Transport in London is shit

if(MARK)
‏@MarkChutney

My favourite #Bowie track is This Town Isn't Big Enough for the Both of Us

So this is a sort of clueless hipster Barry Shitpeas perhaps?

woah, imagine being that guy, and spending moments of your painfully finite life trolling people so ineptly and pointlessly

East London equality!

Coffee, gin, East London, equality!

Is Sadiq Khan's bus driver dad still alive? Needs to take his boy home and ground him for his bullshit rn.

so it seems if you are fighting for better working conditions in London or against your own gentrification then mayoral candidates Zac Khan or Amir Goldsmith are both useless fuckers.

...

Khan previously made it quite clear (i think actually 80 times) that getting into power is all that matters, so you can erm.. make a difference or something.

seems unfair to expect a boxer to have much effect on London transport tbf

unfair tbf

lol! I mean Sadiq of course but Amir might even do a better job

Sadiq Khan is at least trying to hold talks! Other mayors in recent memory refused to do this.

The way he shills for affordable housing is exactly what Zac would have done imo

Wouldn't trust Sadiq Khan as far as I could throw him tbh.

He's a little lad tbf

Walked in... Did notice that some of those new to walking and cycling in London could do with basic training.

@PeterTatchell
I support rail workers but strikes hurt commuters, whereas opening barriers & allowing passengers to travel free would hurt rail bosses

Tatch one of many calling for rail workers to actually break the law as opposed to simply taking conventional industrial action.

Relieved this is over. I walk to work anyway, but the guy I share an office with kept yelling TUBESTRIKE! in a put-on scottish accent and hitting me on the arm. It was starting to hurt.

Ticket revenue from Southern goes to the government, not the rail management company. idk what the point would be when the vast majority of people have already paid for their weekly/monthly/annual tickets. Not sure how it works for TfL.

The weekend disruptions email seems to now be missing the single most useful feature - the map of tube closures. Maybe the bloke who does them is still on holiday.

(There's usually one when you get to the station but that might be too late. And goldhawk road station always has the map the other side of the barriers, which is idiocy iyam)

I think Diamond Geezer covered this on his blog on 5 Jan.

Th map is also disappearing from the station posters as well. He quoted part of an internal TfL document:

"Over the past year, we have been continuously working with research agency 2CV to better understand what customers think about the posters on our whiteboards. From now, the posters on our station whiteboards will have fewer words, more colour, more graphics and simpler information, with the most important information shown first. This is so that our posters stand out and quickly communicate what is most important. For example, the weekly closures poster will no longer contain a Tube map as over 90% of customers surveyed said they found it confusing rather than helpful."

"The research also highlighted the ways in which our staff play a vital role in getting messages across and how we can make their jobs easier. During the consultations, staff said that they found the new posters were clearer, stood out better and helped them direct customers better during closures."

"All of the changes are supported by trials with customers and staff at Liverpool Street, Brixton and King’s Cross St. Pancras stations."

I highly recommend reading his entry for Jan 10 - http://diamondgeezer.blogspot.co.uk/ (no direct link afaict)

The problem I have is when the words say something like the central line is closed between x and y and neither x nor y is on my usual route. So is my trip ok or not? One glance at the map will tell me.

They have ruined london by doing this.

Apparently there is snow in the South East of England so it is now officially a national crisis/disaster/calamity, expect questions in Parliament, wall-to-wall media coverage etc etc.

i think i mentioned elsewhere that rush-hour Underground was terrifying to me; hats off

did it twice a day for 10 years

> (no direct link afaict)

click on the time posted. the hover text says 'permalink'.
http://diamondgeezer.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/express-tube.html

There is a link to a map in this week's email, albeit in the text not at the top.

However, clicking on this link on my phone (eventually) shows the required map but doesn't let me see more than the top left corner of it. I can zoom in and scroll, but not beyond the top left. Is this the same for everyone? It's not particularly useful...

Worth keeping an eye on:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/28/uber-v-tfl-court-hears-written-english-test-will-cost-33000-driver-jobs

Not a fan of Uber but this looks like a completely unnecessary law designed simply to inconvenience minicab firms at the behest of the taxi lobby.

that is idiotic, unpleasant and unnecessary. i took a black cab the other and the driver was a gobby anti-everyone "guvmint shd do something about it" card, uber later on, driven by an intermittently comprehensible but charming senegalese, who told me, i think, about how his dad can't really go out all that much any more because he's losing his marbles a bit and who had studied engineering.

one thing they shd do is apply congestion charge to uber which wd level the playing field a bit, plus perhaps help with the fact i think there are something like 28,000 additional PHVs on the road since 2008. don't quote me before i dig up the stat.

"charming senegalese" f'ing hell i'll just take my pith helmet off.

Holy shit do they sting you if you forget your wallet & have to pay with (borrowed) cash.

Yes. Discovered this the other month when I went over my overdraft for a day. OUCH.

thought i'd lost my wallet for a panicky half-hour last year and it was so expensive i was going to have to walk from holborn to clapton. found wallet in duffel bag shortly after.

