Links of the day

[brixtonbrood]

A completely unrelated post from celestialweasel about a home for retired spies in Oxford led to a long thread about Connie Willis, which led me to finally track down this lovely map which I saw in the London Transport Museum, showing what the London Tube map could look like in 2016.

And I know that if one is putting links on ones livejournal to hilarious animated parodies of major cultural epics, then they should have been put together in someone's bedroom, not created by the combined might of Lego and Lucas - however Revenge of the Brick does have some very funny jokes in it (alright, one very funny joke about General Grievous and some quite funny jokes). The sound track has atmos and a joke, but no actual dialogue - hence can be watched at work without losing too much.

Comments

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

Gosh what a map, especially with the transit lines in place. It started making my brain ache looking at it, as it provides so many alternative routes to any place. Mind you, that provides the redundancy we don't have now, as illustrated by this snapshot map shows, with Paddington looking very lonely. BBC London's traffic reports on Sunday had a very sorry list of a dozen bits of the tube network closed, and makes me glad I'm not trying to navigate the capital a the moment.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

See also TFL's real-time version of the same sort of thing. Doesn't look too bad today!

[pmcray.livejournal.com]

We want exciting deep bore tubes in the centre of London. I'm unconvinced that ther various transits will ever come into being and if they do whether they'll be anything more interesting than glorified trams. The Croydon Tramlink isn't terribly thrilling.

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

Depending on the usage levels, trams can be much cheaper than deep bore, but have the ability to get people out of their cars in the way that busses don't.

[brixtonbrood.livejournal.com]

have the ability to get people out of their cars in the way that busses don't
How very provincial/20th century of you. KL proved pretty conclusively in his first term that most motorists are not in fact complete morons. If you push enough money into the bus service to make the routes really convenient and frequent, and not too overcrowded, and make the buses accessible to the vast majority of users, and charge a significant fee for driving into the central zone at peak hours, and impose bus lanes pretty much anywhere people might want to drive, and put enough cameras on them that you can't get away with infringements, and councils continue to make parking in the central zone either expensive or illegal (ie very expensive), and advertise all these facts heavily Then _eventually_ even an averagely snobbish motorist will look at the busses whizzing past him in the bus lanes and think..hang on chaps, I think I've got an idea.
The phrase "not rocket science" leaps to mind.
However, it is true that trams have a bit less of an image hurdle to overcome so may get people out of their cars easier (some of the increase in bus use is almost certainly people who would otherwise have walked or stayed at home) - whether that's worth the additional cost/time/inflexibility is a judgement call.

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

... and very 'London' of you to call this map 'wonderful' but to suggest that 'whether (trams are)worth the additional cost/time/inflexibility is a judgment call' :-)
Anyway, I was comparing light rail with new deep bore not with buses in response to pmcray's comment. Indeed, in Birmingham the Conservative opposition are saying 'we shouldn't have another crummy light rail line for a few hundred million, we should have a proper underground for a few billion', thereby probably ensuring they end up with nothing.

[brixtonbrood.livejournal.com]

The map is lovely because it's intriguing and actually translates all the stuff I've vaguely read about into a single visual form - not necessarily because everything on it is a good idea (except for the tram that goes from the end of my road up to Waterloo - that's clearly worth every penny).

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

At the end of the road, eh? Now, if you were in Birmingham there would be probably lots of people saying 'oh, we don't want one of them round here' (actually I believe when a survey was done a lot of people in Ealing were against the west London one too).
I have a modest proposal for a monorail between Oxford and London on the lines of the one in Shanghai between airport and city. I believe it should be able to do it in about 20 minutes!

Tube maps

[example22.livejournal.com]

Here are more tube maps than you can shake a stick at. Be prepared to waste hours...