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Paul Corfield wrote:
On Tue, 20 Feb 2007 00:17:18 -0500, David of Broadway wrote: Paul Corfield wrote: It seems like London is very much organized around specific points of interest, while New York is organized around streets and overall directions. I'm not sure London is particularly "organised" - it just "is"! I have never been to New York or looked at their timetables, but I'd imagine the difference between the cities is not one of philosophy but one of frequency. If you're going to run 6 buses per hour down each major road, you follow the NY model of running a single 6bph route down each road and let people change at the junctions. If you're going to run 120 bph down each major road, you run ten different 12bph routes down each road, with each route going different ways at each junction so few people have to change. I also like to study maps which is partly why I have some understanding of the bus system in the 5 boroughs and the limited links between them - another interesting factor which is not really noticeable in London. Except in Havering, Croydon, Harrow, Bromley and Waltham Forest, which have reasonably self-contained bus networks. Keep in mind that NJT does not publish an overall bus map. I was unaware that there was not a system bus map. I consider such things to be essential. Sheffield didn't have one when I lived there in 1993. |
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Tom Anderson wrote:
On Mon, 19 Feb 2007, Dave A wrote: Paul Corfield wrote: On Mon, 19 Feb 2007 08:59:02 -0500, David of Broadway wrote: I will say that your spider maps are much easier to read and much more useful than the maps we have posted at bus stops. They are fine if there is a direct bus from the stop you are standing at. They are hopeless if your journey requires interchange to another service at some point. There is no sense of there being a network with spider maps which I believe is counterproductive when you have a network which is as dense as London's and where the move to shorter routes over the last 4 decades means changing services is much more of a necessity. There is little to guide people as to how to accomplish such journeys if they are relatively unfamiliar with the bus network. My impression of bus use in London is that it is broadly confined to the use of single routes from origin to destination - ISTR a statistic that only 4% of journeys involving buses, involved changing from one bus to another. Any idea if that includes night buses? I can almost never get home in the wee small hours without changing. On further inspection, it looks like I was lying my face off. The figure I quoted is for all bus journeys in Great Britain. In London, it looks like the figure is nearer 20%, which surprises me. Source: TfL Interchange Plan (2002), Para 2.19 (primary source was London Transport Planning in 1997) http://cache.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/pdfdocs/inter_improve.pdf Putting information on making onward connections by bus could make the diagrams overly complicated, just to serve a fairly small proportion of passengers. The only way I can think of to make a clear diagram like this is to combine the spider and the traditional bus map - by using the traditional map as a base, and overlaying buses from the current location as individual coloured lines. How about annotating the spiders to show interchange points, as on the tube strip maps? So, for instance, on the Finsbury Park spider, the Holloway Nag's Head stop on the 29/253/etc bundle would have a little box saying "4 17 43 271 393", maybe with arrows pointing away on either side labelled "Archway" and "Highbury & Islington" (or something, since not all those routes go those ways). It wouldn't completely solve the problem, but if you were at A, wanted to go to B, and knew what the routes serving B were, you could look for a suitable C on the spider map at A. Even if you didn't know the routes at B, you could perhaps make a reasonable guess based on the destination hints. The key problem would probably be the sheer number of boxes and arrows - there are a *lot* of routes in London! Perhaps it would be better to limit it to important destinations which are reachable by bus within a practical time frame - say an hour (average journey time to work for those travelling by bus is 39 mins across London; 47 mins in central London). For example, from Notting Hill Gate there are 10 daytime bus routes covering most destinations reachable within an hour by bus from there, except a few which could be noted in the way you suggest - e.g. Clapham Junction, Barnes, Holborn. -- Dave Arquati www.alwaystouchout.com - Transport projects in London |
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Paul Corfield wrote:
