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