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