Transport in London is shit

yes. i think i sent that while sitting on a train and a person with a macdonalds came and sat next to me.

(i don’t mind macdonalds particularly but do on trains)

last time i flew back from london this fella humphed onto the plane last, and dropped like a sweaty shit in on top of me carrying a fuckin burger king meal

one of the rare occasions when my ilx lowercaps mean persona exhibited irl, it got handed over for disposal immediately

i’m using the new Citymapper Pass and I love it. best thing easily is that i don’t have to use touchID at the barriers. just touch my phone to the reader, beep, through. just as fast as a card.

that's now the case with just using contactless Apple Pay, too - and I agree, it's great that it's as fast as a card now.

BAH my great advantage, gazumped!!

Apple Pay is pay-as-you-go only though, right? I can't tell you the number of times I've tried to work out whether paygo or unlimited zones 1-3 works out better for me. With paygo I always have the suspicion I'm somehow being screwed. But I start looking at my the sporadic payments to TFL on my bank statement and just end up dying of ennui.

I think it's still slightly cheaper to get a monthly travelcard if you travel every weekdays, but otherwise it's a wash thanks to the capping

I think it's still slightly cheaper to get a monthly travelcard if you travel every weekdays, but otherwise it's a wash thanks to the capping

could be worse

How big is the 90 minute public transit commuter zone for London vs San Francisco? This is my attempt to answer the question. Arrival point is central London or downtown SF. So, light areas = you ought to be able to reach central London/downtown SF within 90 minutes. pic.twitter.com/ZSftRqN1bL

— Alasdair Rae (@undertheraedar) February 6, 2020

Bit quiet out today

Commuters into London, don't forget that you can cancel your annual season ticket if it doesn't look like you're going to be using it for a while.

I guess the same is true of TFL?

I'm going to walk to and from work - as long as work stays open, which might not be long - so at least I'll be fit when I get the virus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_4moz_Psso

chris morris has so much to answer for lol

i got 90% of the way through it wondering why i hadn't heard of this at the time.

Chuckling at the end of that, well done

Happy to provide this closer shot for a proper analysis of the books on the shelves pic.twitter.com/vbn9NNF9zo

— Henry Dyer (@Direthoughts) June 15, 2021

picture of the GBNews studios with what looks like a copy of The Bus We Loved on the shelves.

(i think the set designer must be trolling them with several of those books)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1daNvB4phHM

I was hoping for Lazenby.

One hit wonder

https://metrodle.com/ wordle but for the underground

ha, today's is the station I park at when I occasionally drive to London!

Well today I learned that you still have to ring the bell on a bus even if you’re not coming to a request stop. Was that ever the case or did I just make it up?

What do you mean

I think you have always had to ring the bell?

Heavy caveat that I don't actually live in London anymore (though I do work there two or three times a week) - but I was talking to ILX faves the Pinefox and Michael Jones recently, on an anniversary of us first meeting back at the end of the 20th century, and I floated the idea that the only thing that has got better in the UK in the last 25 years is London transport. Elizabeth Line, the overground, better bus info, proper cycling routes etc etc. Is there anything else in the country that has seen material improvement like this?

As long as London is fine the rest of the country can go to hell is the general philosophy.

I did teach a German couple the other day that you have to flag down a bus, they'd assumed as long as they were at the right stop buses would stop automatically.

I thought there were some mandatory stops that the bus would stop at anyway. Big junctions of lines/routes etc and significant destinations. So you didn't NEED to press bell.
But keep finding over here that bus request bells have somehow switched off or been switched off so if I or somebody else hits the bell there's no feedback light coming on . Also come across bus drivers who object to you pressing bell for next stop as soon as you've passed the previous one. Had some idiot a couple o f years ago actually open the door to cancel the request.
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I think a load of people do try to make sure request is clearly in as soon as it is relevant so having a driver obtusely try to undo request is strange. But that is a side issue. & this is a different town to London. But I do think the idea of mandatory stops is pretty universal isn't it?

It's been a long time since I lived in London but my recollection is that if the stop wasn't a request stop (i.e. it said "bus stop" rather than "request stop") buses would automatically stop there even if no-one was waiting to get on and no-one had rung the bell to get off.

I think I was thinking the same.
PLus i thought that several of them were thought of as fare stops as in designating where the price of the ticket would change like zone to zone. Probably not all of them as I'm just working out, though could be exactly which ones did fit the bill.

THis town still has a single fare across town and various passes one can work out. 24 hour all fares covered is teh same price as 3 bus rides so I frequently get that. Or may have actually got cheaper still since price was cut a few months ago and I think it's now 2 point something.

Other thought i just had. During the pandemic and possibly just before there was a directive that if a bus got ahead of schedule it had to stop at a bus stop until the schedule caught up with it. It wound up with buses needing to do that in what had formerly and has since returned to rush hour. I know beforehand one could get to the bus stop out of town and think one was way ahead of time and the bus had had no traffic to slow it down so had gone past stop already. It takes like 10 minutes or something to get from town centre to outskirts where I live and you'd wind up having to wait for a half hour for teh next one.
So I'm just wondering if there are similar route regulatory stops made elsewhere to try to make sure waiting passengers aren't stranded in places for ages and hence these mandatory stops.

I've never heard of a request stop in my life, think this must have been phased out.

