please empty your brain below
but it is a *very* nice, shiny map.....

petoskystone | 23.01.09 - 1:27 a.m. | #

Oh wow, it's hard to know where to start with this.

2116 steps between Bank and Moorgate? *Really*?

I do find myself shunning bits of underground in favour of walking sometimes: during rush hour Liverpool Street mainline to Waterloo can be as easily (and quickly) done by foot as far as Bank as it can be ploughing onto a Central Line train for one stop and negotiating the bowels of the Bank/Monument complex. Similarly, getting from to South London in previous years from my neck of the woods, ditching the overland at Bethnal Green and walking to Whitechapel for the East London Line could cut out a lot of grief in zone 1 (and expense, for the discerning z234 season ticket holder).

Nico | Homepage | 23.01.09 - 2:16 a.m. | #

Nice work DG. You've got to be skeptical about any report which reports values to four significant figures. There should be some form of peer review for hack journalists and PR people.

Aaron Dale | 23.01.09 - 5:30 a.m. | #

The blatant errors are so screaming, it shouldn't be hard to find the author: Go to the PR company's xmas dinner, he'll be the porker. He doesn't know the first thing about calories and he never walks in London.

Ham | Homepage | 23.01.09 - 6:58 a.m. | #

This is brilliant! Shows it up for the PR guff it is, and it's not even accurate PR guff. Just goes to show once again that people should never take newspapers for gospel - it's frightening how many people do.

Jayne | Homepage | 23.01.09 - 8:20 a.m. | #

One could apply this sort of analysis to almost all 'surveys' and figures/statistics published, of course.

The thing is, most people don't, won't or can't. And so the game goes on.

Blue Witch | Homepage | 23.01.09 - 8:46 a.m. | #

My main reason for shamefully taking the tube when it would be quicker to walk is fear of getting lost - I have the worst sense of direction imaginable. So let's hear it for the *simplest* routes between stations. How about Euston to Kings Cross?

Sarah | Homepage | 23.01.09 - 8:59 a.m. | #

Use the stairs to exit on the deeper lines.

I've often schlepped my way up them at Goodge St - splendid exercise providing there's someone with a defribilator at the top.

martinevans.uk | 23.01.09 - 9:05 a.m. | #

The thought of Monument to King’s Cross being quickest by following the Circle Line struck me as bizarre, although I missed the bit about it being from Pru Health; I was too busy looking at the pretty picture... Oh well, if someone’s daft enough to think that tube map works as an A-Z, then they may well fall for the rest of the piece.

Chaz | Homepage | 23.01.09 - 9:10 a.m. | #

I'm still reeling from the 'a double vodka has 30 calories' line. Surely that gave the game away right there.

SSS | Homepage | 23.01.09 - 9:43 a.m. | #

It appears that some of the numbers may be off because testers counted paces rather than steps.

Cannon Street to Monument at 99 paces would equal 198 steps, which is much closer to your measurement of 223. If the person is taller or has a longer stride, then that would explain the number.

Josh | 23.01.09 - 10:49 a.m. | #

I agree all that's media bollocks. However, I really do walk between Bank and King's Cross most days and if you cut through the back streets via Hatton Garden it's a pleasant 40 minute walk. It's infinitely more pleasurable than being stuffed on the Northern Line for 20 minutes.

Johnny Topaz | 23.01.09 - 11:01 a.m. | #

If you head north from Cannon Street you very quickly end up at the westernmost exit of Bank station, so conceivably the Bank-Monument complex is within 99 paces.

dg writes: Already checked that, by walking. It's just over 200 steps, definitely not less than 100.

Graham | Homepage | 23.01.09 - 11:09 a.m. | #

It's a shame the lazy PRs chose to use the unrealistic shortcut of adding up the steps between stations to create the examples. The necessary data to do it properly is readily available from the tfl journey planner, unselect all forms of transport and it'll use you own customisable walking pace from which it should be possible to derive the number of steps.
I'd love to get my hands on the innards of journey planner/traveline, it's quite an amazing bit of software and there's so much potential for discovering trivial or useful things in its database.
If the journey planner had an API you can bet there'd be an iPhone app that suggests routes based on your diet within minutes.