I have to be honest and say that I don't exactly know what my daily commute costs when I touch through on my card (this might be why I occasionally tumble over my overdraft), but fuck me is a one day travelcard ridiculously expensive now.

Ding dong the bridge is dead:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-40921373

fuckin finally

We are continuously updating our map database... #gardenbridge pic.twitter.com/aO73FbhJeQ

— A-Z Digital Mapping (@AZdigitalmaps) August 14, 2017

typically exhaustive and fascinating piece at london reconnections about upgrading holborn underground station's capacity.

nothing like large infrastructure project timetables for making you feel mortal either.

http://buzzsteam.com/2018/03/04/southeastern-commuter-train-stuck-at-lewisham/

Jesus fucking Christ, that is hellish.

As soon as it is known that the train is likely to be stranded for a considerable time (> 30 minutes), efforts should be made to identify any particularly vulnerable passengers.

buried in the middle of an official guidance pdf linked from that site but also hardly rocket science, fuckers.

Bit of fucking rain and I'm stranded in Tonbridge waiting for a taxi. Good thing I don't have work tomorrow oh wait

^ got my delay repay declined for this, assumed because I got the departure wrong by one minute, phoned up to try and fix it and the operator said normally they check 5 minutes either side, I said well they obviously haven't this time, and he denied the existence of the train I got, said it's not on his computer. It's listed on southeasternrailway.co.uk at the time I told him. How are you meant to argue with that? I guess it's an effective way to get around paying compensation if you just deny any trains exist, which given it's Southeastern railway, is I suppose quite believable.

Can we please nationalise these cunts

typically excellent London Reconnections article on Crossrail delays.

Some key points

• Crossrail Ltd. infra build issues are the cause of current delays in being able to test trains
• *No* Bombardier trains have been tested yet (this bit and the mitigation of leasing rolling stock to open the Heathrow-Paddington part of the line helped answer some questions i had about the rolling stock they’re using for that, which i had from using that service reasonably regularly - ie no these are *not* the final trains.)
• Much of this effectively becomes a software project, integrating Siemens signalling and Bombadier on-train software, and software projects have a bad habit of overrunning (i’m never quite sure why this is *more* the case than physical engineering projects - tho as this shows these can easily overrun as well - my rudimentary hypothesis that we have much more historical and systemic experience of physical engineering projects than software projects feels way too basic. Regardless, the impression the article gives is that people are saying “once we’re over the build hump we’ll be fine”. That seems highly unlikely.
• Sadiq Khan has made some serious missteps which include probably lying. Two interesting sub-points from that
• It tells us something about him as a political operator. The article points out that his response to this was the same as his response to the fare freeze argument - effectively that he doubled down on a misunderstanding, said it was still possible, and distributed blame elsewhere. (fair to say he would have been *crucified* if he had reversed on that promise, but it sounds like his handling of it was bad). The article is probably right to say this is a v “Westminster” approach. The fact he’s done the same thing again suggests a character issue with someone who seems to be a fairly savvy political operator usually.

ETCS is a European signalling specification for the safe operation of trains. In fact it is used throughout the world, especially in China. The current National Rail standard, Train Protection and Warning System (TPWS), is very safe. TPWS is largely responsible for the incredible safety record achieved in recent years. It is not, however, 100% fail-safe in all circumstances and does not always protect against human error. For example, it won’t always prevent a buffer stop collision at a terminal – not the sort of thing you want to happen on a terminal platform in an underground tunnel at, say, Terminal 4.

The problem is that whilst very reliable once working properly, ETCS is known to be a fickle beast. Like all electronic signalling systems, it is very susceptible to hostile electrical environments. Unfortunately, it seems that a hostile electrical environment is exactly the sort of thing one finds in a round bored tunnel with a 25kV, 50Hz AC catenary running alongside it, with the added complication of a similar but different signalling system already present. Which is an accurate description of the Heathrow tunnels.

Howard Smith’s comment to the TfL Board perhaps sums the current situation perfectly:

It performed as expected as in functionally it works, but the reliability needs a lot of work before we’d be happy with it as a passenger service.

of course the impact is that they’ll probably have to go back for even more money and that other projects will shelved or delayed.

i’d like to see a pie chart breakdown of the comparative impact of lower passenger numbers, the removal of government subsidy this year, and split out from the passenger numbers the likely impact of full Crossrail service being delayed. Of course these aren’t strictly comparable as the loss of government subsidy has been modelled into the business plan (TfL becomes a real estate developer! what a world), but the passenger numbers were not.

all of this also feels fairly luxurious when you look at the state of Northern travel systems - intercity, suburban and at the city level - but after all money for this is not zero sum. We just have a government that hasn’t invested in transport infrastructure and expects TfL to run without subsidy. The impact on productivity of failing transport systems, whether in London or in the north is huge.

odd question:

did jenny holzer ever have her truisms printed on the back of london bus tickets or did i dream that? i can't find a single picture online but i'm sure i have a couple somewhere, probably tucked into books.