Although London's rail network has pretty wide coverage, it has limited capacity in comparison to NYC's. Our trains are wider and longer and most of our major trunk lines (and some of the minor ones, too) have four tracks. Given how crowded our trains get, if we had to give up our express tracks and shorten and narrow the trains, the buses would become a lot more popular, by necessity. I'm a tad taken aback by your comments on the relative capacities of London's rail network vs NYC's. Now I'm certainly not an expert on your subway or rail network but surely your rail network (not subway) is but a mere shadow of London's? By "rail network" he must mean only LU vs. NYCT. National Rail in the southeast would surely dwarf LIRR+MNR+PATH. In my (albeit limited) experience of the NYC rush hour you get pretty high frequencies on common sections of route served by multiple services but if you want a particular letter / number then frequency drops noticeably compared to almost all of London's tube service pattern. Hmmm, does it really compare that poorly with waiting for a train to, say, a particular branch of the District line? -- Michael Hoffman |
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[Paul Corfield]
We no longer have area maps at our stops. We have bloody stupid and unhelpful spider maps that tell you very little. I really like the spider maps, and find them incredibly useful when trying to figure out if I can get somewhere I want to go from a nearby bus stop. For an occasional user of a particular stop they are fantastic. [David of Broadway] Keep in mind that NJT does not publish an overall bus map. For most routes, the "approximate geographic representation" is all there is. And, in my experience, it's completely useless. [Paul Corfield] I was unaware that there was not a system bus map. I consider such things to be essential. New Jersey is 14.3 times larger than Greater London in area. That'd be one hell of a map. Of course maps of smaller areas would be useful. -- Michael Hoffman |
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On Tue, 20 Feb 2007 23:13:13 +0000, Dave A wrote:
Tom Anderson wrote: On Mon, 19 Feb 2007, Dave A wrote: Paul Corfield wrote: On Mon, 19 Feb 2007 08:59:02 -0500, David of Broadway wrote: I will say that your spider maps are much easier to read and much more useful than the maps we have posted at bus stops. They are fine if there is a direct bus from the stop you are standing at. They are hopeless if your journey requires interchange to another service at some point. There is no sense of there being a network with spider maps which I believe is counterproductive when you have a network which is as dense as London's and where the move to shorter routes over the last 4 decades means changing services is much more of a necessity. There is little to guide people as to how to accomplish such journeys if they are relatively unfamiliar with the bus network. My impression of bus use in London is that it is broadly confined to the use of single routes from origin to destination - ISTR a statistic that only 4% of journeys involving buses, involved changing from one bus to another. Any idea if that includes night buses? I can almost never get home in the wee small hours without changing. On further inspection, it looks like I was lying my face off. The figure I quoted is for all bus journeys in Great Britain. In London, it looks like the figure is nearer 20%, which surprises me. Source: TfL Interchange Plan (2002), Para 2.19 (primary source was London Transport Planning in 1997) http://cache.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/pdfdocs/inter_improve.pdf Thanks for owning up ;-) In my own experience I have to change buses quite a lot to make any number of even quite local journeys. It is impossible for me to reach the central area from where I live without changing buses - admittedly only one change gets me onto a good spread of radial routes into zone 1. My observations would also suggest that substantial volumes of people do change buses in order to make their journeys despite the relative richness of London's bus network. The easy availability of capped bus fares via Oyster PAYG may inadvertently encourage this trend as would the introduction of transfer tickets offering discounts. One simple example of the extent of transfer between services is somewhere like Silver St in Edmonton. Large numbers of people get off route 34 (east - west) to change onto north-south routes at this point. This pattern is repeated all over London. I'm actually surprised the figure is as low as 20%. Perhaps it would be better to limit it to important destinations which are reachable by bus within a practical time frame - say an hour (average journey time to work for those travelling by bus is 39 mins across London; 47 mins in central London). For example, from Notting Hill Gate there are 10 daytime bus routes covering most destinations reachable within an hour by bus from there, except a few which could be noted in the way you suggest - e.g. Clapham Junction, Barnes, Holborn. The problem with your suggestion is that it relies on various parameters that have different meanings to people. What is an "important destination"? The destination for each individual passenger is "important" to them and an awful lot of maps will not show such places - especially if a change of bus is needed. What is a practical time frame? - this must vary depending on whether you are time rich or time poor as well as the activity that you will do when you complete your journey. Finally a time based parameter will unravel given the variability in journey times over the operating day and it again does not deal with peoples' willingness to travel for a long period by bus if overall they consider the bus to the best mode for them given other factors like affordability. I sometimes travel by bus even though "logic" would dictate that the tube or a train would be more "sensible". -- Paul C Admits to working for London Underground! |
