On Mon, 27 Jul 2009 18:07:03 +0100, Basil Jet wrote:

It's even worse for the N18. The N18 runs to Sudbury Town every 10
minutes, with every third bus continuing to Harrow Weald. However,
the timetables at stops (e.g. Trafalgar Square) don't mention the
fact that any of the buses terminate at Sudbury, i.e. they make it
look like there's a 10-minute-frequency service through to Harrow
Weald.

The worst part is that there's no indication of what times the
Harrow Weald buses actually run, which I think is unacceptable for a
half-hourly service.

If it's this timetable here...
http://journeyplanner.tfl.gov.uk/use...__000062ee.pdf
... the times of the Harrow Weald buses are hudden in the
footnotes... but there is no clue as to where the other buses
terminate, so unless you are going exactly to Harrow Weald, this
timetable doesn't tell you whether you have 6 buses an hour or 2. It
seems to me that the main timetable panels having an S after the
time of each Sudbury bus would be a much better solution, but I
guess perceived simplicity is a higher priority than actual
simplicity. They need to learn from Einstein's (mis)quote... Make
things as simple as possible, but not simpler.

The link doesn't work; I'm not sure if the PDFs produced by the
journey planner are identical to the timetables posted at bus stops.
It's a while since I looked at one, but I definitely didn't notice any
footnote to that effect. I'll check again next time I'm in the area.

Okay: go to http://journeyplanner.tfl.gov.uk and click Timetables, then
Route Number N18, then Towards Long Elmes, then Trafalgar Square.

OK, that timetable doesn't look like the one at the stops (although
the patronising "about every 10 mins" part is the same). I also don't
know what's up with "Long Elmes" as a destination - I've never heard
of it, and the buses certainly say "Harrow Weald" on the front. (I
suspect it's the name of the last stop that the route calls at, and
these PDFs are auto-generated using the stop data. That might also
explain why the route diagram depicts the first half of the route in
great (perhaps too much) detail, then inexplicably misses out the
second half of the route.)