Thursday, March 27, 2014

Tube website "upgrade" - Will somone tell me what is going on?

It used to be easy, using the London Underground website, to see what trains were due at any station, making it easy to plan your travel. You can also use dedicated apps for smartphones. And just as well because while those apps continue to be well designed and useful, TFL have revamped their website and ruined it. Look at this picture which is supposed to show arrivals at Ruislip Manor:


The eastbound arriving train is designated as both Metropolitan and Piccadilly as are the first two Uxbridge-bound. And then we apparently have two Piccs followed by two Mets, each arriving in tandem. What on earth? The line controllers know which is which. My smartphone app knows. But they can't put that info on the website (and don't get me started on the platform electronic displays which still, after 8 years, show nothing except the direction of travel and they even get that wrong! (They show London-bound as southbound, rather than eastbound). Curiously, the direction of travel is correctly shown on the website example.

So, if I need to know when the next eastbound Met is due in, no point in wasting time looking at the official website. By the way, the "check front of train" is another symptom of one part of the organisation not talking to the other because, of course, the destination of each train is assigned before it starts each journey.

Perhaps these are just little glitches and will be sorted soon. On a more positive note, you can now see bus arrivals at the station as well so credit to TFL for this bit of long overdue integration.


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