, Croydon tram has a mannouncer

Really hate the "don't stand on the stairs one", 'cos people just ignore it, so the driver just carries on pressing it - why not just use the PA to tell them off? That used to work pretty well.

Yeah people might actually respond to a driver's instruction/request more than Robot Woman. But then you might have to pay them the same as tube drivers idk.

Nice, if effectively useless: http://traintimes.org.uk/map/tube/

I would actually pay money for 1x app to do that for the buses.

it's only a guess though - takes start times and journey times and linearly interpolates. doesn't allow any time for stopping at stations either.

Oh, in that case, boo.

Presumably a bus tracker which accesses the (admittedly dodgy) information you see on the dot matrices at some bus stops would be possible? I've no idea whether that would work, but I would adore something like this: http://www.ctabustracker.com/bustime/map/displaymap.jsp

I thought NYC had male recordings on the train.. In a big cheerful midwestern accent no less - "Stand clear of the closing doors, please!"