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Michael Hoffman wrote:
[David of Broadway] Keep in mind that NJT does not publish an overall bus map. [Paul Corfield] I was unaware that there was not a system bus map. I consider such things to be essential. New Jersey is 14.3 times larger than Greater London in area. That'd be one hell of a map. In the 1970s National Buses used to publish a bus map of England and Wales on a single sheet. It showed all the routes operated by London Country, Crosville, Potteries Motor Traction etc. It might have omitted town services. |
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On Tue, 20 Feb 2007 09:21:58 +0000, Tom Anderson
wrote: What's the typical deliver size? Or rather, what weight would you say 80% of deliveries are smaller than or equal to? Would it be small enough to do by bike (using a freight bike of some sort, rather than a courier's panniers)? Most jobs go in (as a minimum) an A4 box (i.e. a box that would contain five reams of A4 80gsm. Not to mention large scale deliveries. As I was leaving work this morning we had 50+ reams of paper turn up. How are they supposed to deliver that without a lorry? I assume you get your paper in quite big sheets - 50 reams of A4 at 80 gsm is 125 kg, doable on a trike or 8-freight or something. If it's A0, though, that's two tonnes, which i would certainly agree requires motor power! Actually, I got that wrong. It was 20 boxes of A4 which is 100 reams. Plus some A3 and other stuff. A0 paper comes in rolls - 200m long, works out to maybe 10cm across at a guess. 24 rolls on a pallet. |
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On Tue, 20 Feb 2007 11:28:32 -0000, "Paul Scott"
wrote: "James Farrar" wrote in message .. . We *do* have foot messengers for small jobs to local addresses, but that's a small minority of the work we do. Not to mention large scale deliveries. As I was leaving work this morning we had 50+ reams of paper turn up. How are they supposed to deliver that without a lorry? Get them to email it - 'paperless office' anyone... Lots is, though that's not much use for hard copy, not to mention proofs! |
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On Wed, 21 Feb 2007 02:01:34 -0000, "John Rowland"
wrote: Michael Hoffman wrote: [David of Broadway] Keep in mind that NJT does not publish an overall bus map. [Paul Corfield] I was unaware that there was not a system bus map. I consider such things to be essential. New Jersey is 14.3 times larger than Greater London in area. That'd be one hell of a map. In the 1970s National Buses used to publish a bus map of England and Wales on a single sheet. It showed all the routes operated by London Country, Crosville, Potteries Motor Traction etc. It might have omitted town services. And more recently when Southern Vectis published the Great British Bus Timetable that included a national map of bus services and for National Express coaches. I wish they would bring that book back but they probably never will. -- Paul C Admits to working for London Underground! |
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On Feb 20, 11:03 pm, "John Rowland"
wrote: wrote: On Feb 20, 2:40 pm, "John Rowland" wrote: I'd like bus shelters to bear accurate mathematically distorted geographical maps, where, for instance, distance from the centre of the map is proportional to the square root of the actual distance on the ground, and any super-long routes have an arrow at the edge of the map listing further destinations. How do you handle the case where two bus routes share the same stretch of road, diverge, and then rejoin at another point? You either give them different colours, or you show them as separating and converging like the Northern Line - whichever makes the map easier to understand (which would depend on what else was going on in the map). But then this would destroy the accurate mathematical distortion property. -- Abi |
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On Wed, 21 Feb 2007, James Farrar wrote:
On Tue, 20 Feb 2007 09:21:58 +0000, Tom Anderson wrote: What's the typical deliver size? Or rather, what weight would you say 80% of deliveries are smaller than or equal to? Would it be small enough to do by bike (using a freight bike of some sort, rather than a courier's panniers)? Most jobs go in (as a minimum) an A4 box (i.e. a box that would contain five reams of A4 80gsm. That kind of thing would easily be doable by freight bike - may i ask how you deliver it at the moment? Presumably you don't have a van trip for each delivery; pile multiple deliveries into one van and go on a tour round all the customers? Not to mention large scale deliveries. As I was leaving work this morning we had 50+ reams of paper turn up. How are they supposed to deliver that without a lorry? I assume you get your paper in quite big sheets - 50 reams of A4 at 80 gsm is 125 kg, doable on a trike or 8-freight or something. If it's A0, though, that's two tonnes, which i would certainly agree requires motor power! Actually, I got that wrong. It was 20 boxes of A4 which is 100 reams. Plus some A3 and other stuff. A0 paper comes in rolls - 200m long, works out to maybe 10cm across at a guess. 