A rant about London's crappy transport infrastructure and some thoughts on 'Net help

Wednesday, December 12. 2007

A rant about London's crappy transport infrastructure and some thoughts on 'Net help

Today it took 2 and a half hours to do what should be a c 1 hour journey. Its a 3 leg trip, travel time should be c 45 mins all in all, with - in theory - about 15 mins change / wait / etc on the legs.

Now on most days one of the legs has a problem, so its usually a c 1hr 20 trip. Today all the legs did - the "perfect storm".

Two thoughts:

(i) IF the Govt's plan is for us all to be "greener" and stop using cars so much, then the F8cking public service infrastructure that we have got should at least work as it is (never mind the issues around improving the experience to tempt people out of cars). Just taxing us off the roads and not investing in public service is just stupid*. We may as well bring in Mussolini to go green.

(ii) At each leg, I had imperfect information about what choice to take...it would have been very much better if I could have had the predicted train data for each of the lines as I started off - the information clearly exists, the train company has it - and I could have probably chopped a good 1/2 hour delay by choosing alternative options.

Now that is a mobile service I would even pay for !

* Unless its a deeper cunning plan to force internet based home working, in which case we need to sort out the office "presence" culture in most companies

Posted by Alan Patrick in Web Services / Cloud Computing at 11:28 | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0)

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There's a guy who did a mashup between twitter and the Tube' status information. Very neat. You can get your SMS updates, but I don't know if receiving SMS is free in the UK.
http://blogs.opml.org/tommorris/2007/02/22#twitterTubeTracker

I wished we had this kind of information for the Montreal public transit system on their website so someone could do a mashup like this.

Just to be certain you'd get this, I'm replying here, in addition to on twitter. ^_^

#1 Zelnox on 2007-12-12 13:13 (Reply)

I'm a big fan of walking in London! It's old technology, but it works

#2 richard beddard (Homepage) on 2007-12-12 13:38 (Reply)

@ Zelnox...thats part of it...I want to be able to find all the routes from A to B, find their delays, and then replan the optimal route based on these at each point.

@ Richard...true, but I am a lazy git and its a long walk from Sarf Lunnun to Shepherds Bush

#3 alan p on 2007-12-12 15:04 (Reply)

Has anyone noticed the metaphorical connection between Mornington Crescent and the Circle line? I'm sure that the Circle line is just an in-joke of TfL, where they draw it on the map, and constantly announce "severe delays due to earlier signalling problems", but no actual trains are scheduled to run. Ever. They just rely on a District/HamSarny/etc. train whisking you away from the platform before you suffer any existential questions about their service. Finally, I think I've rumbled the game.

#4 Martin Geddes on 2007-12-12 16:06 (Reply)

@ Martin...how did you guess one of the culprits was the Circle Line

#5 alan p on 2007-12-12 19:16 (Reply)

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