"request stop" is what I think when I see some of the threads on here tho HEYO

Lmao

Yeah unless there’s people at the upcoming stop I’ve always pressed the bell?

During the pandemic and possibly just before there was a directive that if a bus got ahead of schedule it had to stop at a bus stop until the schedule caught up with it.

this has been the case for ages. Magnus Mills wrote about it in The Maintenance Of Headway which came out in 2009, based on his own experiences driving London buses

even if there's people at the stop you usually have to press the bell to get the driver to open the rear doors, unless it's a small one-door vehicle

In my experience "flagging a bus down" involves standing purposefully at the edge of the stop and fixing the driver with a gimlet stare as the bus approaches. If still unsure as to whether it will stop, raise your hand in an apologetic half-wave until the driver activates their indicator. Then say "cheers" to them as you get on. Job done.

I've never heard of a request stop in my life, think this must have been phased out.

Still a bunch of those near me in Tottenham, on the W4 route for example. As far as I can see the dictinction is that request stops don't actually have physical bus-stops or even signs - the bus-driver knows where the stops are, and will stop there if you ping the bell.

I've lived in London all my life and have always pinged the bell if I've wanted to get off, and never assumed a bus will stop at the stop I'm waiting unless I wave my arms a bunch (although occasionally, when I've been out late, a nightbus has stopped to see if I wanted to get on and wasn't dosing and thus missing the bus).

The bus stopping for a bit because it's ahead of schedule was definitely a thing pre-pandemic.

Yeah the demise of the card bopper in the middle of buses is the single biggest downgrade in London buses, why yes I’d LOVE to join a group of people all trying to board a bus through the single point of entry while two others are exit-only 🙃

ok so request stops are like the TFL secret menu? learn something new every day.

xpost

And yeah I thought buses being held to even out service was a very widely known thing, is this a Mandela effect bit

is this a false memory or did the heatherwick (curse his name) routemasters originally have a card bopper at the rear 'third' exit too

and yeah, some of the more provincial routes do have secret request stops. the 380 has a run of stops in deepest Blackheath that are virtually unsignposted. often it coincides with a 'hail and ride' section, there's a fuzzy grey area where there are designated drop-off points but you can arguably (?) hail it from anywhere along the section, especially if visibly infirm, idk, anyway these tend to be in very well-to-do suburbs

Yeah they did. Incredible how they cut out their single best operational advantage to just be a double decker with an extra exit that bakes passengers at temperatures above 20C.

Went all in on a cycle-only commute eighteen months ago (45-55 mins one way) and don't regret it although do occasionally miss the 'people watching' aspect of bus travel and not feeling in constant mid-level threat mode on London's gnarly highways, as improved as the cycling infrastructure may be.

I have tried doing the London bit of my commute (Liverpool St to Bloomsbury) by bike but it was frankly terrifying.

Yeah those new routemasters have always ben underwhelming and also a bit NOISY (I have hearing damage but ymmv).

It's been a long time since I lived in London but my recollection is that if the stop wasn't a request stop (i.e. it said "bus stop" rather than "request stop") buses would automatically stop there even if no-one was waiting to get on and no-one had rung the bell to get off.

Yes this is what I thought - but apparently that's no longer the case (and may not have been the case for a long time!) So as a passenger you have to bing the bell like every stop is a request stop.

We live on a route (W3) where the bus is always late so there's often two (or three!) duelling buses behind each other. This morning I saw passengers at the stop in front of me and didn't ring the bell because I assumed the bus would stop for them. But because there was already a W3 parked there, it just overtook the bus instead.

Personally I don't think buses should skip stops if there's two buses at the stop, as there could be someone with a wheelchair/pram who can't get on the first bus.

I've always dinged the bell for every bus stop I've ever got off at, since 1998...

I'm remembering bus routes on the outskirts of London from 70s/80s and there were a load of stops that weren't mandatory but haven't lived in London for a few decades. So can see things may have changed and it only being those hopper buses it would be true of now. I thought there was some kind of a stop at the places around my mother's house but now wondering if the stop near the doctor's we used to use has one. Thought there would need to be some signifier and some way of keeping space cleared at kerb to allow bus to stop.

If the catch up with official schedule stopping predated the pandemic it wasn't by much here. But that may be just here and possibly other smaller town/cities around the country. As in not Dublin. I didn't hear the policy announced and did need to work out that it was unlikely that one would get lucky and catch up on lost time once it was instituted. Also noticing that one can get on a bus thinking it might catch up with how far behind schedule everybody at the stop is and the driver continue to act like he is on a later schedule which is annoying. Stopping and waiting for schedule when a couple of buses previous to them have not appeared. Must be some way around that since it can happen during morning rush hour. Only response at the time was a comment that they couldn't get the drivers. Doesn't help people avoid being late for work or alter a clock in timer.

often it coincides with a 'hail and ride' section

ah yeah, the W4 is totally a "hail and ride" section, though there are specific (albeit unmarked) spots where the bus will stop, like the top of our road - it won't just stop if you wave at it/ring the bell outside your house. We are definitely not a "well-to-do suburb", tho.

if a stop serves more than one bus route then surely you always have to flag it to get on, otherwise it would be assumed you're waiting for a different bus.

Dinging the bell is one of the pleasures of bus travel.