please empty your brain below

and the trouble with personal downloadable timetables is that they are not always right. The 15:34 from London to Tring has always stopped at Harrow and Wealdstone (well at leat in my 40 year odd memory of my DAD and I commuting) but my personal timetable for the current period (may 10 to September 10) insists it's first stop is Watford Junction (and personal experience on the daily commute says it does stop there and Bushey too!)

Daggers! The map needs little tiny red daggers. Yes, that's what it needs.

(Where are the wheelchair blobs, too?)

The river might be slow, but in the heat of summer it is much more comfortable than the Underground. The fold-out leaflet is really nasty, but the river buses are a bit erratic. The people at TfL need to take a trip to Venice to see how it is done there, although all those stairs would give them appoplexy.

'Scuse me DG, but your North London bias is showing here. Why would anyone wanting to get from Greenwich to London trundle up to the Doome, descend umpteen flights of escalators and struggle onto the UndergrounD when they could just pop onto a proper train, one stop from London Bridge? (With the added delight of travelling along the world's largest brick structure, and London's oldest railway?) I am constantly amazed that people from north of the Thames think that the lucky dwellers on the south should actually prefer to travel in congested, overheated tube trains rather than proper trains with fresh air and views.

If the river service sorted its fares out properly they'd get more users. It's £4.90 to go one stop in the central area - and a lot of the operators won't give you an Oyster discount unless you have a travelcard on your Oyster. We made the mistake of going from Embankment to Blackfriars on it the other day, which cost us nearly a tenner. We could have got a bloody taxi for that. The speed restriction before Tower Bridge is utterly silly, too. Why? It's not like there are huge volumes of traffic on the river - and there ought to be. The river is tragically wasted as a resource, and it needn't be.

Transport operators and indeed other "service providers" always assume their customers are stupid, often while simultaneously presuming that they can follow ridiculously complicated procedures like robots.

When NSE/Connex introduced the Class 465 Networker stock in SE London, they were surprised when passengers objected to the removal of the two-digit "headcodes". Nobody taught me the meaning of the headcodes, yet after 15 years hanging around on London Bridge station waiting for connections I had learned the headcodes almost by osmosis. They provided routing as well as destination information and on occasion the headcode of an approaching train was the *only* passenger information available.

The headcodes have gone now, but I'll wager the current traffic managers at Southeastern would be surprised at just how adept passengers have become at distinguishing approaching Class 376 (5-car) and Class 465 (mostly 4-car) trains head on at 400 yards. This information affects the stopping position of the train at the platform and getting it right can avoid the need for a desperate sprint not all of us are in condition for.

Roger said: "Why would anyone wanting to get from Greenwich to London trundle up to the Dome, descend umpteen flights of escalators and struggle onto the UndergrounD when they could just pop onto a proper train, one stop from London Bridge?"

I have no idea why. However, my example was North Greenwich to Waterloo, which is much more sensible on the tube.

Personally, I am rather surprised by the presence of a compass on the map. Makes me wonder if that is some sort of requirement for a nautical map, even one that is basic and diagrammatical...

River Boat services are underutilised for one simple reason - they are not a proper part of the Travelcard system. The discount offered to Oyster holders is half baked and still adds up to a premium service. To put simply - it costs far too much when the alternatives are a lot cheaper and quicker.

Once/if the boats get included as part of the Travelcard user numbers will rise as many Londoners (such as myself) would prefer to take a few minutes longer on the Thames rather than sweat it out on the underground.

I think that a boat service must be inherently more expensive to run than any other type of service. It requires more staff, the vehicles need more maintenance and need to be replaced more often. Boats run more slowly, and therefore more vehicles are needed to provide an acceptable level of service.

A day pass for Venice costs around 24 Euros, even the we're-total-bastards-lets-rip-off-the-tourists Paris Visite costs only 9 Euros for a day pass.

So, if boats were included in the travel card scheme, there would have to be a big element of subsidy there.

I think the biggest failure of this map is that it's difficult to tell which side of the river the different piers are on. I live on a barge on the river so I like to think I'm more clued-up about this stuff than most landlubbers, and even I was confused here...











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