24 rolls on a pallet. Okay, any of that'd be rather hard to shift by bike, i think. Although i did start wondering if you could build a tandem derivative of an 8-freight (a 16-freight?) which could handle a pallet - a problem to leave to a real engineer, i think! For those of you not familiar with the 8-freight: http://www.velovision.com/mag/issue9/8freight.pdf Funnily enough, it actually has been used to transport boxes of print - ten boxes, 100 kg "quite happily". I should add that i'm not seriously suggesting you replace vans with bikes; i'm just interested in working out to what extent bikes could replace motor vehicles for goods traffic in a real-world situation. Also, bear in mind that the OP was only proposing closing one route to cars; all you'd really have to do was pile everything into a hand-cart and wheel it a few hundred metres to the nearest motor-accessible road! tom -- A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. -- Gall's Law |
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On Tue, 20 Feb 2007, John Rowland wrote:
Dave A wrote: The problem with that is that where there are long routes that can be shrunk in a spider diagram but will not fit into a traditional map - this is the case for many routes on the central London traditional map. The most useful connections will be those outside central London, which wouldn't be represented by the map I describe. I (still) hate the spider maps. I'd like bus shelters to bear accurate mathematically distorted geographical maps, where, for instance, distance from the centre of the map is proportional to the square root of the actual distance on the ground, Nah, logarithm. and any super-long routes have an arrow at the edge of the map listing further destinations. Each group of routes which serve the same local stops would be shown as a single coloured line, which then branches into the different routes towards the edge of the map.... http://www.openstreetmap.org/ http://www.tfl.gov.uk/buses/spiders/ http://www.gimp.org/ Get busy! tom -- A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. -- Gall's Law |
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On Wed, 21 Feb 2007 15:44:20 +0000, Tom Anderson
wrote: On Wed, 21 Feb 2007, James Farrar wrote: On Tue, 20 Feb 2007 09:21:58 +0000, Tom Anderson wrote: What's the typical deliver size? Or rather, what weight would you say 80% of deliveries are smaller than or equal to? Would it be small enough to do by bike (using a freight bike of some sort, rather than a courier's panniers)? Most jobs go in (as a minimum) an A4 box (i.e. a box that would contain five reams of A4 80gsm. That kind of thing would easily be doable by freight bike - may i ask how you deliver it at the moment? Presumably you don't have a van trip for each delivery; pile multiple deliveries into one van and go on a tour round all the customers? Depends on distance and deadline. Sometimes, yes. Also, bear in mind that the OP was only proposing closing one route to cars; all you'd really have to do was pile everything into a hand-cart and wheel it a few hundred metres to the nearest motor-accessible road! Parking the vans is bad enough as it is! |
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Paul Corfield wrote:
On Tue, 20 Feb 2007 23:13:13 +0000, Dave A wrote: Tom Anderson wrote: On Mon, 19 Feb 2007, Dave A wrote: Paul Corfield wrote: On Mon, 19 Feb 2007 08:59:02 -0500, David of Broadway wrote: I will say that your spider maps are much easier to read and much more useful than the maps we have posted at bus stops. They are fine if there is a direct bus from the stop you are standing at. They are hopeless if your journey requires interchange to another service at some point. There is no sense of there being a network with spider maps which I believe is counterproductive when you have a network which is as dense as London's and where the move to shorter routes over the last 4 decades means changing services is much more of a necessity. There is little to guide people as to how to accomplish such journeys if they are relatively unfamiliar with the bus network. My impression of bus use in London is that it is broadly confined to the use of single routes from origin to destination - ISTR a statistic that only 4% of journeys involving buses, involved changing from one bus to another. Any idea if that includes night buses? I can almost never get home in the wee small hours without changing. On further inspection, it looks like I was lying my face off. The figure I quoted is for all bus journeys in Great Britain. In London, it looks like the figure is nearer 20%, which surprises me. Source: TfL Interchange Plan (2002), Para 2.19 (primary source was London Transport Planning in 1997) http://cache.