Transport in London is shit

Primrose Hill

yeah before i came here i walked everywhere and i don't want to give that up, but sometimes the practicality of getting places from hackney weighs down. also i am useless with directions and maps and such, so until i get smartphone and so lose the possibility of getting irredeemably lost, walking can be a bit scary.

(the google maps directions do indeed look a lot better, thanks!)

i still habitually carry an a-z around with me, seven years after moving to london (and regularly use it) (can't get maps to work on smartphones)

The first week for me consisted mostly of just a desire for a smartphone, then I learned the joy of getting lost. Now my feet just hurt, so the walks from paddington to shoreditch and back are going to have to wait (actually, it wasn't too fun overshooting my destination by 25 minutes yesterday).

I ordered an Oyster pass, so once I realize the weather isn't supposed to be like it is now, and once the weight of grad school work condenses my schedule, I'll have to learn to work around tfl.

Merdeyeux - re: TfL journey planner - have you played around with the options? The default setting is 'average' walk speed and a limit of 20 minutes walking - I always up this to half an hour and say that I walk quickly, otherwise it tends to make the journeys more complicated than they really need to be.

fiddling does make it a bit better, but still not entirely - the big one that really made me notice its faults is that it refused to point out to me the very easy overground route from my house in hackney to harringay.

while i'm talking about london i need to express this: holy shit what a bunch of cunts the old blue last has for clientele.

I have an 18+ Student Oyster Card, but when I try to put a travelcard on it on the Oyster website it tries to charge me at the regular rate. I'd call but I don't have a phone yet...

Anyone know what the deal with this is?

still never been to the old blue last

i love the palm tree

EDB - I have no idea, but if you find out can you post it here? (I'm trying to help a load of foreign students apply online for 18+ student cards)

So, when about to head out tonight I realised my oyster card had disappeared off the face of the planet, presumably dropped on a bus 2 or 3 weeks ago when I last used it. I set off moodily to the station expecting to have to fill in numerous forms, show various proofs of ID and address, and get a load of photos done. Apparently not. I got a replacement I about a minute without even giving my name.

Xpost: got a reply from tfl essentially saying "just pay at the machine, dude"
Also, I am writing this on a tfl bus. Appropriately meta.

http://citymapper.co.uk/

FUCKING HELL SO MUCH BETTER THAN THE LYING PIECE OF SHIT ON THE TFL WEBSITE

I like how they give you the prices.

It doesn't seem to understand that I might want to use the bus AND the tube

or that there are trains. Fastest time it has for my 28-min commute to work is 1h.

Looks good for short journeys, TFL Journey Planner is shit

It's ideal for Hackney, which has no Tube and barely has trains

It's certainly shit at weekends. Reduced to near fire-bombing rage yesterday and today when I'm
forced to travel beyond my walking range.

The hours of sunlight are so precious at this time of year in the Uk- and wasting time today with Victoria Line collapse which buses seem completely unprepared for.

It is virtually impossible to get a bus westward across the City nowadays, everything gets ridiculously snarled up around Cannon Street. Seriously got to the point where walking is the best way from getting from London Bridge to Holborn.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ofP0oDbML-w/TTNMdvneJSI/AAAAAAAAAGQ/nrbP4i3JSFc/s1600/walking-man-i.jpg

It’s a combination of Boris not really wanting Londoners in central London at the weekend, just rich tourists who can afford to stay at the Savoy, walk around town and attend Boris’ Big Events (you think this is bad? Wait until the Olympics, when presumably we’ll be shot if we try to venture beyond, say, Hyde Park Corner) and the underlying and insoluble problem with London transport which is that the roads are too narrow; the place was built for horse-drawn carriages and in the hugely irritating old-school Viennese style which means lots of sloping streets converging at one big junction, rather than a more sensible grid system. Short of knocking down the entire city and rebuilding from scratch, though, I don’t really see what could be done to solve the problem.

Well for one they could work on the lines at night, rather than on the weekend, which just inconveniences several thousands more.

I'm just in a bad mood after being so painfully scorned by tfl headaches yesterday.

30 minute snarl up on the way to work today thanx to some piddling little piece of nondescript roadmending. Don't know why the economy's so bad, there appear to be tens of thousands of guys working on digging up virtually every street in London.

Their excuse for not doing night work is "complaints from local residents."

They've been working on Holloway Road at night for a while, hundreds of the buggers swarming all over it.

you sure that's not the Joe Meek Appreciation Society?

I've noticed that the presence of suicidal landlady murderer Joe Meek's former studio isn't exactly advertised round here. For the first few years after I moved here the (I think it's green, from memory) plaque was obscured by a To Let sign.

You know what happens a lot here that I just can't imagine ever being acceptable anywhere, is when buses abruptly change their destination mid-journey. I'd say this happens on the 341 at least once every couple of weeks in the morning: the bus will be going to waterloo, then all of a sudden (usually around the angel, but sometimes not until holborn) it just announces that it'll terminate at the aldwych. I always get off before that anyway, but I still get indignant on behalf of the (possibly imagined) people on my bus who have been on it since Tottenham and need to actually get to waterloo. Like, why don't they just pick a fucking destination and stick to it?!

