When we made our Tube Strike map a few weeks ago, it was picked up on, championed and re-tweeted lots by the nice people at Infogr8 – who have just released ‘The state of #dataviz in 2014‘ – and they nicely features us, along with the map, so we thought we’d do the nice thing and plug them back, and to mention to take a look at the rather good PDF they’ve just produced with all manner of data stories for you to feast upon (including ourselves!).
Infogr8
Meanwhile, back on the Barcelona subway – here’s something else that we saw at almost every station and really liked. Station Master is all about giving you a visualisation of a station and telling you what is the best exit position to be in on the train, and here’s something simple which London Underground don’t do (but they could) which would aid just that.
They have street map diagrams at all stations, and on them they show where the platforms physically lie below street level, and they then mark on with a bright ‘M’ where the entrance/exit point is to the Metro. This acts as a great guide for helping you work out which end of a train you should be at to be at the nearest point to you above ground destination. Maybe it’s something we could try out in Station Master …
Street Map Diagrams
Our other Station Master notes that this will be something that will be very important to know in London when Crossrail opens in just under 5 years time (December 2018).
The platforms in the central tunnelled section are 250 metres long; so while at Bond Street Crossrail station for example, one entrance will be physically next to the current Bond Street Underground station the other entrance will be in Hanover Square (think behind the Apple Store at Regent Street). Likewise, at Liverpool Street Crossrail station, one entrance is over the road from Liverpool Street station itself (with a connection to the Underground there) while the other entrance is actually in Moorgate, again with a connection to the Underground – get the wrong end of the train at stations like these and you’re in for a long walk from one end of the platform to the other or perhaps even a longer one at the surface!
This weekend’s map fun comes in the form of a very geeky game that you can play with your tube-loving friends.
Print this out … the blank tube map, with all the stations removed! Then in a way similar to “pin the tail on the donkey”, shout out some tricky station names, and the person playing has to point to where they think it is on the map. Oxford Circus, Earl’s Court and Baker Street are of course easy, but getting them to get totally correct places like Northwood Hills, Redbridge and Becontree suddenly becomes a lot harder!
Blanked Out Tube Map
This Station Master got to go overseas last week, and took several photos whilst he was there – the location? Barcelona in Spain, where the the TMB (Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona) rattles around the city. It too has 11 lines like London, but fewer stations – 163 in total.
Our two favourite things we spotted were the ‘Next train’ indicators on the platforms which counted down in minutes and seconds, how long before the next train would be in the platform available for boarding – and it was spot on, when it reached ‘zero’ was the moment that the train was opening its doors on the platforms.
The other thing we liked was inside the carriages on the trains – instead of just a simple map, it was lit up with lights showing you the progress of the train as it went along so you could see much more quickly where you were and what station was next.
Lit up Line Diagram
We’d like to think that if TfL/LU do introduce driver-less trains at some point in the future, that they’ll also look at every other metro system in the world (including Barcelona which has three driver-less lines) and take on board some of the feature and ideas and incorporate them into London’s trains.
Send in your 150 old memories
We saw this sign up at Latimer Road during the week as we passed through, and several things occurred to us.
We didn’t realise that the H&C line was having a ‘150 book’ all to itself – surely when the whole of the Underground is celebrating being 150 years old, surely it’s the Metropolitan Line that should be doing it. Ok yes, this branch of the H&C used to be served by Met trains, but then why the H&C coloured branding?
I’m not sure that anyone alive today, will have old photos/stories from 150 years ago… mainly because they’re not alive.
Oh, and it’s March .. and the poster is still up despite asking people to send in things by the end of December 2013.
Methinks that not a lot of people sent anything in …
The other day we had the fun of TubeWhacking which sucked a fair few minutes out of Station Masters day when we should be hard at work. Today, we have something even better which has totally distracted us this morning, and it’s been totally worth it for the fun involved. Introducing … Mini Metro!
Create Your Own Metro System!
No, not the car – but a game where you build and develop your own subway system, you get to draw lines, connect stations, build tunnels under rivers and add carriages to the trains on your line.
All the time your metro system grows – as do the number of people travelling on it, and the aim of the game is to go as long as you can with getting a ‘Station Overcrowded!’ message which is when you lose.
We’ve played it for over an hour solid this morning, and our passenger high score number was 341.
Beware. It’s terribly addictive, and yet so much fun! Which is why we recommend you go and play it immediately!
This still tends to confuse us .. especially if we get onto the train at Stockwell or Euston. Think you’ve got onto a Northern Line train? You have! It’s just that the units that have been refurbished for a moment make you look twice at the line diagram on the carriage wall because you think from the bright shiny floor pattern that you’re in a Victoria Line carriage.
Victoria Line Carriage?
Then you see the dark blue grab poles (You know… Dark blue, the colour of the Northern Line) and the seat patterns and all is good. But it still doesn’t look very ‘Northern’ to us, more Victorian!
This is the best tube related thing we’ve seen in ages. We love this site.
The classic St. Johns’ Wood is the only station not to contain any of the letters from the word ‘Mackerel’ is a long-term established tube fact, as (was recently discovered) that Woodford is the only station not to contain any letters from the word ‘Stickleback’.
We mentioned this a while ago with some other variants we know, but now there’s a site… this simple beautiful site by Ben Green which let’s you ‘Whack’ your own words to see which tube station may be the only only not to contain those letters.
TubeWhacking
And it’s not just the London Tube, but it works for the Paris Metro, German U-Bahn, and even has a ‘Wombling’ option for London, to include Overground stations too. Genius!
Station Master got an interesting piece of mail in the post today from his credit card who informed him that their Oyster-enabled Credit Card (OnePulse) was being phased out and would no longer be valid for use after June of this year.
“It’s being replaced with a new Freedom Credit Card!” said the literature – which sounded a bit close to a ‘Freedom Pass’ for my liking (we’re not that old .. yet), but also highlighted the fact that it would still be able to be used for Contactless journeys on buses (as already) and tube journeys when the system is enabled later in the year.
Card Clash
But TfL are worried that this is going to lead to Card Clash – so much so that signs have been appearing at tube stations already, even though the system isn’t due to go live yet. If you have an Oyster card AND contactless card in the same wallet, and you don’t get an read error on the gate, you could easily fall foul of touching in with one, and touching out with another – leading you to have an incomplete journey on BOTH cards, which (at peak hours) could cost you £8.50 for each – seventeen quid in total! Well done TfL for pointing this out in advance, but it’s not going to stop it happening, and there are going to be some very angry people when this happens to them.
The solution? Keep your Oyster card in a separate wallet (like, we already do) and not in your main wallet or purse, to avoid the clash happening…
BuzzFeed who are normally so good at just propagating other people’s material, did something unusual this week – they created and distributed their own tube map variant, based on “What you would actually truthfully find at each stations…”. Click on it for the larger version.
Truthful Tube Map