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/pdfdocs/inter_improve.pdf Thanks for owning up ;-) In my own experience I have to change buses quite a lot to make any number of even quite local journeys. It is impossible for me to reach the central area from where I live without changing buses - admittedly only one change gets me onto a good spread of radial routes into zone 1. My observations would also suggest that substantial volumes of people do change buses in order to make their journeys despite the relative richness of London's bus network. The easy availability of capped bus fares via Oyster PAYG may inadvertently encourage this trend as would the introduction of transfer tickets offering discounts. One simple example of the extent of transfer between services is somewhere like Silver St in Edmonton. Large numbers of people get off route 34 (east - west) to change onto north-south routes at this point. This pattern is repeated all over London. I'm actually surprised the figure is as low as 20%. I think that for many locations in inner London, changing bus is often just not necessary, as the spread of routes from most inner London hubs covers most of the surrounding area. Saying that, I should have done a common sense check before quoting a silly statistic - there are stampedes in the morning in Shepherd's Bush when a 207 unloads behind a loading 49. (Incidentally, I was very bemused to find that the 49 was receiving no service enhancement at all from the C-charge extension, unlike practically every other route in the area, and despite being completely full in the morning peak from Shepherd's Bush and often skipping all stops on Holland Road. The C1 extension is welcome, but it was never intended to be routed along Holland Road, and it's hopelessly slow around Earl's Court.) Perhaps it would be better to limit it to important destinations which are reachable by bus within a practical time frame - say an hour (average journey time to work for those travelling by bus is 39 mins across London; 47 mins in central London). For example, from Notting Hill Gate there are 10 daytime bus routes covering most destinations reachable within an hour by bus from there, except a few which could be noted in the way you suggest - e.g. Clapham Junction, Barnes, Holborn. The problem with your suggestion is that it relies on various parameters that have different meanings to people. What is an "important destination"? The destination for each individual passenger is "important" to them and an awful lot of maps will not show such places - especially if a change of bus is needed. Certainly true - but then the opposite is also true, where you can show everywhere and end up with a map that confuses most for the benefit of a few (which was the reason for switching to spider maps anyway). What is a practical time frame? - this must vary depending on whether you are time rich or time poor as well as the activity that you will do when you complete your journey. Finally a time based parameter will unravel given the variability in journey times over the operating day and it again does not deal with peoples' willingness to travel for a long period by bus if overall they consider the bus to the best mode for them given other factors like affordability. Very true. However, I would suggest that people who are set on using the bus for affordability reasons may also be more willing to work out routes for themselves - that's my experience from students, at least. I sometimes travel by bus even though "logic" would dictate that the tube or a train would be more "sensible". Snap. Often I just like the view out the window! -- Dave Arquati www.alwaystouchout.com - Transport projects in London |
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(Responding to an old post...)
Paul Corfield wrote: On Mon, 19 Feb 2007 23:57:05 -0500, David of Broadway wrote: Although London's rail network has pretty wide coverage, it has limited capacity in comparison to NYC's. Our trains are wider and longer and most of our major trunk lines (and some of the minor ones, too) have four tracks. Given how crowded our trains get, if we had to give up our express tracks and shorten and narrow the trains, the buses would become a lot more popular, by necessity. I'm a tad taken aback by your comments on the relative capacities of London's rail network vs NYC's. Now I'm certainly not an expert on your subway or rail network but surely your rail network (not subway) is but a mere shadow of London's? By "rail" I was including subway/Underground. But, including everything, you still might be right. It's difficult for an outsider to get a good sense of your rail network. From memory PATH is only twin bore into both WTC (as was) and 33rd Street. Metro North is twin bore into Grand Central or is that 4 tracks? Metro-North has four tracks along Park Avenue. I think that LIRR and NJT into Penn Station is 4 tracks under the river. NJT has only two, shared with Amtrak. Here's a track map of the rail systems in the NYC region, excluding the subway, PATH, and everything west of the Hudson: http://www.richegreen.com/NYCTrackMapV3.pdf (an 8.7 MB file) Now OK some of your trains are pretty long but overall frequencies and distances covered are nothing like the density of service that we have on networks like Southern, South West Trains or One from Liverpool Street. I've observed Grand Central and Penn Stations in the rush hour and