Patrick Crozier

“It’s not much of a quid pro quo for having lived through the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward...”

The other night Michael Jennings, Brian Micklethwait and myself sat down with the intention of recording a podcast about South East Asian Metros, Michael being pretty clued up on the subject.

We started well.  We managed to keep to the subject for a good five minutes before veering off onto topics as far apart as colonial architecture and the evils of communism1 the Metropolitan Railway’s Club carriages, the importance of passenger information, maps and timetables (or lack of them), international fare system convergence and commuter escalators.

And our tendency for all talking at once continues unabated.  Oh well.

Notes
1. As evidenced by Michael’s quote at the top.

Update 11/01/08 Michael tells me that that “South” bit in the title is inaccurate.

Rob Fisher

Yesterday I observed an interesting public transport failure mode.  Floods had closed many tube stations, so people took to the buses.  The buses filled up.  People making journeys that would otherwise have been unaffected by the tube station closures were left stranded as the full buses drove past their stops.

This situation should be a good business opportunity, but with all public transport in London provided by the same organisation, I doubt the incentives are strong for extra bus services to be laid on.  No doubt taxi drivers did very well.

Brian Micklethwait

Said Transport For London:

“This is a dangerous, stupid and irresponsible act that could have resulted in serious injury or death to not only the individual concerned, but other passengers.”

Quite so.  But: wow.

Although, I wouldn’t be “wow"-ing if I had been trundling up the up escalator, and that had come hurtling down straight into me.  Which wouldn’t have happened, because:

The film’s producer said other people were not in danger as friends of the stuntman, a Norwegian national, had warned passengers away.

Oh a Norwegian? Why didn’t you say?  I love Norwegians.  Even when they ski.

Brian Micklethwait

Yes:

The increasing success of social networking websites such as MySpace and Facebook show they have an important place in the hearts of Britain’s residents. But this week Between the Lines was introduced to a site which may be one of the weirdest ever developed.

Onthesametrack.co.uk aims to match up people who travel alone on London’s Underground and overground train systems, allowing long commutes to be more enjoyable than the time usually spent with someone else’s armpit stuck in your face.

Profiles can be personalised to include pictures of the commuter and information about their lifestyle, job, relationships, and journey habits.

Users can even search for someone leaving their station, for example High Barnet, and travelling to the same destination, let’s say East Finchley, at the same time as their commute.

But what if you get attached to someone nasty or mad, asks the next paragraph?  Well, that’s true.  Better to not make friends at all, with anybody.

Personally I think that OnTheSameTrack is a recipe for Underground hell, not so much for the people who do this, but for those who have to endure their armpits and their stupid babbling.

Brian Micklethwait

Says diamond geezer:

You know how wonderful it is that mobile phones don’t work on the Underground? The fact that you can hide away on a train where the office can’t ring you? The fact that you don’t have to listen to everyone else in your carriage droning on and on to their mates while you’re fifty feet under? Well, that peace and quiet is about to end.

A new system is now about to be tried out on the Waterloo and City line, and could be all over the Tube in 2009.

And then there’ll be no escape. Make the most of being incommunicado while the silence lasts.

I find people talking on the Tube infuriating, except when I feel the need to do it myself.  For starters they shout, to make themselves heard above the din of the regular din, imagining that their extra din won’t matter, what with all the din already.  But it does matter.  Screening out regular Tube din is easy, but screening out their particular and irregular din is not.

Here are a few fun animations from Nexus (whatever that is) showing how London's rail network has grown over the last two hundred years.

Warning: big files and you'll be wanting to use the pause button and when it opens up the window may turn out to be bigger than the screen.

Jackie D

As part of the ongoing investigation into my assault, today I had to go to Baker Street station so that some evidence (a CD-ROM onto which I burned the photo I took of my attacker) could be seized from me, and so that I could give a statement about that evidence. I was told to meet the officer in “the police room”.

None of the London Underground workers at the station knew what I was talking about. I was eventually led through a door and a long hallway to where the British Transport Police have a couple of training rooms and a few offices. In the main office, five policemen were absolutely lovely to me and made sure I was comfortable as I waited for the detective to arrive from Aldgate. Amusingly, one of the officers was clearly having an email debate with someone else in the BTP, and read his reply aloud to the other men so that they could tell him he was being too harsh. “I liked the last two words,” one remarked, referring to the “kind regards” sign-off. Another two officers discussed what a shambles OASIS, the police’s central IT system, is. When I received a call on my mobile, I wandered into another office to take it; nobody tried to stop me. On the desk, there were about a dozen very nice iMate JAMs, a spiffy web-enabled phone/PDA which I owned myself (until I got tired of being connected all the time).

Eventually, the detective from Aldgate found me, and led me down another long, winding hallway, through many doors, up one floor, down another series of very smoky hallways, and into a small room. He took the evidence from me, took my statement, and the whole process lasted about half an hour. “I can’t believe this is all still done on paper,” I said to him as he wrote down my name, address, phone number, and all the other details they already had for me on yet another set of forms. “Yeah, well,” he said, smiling weakly.

What really surprised me was just how much more there is to a London Underground station like Baker Street than one would ever guess from rushing along its platforms and wandering around the halls. It was a little disconcerting, too, to note how many more cops were deep in the labyrinth and offices, immersed in bureaucracy and paper-pushing, than were visible in the station. Am I being unfair?

Jackie D

Brian blogged here about what two thugs did to me on the Underground ten days ago. Well, I’m happy to report that British Transport Police think they’re going to catch them soon. I was given a “personal guarantee” by a very sharp detective today that they would have these scumbags behind bars by the time I return from a quick trip to New York next week.

I was told by the officers who took my statement on the day of the attack that I was much better off in the hands of the BTP than I would be with London’s Metropolitan Police. If they catch these two that quickly, I guess they will have been right. 

Brian Micklethwait

Yes, incident in the Underground, endured by and reported by Jackie D, and then given an extra blog-nudge by Samizdata.

One of Jackie’s numerous commenters reckons that Jackie being attacked in the Tube, and then her photo-ing the attacker and showing it to everyone, could be a Mainstream Media story.  If Jackie blogging him and photo-ing him helps to catch this guy, that would surely be a story.

This is cool.

Via Driver Chris, who gives it a far better intro than I can muster: It's a map of the British motorway system in a London Underground style.

A deluge of diamond geezer tube trivia and profundity (tube = London Underground railway), all stations from here to here, and maybe the journey will continue a while yet.

Brian Micklethwait

Via Kristine Lowe (again) this:

Free newspapers distributed to subway commuters are a major cause of subway track flooding, a Metropolitan Transportation Authority investigative task force has found.

Leftover stacks of papers such as AM New York and Metro that blew onto the tracks and clogged drains were partially responsible for the crippling subway flood of September 8, 2004, which affected 15 subway lines, according to the task force’s findings.

Will the London Underground be next?