Philb | Homepage | 23.01.09 - 11:22 a.m. | #

Shome mishtake shurely, Mish Moneypenny? I would have thought that the shortest distance was between Charing Cross and Embankment, but that distance isnt even given.

Please please PLEASE tell me where I can buy some of this 30-calories-a-double vodka, which would probably go down very well with some 40-calories-a-slice chocolate cake.

Capability Bowes | Homepage | 23.01.09 - 12:56 p.m. | #

I actually like the idea, but pedometers are not very accurate. Why not issue the people with a GPS and measure the exact distance? If you must have the map showing "footsteps" rather than distance, then work out the average distance the average person walks in a single step and do the maths accordingly. London Bridge to Monument also looks very high.

Jon Combe | 23.01.09 - 1:04 p.m. | #

I have made the mistake of thinking it's not too far between Kings Cross St Pancras and Farringdon, on the map they are so, so close to each other but in real life it's a ruddy long trek.

Adam S | Homepage | 23.01.09 - 1:47 p.m. | #

Is this what they call "fisking"? You're not Ben Goldacre, by any chance?

Well done!

Autolycus | Homepage | 23.01.09 - 3:56 p.m. | #

OK. The figures are not correct but I don't get your last paragraph. Why does it not make sense to get off the tube early if it is a "great idea to walk more each day"?

dg writes: The relevant important word in that last paragraph is "six".

Mike | 23.01.09 - 5:17 p.m. | #

I think it's good to walk between tube stations, particularly in the summer. A lot of walks are pretty easy-going as well. From Covent Garden, you can easily get to the Strand, Trafalgar Square, Leicester Square, Charing Cross and Holborn, leaving Covent Garden's own tube station semi-redundant. Liverpool Street to Bank or Moorgate is also straight-forward, as is Waterloo to Embankment (just across Hungerford Bridge).

As for the map, wouldn't it be more sensible to measure it in miles, rather than steps?

Andrewh | 23.01.09 - 8:08 p.m. | #

As soon as I saw the "99 paces" bit on the Beeb's website I realised this was guff. Hell, that's only across the road and back!

I do agree that there are a lot of people who think that London is composed of discrete 200m-radius circles round each Tube station, and when they suddenly discover that they can walk from, say, the edge of the Covent Garden circle (Drury Lane) to the edge of the Holborn one (the Princess Louise) in about 2 mins, they are amazed!

The number of South Londoners who come into Charing Cross by train, then go Northern/Piccadilly line to Covent Garden (walking about the same distance along passageways as the actual walk to CG - and taking about 10 mins longer) must be huge. Their Charing Cross circle ends at about the Edith Cavell statue by St Martin-in-the-Fields and the Covent Garden one doesn't start till Stanfords, so they don't connect them up. (The Leicester Square one only goes from the Bear & Staff to the Sussex so that doesn't connect either).

kenromford | 24.01.09 - 1:06 p.m. | #

hah! fabulous investigative blogging.

CRAiG | Homepage | 24.01.09 - 6:51 p.m. | #

"No sane person would walk from King's Cross to Farringdon just for the exercise, it's a 2km trek." Well, I used to walk from KX to the corner of Farringdon Street and Clerkenwell Road, which isn't far from the station, and I used to do it about once a week.

Mind you, I wasn't just doing it for the exercise (I dislike the Metropolitan line, or more precisely, the fact it's shared with the H&C and Circle and hence unreliable), and I'm not sure I'm entirely sane (I once walked from Muswell Hill to Croydon, to see how far you could get if you walked all day), so perhaps your point stands.

Paul Mison | Homepage | 31.01.09 - 8:42 p.m. | #











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