On Mon, 23 Apr 2007, MIG wrote:

On Apr 23, 9:52 pm, Tom Anderson wrote:
On Mon, 23 Apr 2007, Paul Corfield wrote:
On Mon, 23 Apr 2007 20:09:41 +0100, Tom Anderson
wrote:

If the answers to these questions are both 'the vast majority', then
LU should now have a massive amount of data about journeys being made
on its network - in terms of where they start and end, at least.
Actual hard numbers, not estimates or surveys of passenger density on
each line. This would be really interesting to look at. Does it
exist, is it public, and what would be my chances of getting it via
FOIA?

To be honest it is more valuable in some respects where it shows modal
interchange or bus to bus interchange. The opportunities to better
understand "total" journeys rather than just the rail element are more
attractive and adjusting bus services to provide through or "round the
corner" services is easier.

Absolutely - although the lack of people touching *out* of buses is
going to hamper this, at least at the finish of a rail-bus journey.

That would kind of depend on the Oyster pad in a bus knowing where it
was.

Ha - yes, very true!

The ticket gates usually stay where they are. Readers in trains along
with some kind of GPS would save on the ridiculous going up the
escalator situation when passing the boundary of your paper travelcard,

Serves you right for having a paper travelcard .

Gates should be able to do this; say you have a Z12 paper travelcard and
an oyster with some pre-pay, and you go from Z1 to Z4, when you want to
get out at your destination, you should be able to stick your paper card
in, have it rejected with an 'excess fare required' message, then touch
your oyster to pay it. Well, that would be nice, anyway.

but I don't if GPS would be reliable enough for something as variable as
a bus.

Back in the days before flat fares, buses knew roughly where they were -
they needed to know what fare stage they were in for the machine to price
the tickets. I think the driver had to push a button every now and then.
There's currently some sort of beacon system on some routes, for tracking
buses, but i don't know if it tells buses where they are. There's some
sort of alleged 'iBus' system on its way which will provide accurate
tracking of all buses:

http://www.alwaystouchout.com/project/96

It remains to be seen how well this will work.

Also, we're still not going to have people touching out. Might be possible
to install long-range card readers on the doors to track people getting
out, but that's getting a bit crazy ...

tom

--
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