"Graham Harrison" wrote:

"MIG" wrote:

On good form today with reports of South Eastern services suspended
between Shepherds Bush and Milton Keynes.

Their willingness to repeat nonsense for bulletin after bulletin is
often less obviously workable out than that one, like the time that
they kept announcing that services on the "Lewisham line" were being
diverted, when they meant that services between Dartford and Lewisham
via Bexleyheath were being diverted via Sidcup (rather important for
punters to know that they were NOT going via Bexleyheath, but WERE
going via Lewisham).

They do this sort of thing over and over. The newsreaders just keep
on dumbly reading it out every half hour. You'd think that the London
travel newsroom would have some vague idea about transport in London.

There is another point that I think we may all be missing here. Radio
London is aimed at Londoners. But it's heard by a much wider range of
people, particularly the travel news because of RDS. Thus it needs to
ensure that any data it puts out be it about road or PT has to be
understandable to non-Londoners as well as Londoners. [...]

I think they're well aware of the reach of their signal, particularly w.r.t.
travel news (for general news it's not unreasonable to expect that listeners
would turn to their local, home counties station - of course there's always
going to be grey areas on the fringes) - the BBC London's radio travel
reports seem to take in much of what's within (as well as on) the M25, and
will mention things further afield if they're likely to cause issues for
travel from London (e.g. disruption on the Brighton main line, Operation
Stack on the M20 etc).


[...] I lived in and around London for many years before I moved to
Somerset yet I have no idea where "Charlie Browns Roundabout" that I heard
referred to recently is.

I suppose that's just a shorthand which regular road commuters would pick up
on immediately - explaining that it's the roundabout on the NCR underneath
the terminus of the M11 each and every time might be a bit of a mouthful (so
it's kind of 'need to know' - if you don't need to know, then you can
discard it, if you might need to know but don't know where Charlie Brown's
is... er, well tough!).

Oh, a little history for you:
http://www.britannia.com/travel/london/cockney/cbrown.html