certainly large volumes of people are shifted but it didn't feel on the same scale as London's main line networks. From the little I've seen in London, you're surely correct. Victoria may be no busier than Penn, but we only have one other station similar to Penn while you have lots more similar to Victoria! I confess I don't know how many people are carried on LIRR lines that terminate in Queens and Brooklyn. Nor do I, I'm embarrassed to say. Since fares are the same to LIC and Brooklyn as to Penn, and more trains go to Penn than to LIC or Brooklyn, many passengers who might find the LIC and Brooklyn terminals useful (it's easy to get to East Midtown from LIC and to Lower Manhattan from Brooklyn) go to Penn anyway. On the subway you do have much longer and bigger profile (than our tube stock) trains and the benefit of express lines. In my (albeit limited) experience of the NYC rush hour you get pretty high frequencies on common sections of route served by multiple services but if you want a particular letter / number then frequency drops noticeably compared to almost all of London's tube service pattern. Yes and no. Where we have multiple services sharing a trunk, you have a single service with multiple branches. I would argue that a single service in NYC is more akin to a single branch in London. For instance, the Central line would probably be treated as two routes in NYC, and the Metropolitan would be at least three. The Northern would probably be four, assuming current service patterns (which somewhat resemble our service patterns on the 2 and 5, except that no 2's go to Dyre and only a handful of select rush hour 5's go up the branch to 241; our south end is a bit more complicated, with off-peak 5's terminating at Bowling Green and lots of rush hour 5's going to Utica or New Lots rather than Flatbush). And don't get me started on the District! That said, your trains do tend to be more frequent than ours, it seems. Especially off-peak. And some of our branches are fairly infrequent -- I ride the B, for instance, which runs at about 6 tph all day except for a brief period northbound in the AM rush and southbound in the PM rush. I could also ride the Q, but I have to select one or the other in advance, since they run on different lines in Manhattan. One problem with express services is that they tend to dilute service to local stations. Most of our expresses run on weekends, and a few even run overnight! I'm interested to get your feedback on what I've not noticed about NYC's trains compared to ours here in London. I think you've noticed quite a bit! Also, most NYC neighborhoods not near the subway developed in the automotive age. Most people in those neighborhoods use their cars for all of their trips except into Manhattan. In those neighborhoods, the only major demand for bus service is to the nearest subway station. (And to nearby schools.) From what I've read here, London has a lot of local travel by bus outside the central area. I think we're sort of back with history here in that the rail and subway networks are typically strongly radial links with little local traffic (relative to flows into the centre) and virtually nothing offered for orbital flows. Buses have always had a strong purpose given those gaps in the rail network. But my feeling is that the demand for local and orbital bus links is much greater in London than in NYC. Car ownership and use is high in parts of NYC not served by the subway. In older times when we had less congestion many bus routes were very much longer than today and lengthy radial journeys were also possible into the suburbs or across the central area. Sadly this is now relatively rare with few radial routes stretching from Zone 1 to beyond Zone 2. There are more longer radial routes in South London that North of the river - probably reflecting the influence of the tube network north of the Thames. We also have relatively few bus connections between the boroughs. There are many routes running between Brooklyn and Queens (which does not generally entail crossing a body of water) and between the Bronx and Manhattan (which entails crossing the narrow Harlem River with its many short bridges), but any other borough-to-borough trip involves a major river crossing. We do have some -- the B39 and B51 between Manhattan and Brooklyn, the S53 and S79 between Staten Island and Brooklyn (the S93 is really just the S53 Limited), the M60, Q60, and Q101 between Manhattan and Queens (also technically the Q102, which runs from Queens into Roosevelt Island, formally part of Manhattan), and the Q44 and QBx1 between the Bronx and Queens -- as well as the (heavily subsidized) express routes. But the vast majority of interborough trips are taken on the subway. You might find these links interesting: http://www.nymtc.org/data_services/HBT.html -- David of Broadway New York, NY, USA |
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On Sun, 11 Mar 2007, David of Broadway wrote:
