Monday 8 January 2007

to get on the bus that takes me to you

It's been a while since the TfL journey planner has been *quite* that obtuse.

If I leave my house and turn right, I am about an 8 minute walk to the nearest tube station, A. If I leave my house and turn left, I am about a 3 minute walk from the nearest bus stop, and about 15 mins past that the second nearest tube station, B.

TfL have a horrible habit of telling me to take a bus to station B to start all my journeys. (They suffer from the benign delusion that buses happen at regular intervals on the relevant routes ... this far out of the centre that just doesn't happen.) I've got in the habit of plotting my journeys from 'Station A' rather than from my house to work around this problem.

On Saturday night I was venturing south of the river to meet up with some friends. I wanted to check that the pub we had arranged to meet at was the one I vaguely remembered, so popped over to BeerintheEvening, who have the TfL planner embedded in their site in such a way as it only takes postcodes.

TfL did not want me to take a bus to station B. Oh no. That would be predictable. They wanted me to take *two* buses, to get to Station A.

Station A that is, if you recall, a ten minute walk, tops. Estimated travel time for that part of the journey by bus? 18 to 24 minutes ....

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

TfL have a horrible habit of telling me to take a bus to station B to start all my journeys. (They suffer from the benign delusion that buses happen at regular intervals on the relevant routes ...) I've got in the habit of plotting my journeys from 'Station A' rather than from my house to work around this problem.

Aye. I'm used to that one. It's partly because their 'logic' is set to have walking as the least preferable option - hence having to set the "walking speed" and the "I'll walk if it's faster" box to get any reasonable instructions. I think there's also a "maximum walking time" box as well, but I'm not sure. I've got used to calculating from stations myself, too ...