Bus Arrivals Boards

I don't know how long this info has been available but I noticed today that you can now see bus arrival times in the same way as for trains. On the LU web site you can select a location to bring up a street map then click on a bus stop symbol on the map and up pops a list of the buses due to call there with estimated times of arrival. I don't travel much by bus but for those who do this information is a real boon. I wonder if there is a smart-phone app for it? Bus travellers have it worse in some ways because they have nobody to ask if the buses don't run. At least we have the pleasure of clicking on a big green "Help" button and hearing a recorded announcement that there is nobody available to answer the call.

I exaggerate, of course [No! Really?: Ed]. In the main there is plenty of information about the state of the Tube and I think the service level has been pretty good in recent months. I don't bother about the Help buttons because I can see on the phone how the trains are running. It is not easy to convey how amazing this facility still is to me. I once stood for an hour at a bus stop, ignorant that they had cancelled the services for a while.  I have spent God knows how many hours wondering where my Piccadilly service had got to - in the bad old days when I had to go that way into London. The buses may be stuck in traffic and the trains held up by signal failures but at least you can get to know about it and knowledge is power.

A matter of timing

There has been some interest, in the local online paper in Ruislip, the Ruislip Online forum and on District Dave, about changes to the Metropolitan Line timetable due to commence in December. They want to move from the current 10 trains per hour at peak times and 6 off peak, to a steady 8 tph all day. The reasoning behind this is not at all clear. The system has always run more trains at peak because, well, peak means peak, dunnit? That's when more passengers travel. Having more trains off peak that will be simply be emptier than at present, whilst forcing more people to stand for longer thanks to the fewer seats in the new S stock trains as well as a reduced service, seems fairly illogical, Captain.

Having to wait a minute or so longer for a train to arrive is neither here or there. The problem is that they fill up so quickly and any delay, or longer gap in the normal service, makes it unpleasant to travel the relatively long distance to central London. However if, as may also be planned, there will be more fast trains from Harrow then changing there may make more sense than at present, where you never quite know if the so-called fast train will actually overtake the slow train you left and whether you will get a seat on it.


These are considerations lost to passengers on all the other lines (perhaps with the exception of the District/Piccadilly junction at Acton Town) and I think they are therefore not important to the people planning the Met schedules. Shame really. When you have to pay zone 6 fares, you might at least be sure of a seat. Just think, once upon a time the Met proudly ran Pullman coaches out to Amersham, Aylesbury and on into the wilds of outer Buckinghamshire. Of course, in those days it was a proper railway service, not a business with "customers".

A Withdrawal of Service

The title of today's post may mislead you into thinking this another groan of despair about gaps in the tube schedules. It is not. It is a warning that things may be changing around here. [he is referring to this blog: Ed]. My working routine has changed significantly since the summer and I now go into my office at Waterloo no more than 2 times a week. And what do I do the rest of the time you may well ask? Well, ask away, for you ask in vain. This blog is about commuting and not about my private life, albeit that I may have made the occasional reference to non-work doings in the past.

So today's question for the panel is - does going into London twice a week constitute commuting, by which I mean real, old-fashioned,<start Yorkshire accent> when I were a lad we had to travel 26 hours a day and thank railway company for t'privilege <end accent>, sort of commuting? Because it doesn't really feel like commuting. Partly because I am no particular obligation to be at my office at a given time, partly because the knowledge that one is not travelling tomorrow makes it so much easier to face, and even enjoy, going in today. On the other hand I continue to be reliant under the good offices of London Underground to make it possible to leave beautiful Ruislip and venture, gasp, south of the river. The raison d'etre of this blog has therefore not really changed. But perhaps the emphasis may shift from the daily struggle with packed trains to a more eclectic, ephemeral, nay, evanescent, view of life in the subway. [I am waiting for "eldritch" to make its long overdue appearance: Ed]

Standing for it

As the unseasonable heatwave continues, in the south-east at any rate, it was sweltering down in the Tube this afternoon. A nicely air-conditioned "S" stock provided some relief up from Baker Street to Harrow but sadly no spare seats so it was stand all the way for me and many others. LU invited me by email to undertake a survey into the new trains the other day, and I duly went to their website and filled in a set of "satisfied" and "very unsatisfied" and the like on the usual multi-choice questions (Did I like the grab-bars? being something they obviously consider important), and when given the chance, hammered home the point that there are not enough seats on trains intended for relatively long journeys. But it is futile. The design of the S stock was fixed long ago, the trains are being made and we won't get any new ones for another 50 years. So why ask for opinions now?

A turn-up for the book*

My old dad liked to describe any unlikely event that actually occurred as a turn-up for the book. We've certainly had one of those this week as the temperatures in London have soared to the mid 20s and seem set fair through the weekend. It felt as hot in the sun today as it had a couple of weeks ago when we were in Spain. And to crown it all, I am not going in to the office until next week and so can enjoy this last burst of the summer of 2011 without having to face the undoubted pressure-cooker of the tube. Oh joy.

*[This title has been used once before. In Feb 2009. Just to show you I am on the case: Ed]