Paul Corfield wrote: On Mon, 19 Feb 2007 23:57:05 -0500, David of Broadway wrote: Although London's rail network has pretty wide coverage, it has limited capacity in comparison to NYC's. Our trains are wider and longer and most of our major trunk lines (and some of the minor ones, too) have four tracks. Given how crowded our trains get, if we had to give up our express tracks and shorten and narrow the trains, the buses would become a lot more popular, by necessity. I'm a tad taken aback by your comments on the relative capacities of London's rail network vs NYC's. Now I'm certainly not an expert on your subway or rail network but surely your rail network (not subway) is but a mere shadow of London's? By "rail" I was including subway/Underground. In that case, yes. But our overground trains are as big as, or bigger than, NY subway trains. But, including everything, you still might be right. It's difficult for an outsider to get a good sense of your rail network. It's pretty hard for an insider! The handful of lines north of the river are simple enough - they're all basically like tube lines that happen to stop at the Circle line, rather than continuing into town (barring the North London and Gospel Oak to Barking lines). South of the river, though, it's a different story - there's an untamed thicket of lines, all criscrossing and interconnecting, and it's hard to believe anyone has a solid grasp of it all. They're shown on this map: http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/pdfdocs/lon_con.pdf Which i think gives some idea of the complexity of the topology. I'm not sure how they wound up like that; for some reason, 19th-century railway bods decided it was a good idea to build lines that were halfway between radial and orbital, so now there's this matrix of overlapping spirals, plus some more sensible radials. Maybe it was because the main station for Kent, which is in the east, is Victoria, which is in the west. No idea how that happened. tom -- Let us learn to dream, gentlemen, and then perhaps we will learn the truth. -- Friedrich Kekule |
DEcongestion zone map
Tom Anderson wrote:
On Sun, 11 Mar 2007, David of Broadway wrote: Paul Corfield wrote: On Mon, 19 Feb 2007 23:57:05 -0500, David of Broadway wrote: Although London's rail network has pretty wide coverage, it has limited capacity in comparison to NYC's. Our trains are wider and longer and most of our major trunk lines (and some of the minor ones, too) have four tracks. Given how crowded our trains get, if we had to give up our express tracks and shorten and narrow the trains, the buses would become a lot more popular, by necessity. I'm a tad taken aback by your comments on the relative capacities of London's rail network vs NYC's. Now I'm certainly not an expert on your subway or rail network but surely your rail network (not subway) is but a mere shadow of London's? By "rail" I was including subway/Underground. In that case, yes. But our overground trains are as big as, or bigger than, NY subway trains. Really? On the numbered lines (IRT), all trains are 10 cars long (except on the 7, where they are 11 cars long). An IRT car is 51 feet long and 8 feet 10 inches wide. On most of the lettered lines (BMT/IND), trains consist of either 10 60-foot-by-10-foot cars or 8 75-foot-by-10-foot cars. (The C, J/Z, L, and M run only 8 60-foot-by-10-foot cars.) (Shuttles are shorter.) I don't think most of the overground trains I came across were that long. But, including everything, you still might be right. It's difficult for an outsider to get a good sense of your rail network. It's pretty hard for an insider! The handful of lines north of the river are simple enough - they're all basically like tube lines that happen to stop at the Circle line, rather than continuing into town (barring the North London and Gospel Oak to Barking lines). South of the river, though, it's a different story - there's an untamed thicket of lines, all criscrossing and interconnecting, and it's hard to believe anyone has a solid grasp of it all. They're shown on this map: http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/pdfdocs/lon_con.pdf Which i think gives some idea of the complexity of the topology. I'm not sure how they wound up like that; for some reason, 19th-century railway bods decided it was a good idea to build lines that were halfway between radial and orbital, so now there's this matrix of overlapping spirals, plus some more sensible radials. Maybe it was because the main station for Kent, which is in the east, is Victoria, which is in the west. No idea how that happened. Yes, I'm familiar with both versions of the London Connections map. I've ridden many of the lines in the north, including all of Silverlink Metro within the zones (down to North Woolwich). But, as you say, the south is spaghetti. I've ridden several of the lines, but I don't have a good sense of operations. I wonder how most tourists get to Greenwich. I took DLR there, but I was starting out in that area anyway. Coming back, I walked to Maze Hill for the very quick trip to Cannon Street. (Of course, Oyster PAYG isn't valid there; I had a Travelcard.) -- David of Broadway New York, NY, USA |
DEcongestion zone map
David of Broadway wrote:
Here's a track map of the rail systems in the NYC region, excluding the subway, PATH, and everything west of the Hudson: http://www.richegreen.com/NYCTrackMapV3.pdf (an 8.7 MB file) Gosh! That's one hell of a piece of work. |
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