Also cosign every road being dug up everywhere, always. Or at least that's what it feels like.

although now that I've got that off my chest I feel like I should say that transport in london is still pretty fucking amazing.

in my experience, the route changes are mostly to do with drivers hours - they can't drive passengers after a certain number of hours. i once got on a bus which turned us all out *1 stop* later (and then proceeded past where i was going and onto the depot empty).

but yes, anyone who's ever lived anywhere where the buses stop at 18:00 and there are no buses at all on a sunday would never complain at london transport.

Seriously. I moved here from a city with pretty much 2 and a half subway lines (for over 3 million people).

but yes, anyone who's ever lived anywhere where the buses stop at 18:00 and there are no buses at all on a sunday would never complain at london transport.

the village up the hill from where i grew up had one bus a WEEK and i still complain about london transport's permanent guerrilla campaign to ruin people's lives

buses abruptly terminating mid-journey is one of the worst things it does. especially if it's a pretty packed bus, the one behind that everyone has to try to cram on to is also packed, and for the entire miserable experience you get to pay the overpriced fare twice

in my experience, the route changes are mostly to do with drivers hours - they can't drive passengers after a certain number of hours.

seems what the problem is, is failing to plan adequately so that drivers can actually get to the end of the route within their hours (ie including taking into account mental traffic jams which mean it takes 45 minutes to drive round holborn circus FOR EXAMPLE) (cuz in practice, that's when it most often happens - ie when all the passengers are at their most stressed/late/grumpy anyway)

Barclays bikes are definitely my favourite thing about transport in London these days. Use them all the time for quick trips into town etc, much more convenient than taking my own bike.

citymapper not so good as it doesn't have regular rail in it (only the orange lined "overground" rail)

xxxp, can you ask for a ticket from the driver if the bus terminates early or is that only if it breaks down?

> seems what the problem is, is failing to plan adequately so that drivers can actually get to the end of the route within their hours

traffic isn't that predictable though. you could err on the side of caution but that'd mean drivers getting to the depot way ahead of their shift change and the result of that's the same, a driver not driving (although it would mean the bus was free to go out again. but is the bottleneck the buses or the drivers?)

> you get to pay the overpriced fare twice

the three times this has happened to me in the 10 years i've been here, the driver's written a transfer ticket. or i've just walked the extra mile. and it's not an issue if you have a season ticket.

tbf if the driver wrote a transfer ticket for everyone who had to change bus for this reason during peak time - it would be quicker to walk

They used to do one ticket for everyone on the bus.

^^exactly. plus factor in bus drivers who ignore you if you ask for them. i've never seen anyone ask for or receive a transfer ticket at these times cuz everyone recognises that it's just more hassle at a time when you're already stressed out of your mind.

ANOTHER problem w/london transport is how british people are SO ACCEPTING of INADEQUATE SERVICE

"exactly" xp to post

um, Oyster card?

The system is never going to work because the way London is built, managing or directing traffic is pretty much ungovernable (short of extending the congestion charge boundaries to Brent Cross/Uxbridge/Croydon/Tilbury and then you'll still get BBC/Evening Standard whines about OH I HAVE TO PAY FOR PARKING MY CAR IT'S SOOOOOOO UNFAAAAAAIR). The free-for-all roadworks are a direct result of eighties Thatcher deregulation and nobody's got any teeth to do anything about it because the lobbyists will come round like moths and talk them out of it.

^^^^this. All things considered, the buses in London are a fantastic service, compared to just about any other city on earth, in my experience. The occasional terminated journey is a small price to pay. Also, despite fare increases, London buses are still very good value- compare Oxford, where a 2 mile journey can cost £2.50, or Manchester, where Oxford Rd has 4 bus companies competing for business and yet you'll still pay more than you would in London.

The Tube on the other hand is a disgrace, but that again is a legacy of Conservative deregulation, like the national rail network in microcosm.

I don't pay twice in terminating-early situations (used to happen a lot more often on the Victoria-bound 38, especially in the bendy days), I tell the driver on bus #2 that I've just been booted off the one in front and walk past. OK, back in the bendy days, this wasn't even an issue.

> SO ACCEPTING of INADEQUATE SERVICE

if the alternative is being wound up by tiny things, of minor delays "RUINING" your life, i'll take the accepting.

xpost Yes, I've never had a driver ask me to pay again in those situations. They usually know if the bus in front has terminated early, and if you say that's what happened, they'll just shrug and thumb you on. Doesn't stop the infuriating situation sometimes where the announcement that the bus is terminating is made, but the bus you're supposed to be decanting to shoots past just as you're getting off the terminator.

yeah drivers aren't deliberately making things hard for anyone, just doing what must be a difficult job at the best of times. No excuse for rudeness, but rude drivers are very much the minority.

xpost I don't know about that. While I try to maintain a zen-like calm in these situations, it's very hard not to let RAGE take hold of you. On one memorable occasion I was running down the road after a bus, with a schoolboy iirc, both of us roaring obscenities, he stopped, took off his shoe and hurled it at the back of the bus and I threw a book I was holding.

Both slightly rueful afterwards as we went and collected our belongings, but agreed it was, in his words, 'whack'.