2010-12-04
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Oliver O’Brien in Where is London? on Suprageography, as quoted (more or less) by Martin Deutsch.
This is part of the post I was responding to with Concentric Londons, but Martin’s post reminded me that I should also have a little Proustian fugue on the subject of AA handbooks. As Oliver writes, they contained strip maps of the UK’s motorways, with the details cut back to just the intersections. Each had a carefully designed diagram, so the different designs of the four-level stack at the M25/M4 interchange was clearly different from the whirlpool of the nearby M25/M3 junction.
As with the London Underground diagram, which made the complexity of the city above irrelevant to me as a child visiting the Natural History Museum, the AA diagrams made the long stretches of road between Suffolk and Scotland easy to understand and handle.
I don’t imagine my parents kept the handbooks (certainly I can’t remember seeing one for ages), and there’s barely any record of them online. If you want an idea of what they looked like, though, you could do worse than visit the exit list pages (for example, for the London-Swansea M4) on the wonderful CBRD. If anyone does ever come across a mid-1980s AA Member’s Handbook, though, I’d love to see scans of the originals.
2010-11-08
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Figure 14: Followers of τism seek the way of the τ
from The Tau Manifesto by Michael Hartl, which argues that τ (= 2π) would be a more useful physical constant.
2010-10-14
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ETOOMANYBUSES (by rjp)
There are a lot of buses in South London, it turns out.
2010-09-02
High Frequency Maps: A London Perspective
Human Transit has recently published a call for public transport systems to use frequency as a base for mapping, which I noticed from this post on Chicago (via mattb on the daily chump).
As a European and a Londoner, the first thing that strikes me is that, for a major city, Chicago has what seems a very poor transport network. The only line that can claim a wait of less than 7.5 minutes on weekdays is a 79th street bus. By contrast, the entire Tube network in London has typical expected waits of about three to eight minutes, dropping as low as almost one train a minute for busy lines at peak.
In fact, the Tube (and, from what I’ve seen, Berlin U-bahn and Paris Metro services) appears to have such little variation that it’s questionable whether such an approach makes any sense. The only thing I think tourists may gain from it is a sense that the Circle line is less frequent than the District and Metropolitan services that it shares tracks with; the deep tube lines would be much of a muchness.
That’s not to say that service variations don’t matter. There’s been a to-and-fro in the tube diagram design ever since it was invented, with dashed lines and, more recently, crosses indicating peak-only lines and interchanges. Currently the map has dispensed with the detail, relegating it to footnotes, but in-car diagrams on the Northern line (one of the most fiddly) do a good job of conveying the way interchanges at Kennington and to Mill Hill East work.
There might be more of a call for it on buses, but one of the most egregious failures noted in the original post (mixing night and day buses) hasn’t been done in London for years, as far as I know. There is a fair bit of variation between very high frequency buses (like the 38 and 73, which should be every minute or three) and those further out in the suburbs which are only every fifteen minutes. On the other hand, putting the entire London bus network on paper takes five maps, four of which are vast; there might not be the room to do it effectively.
One place where frequency is already indicated in London, though, is the Oyster Rail Services map (PDF). However, this used to be done nicely with thin lines for infrequent services and thicker ones for those with more than four trains per hour; now the dreaded cross marks those stations. Still, it does work. (I also recall seeing a map, perhaps by National Rail, that showed the number of trains per hour calling at each station; Clapham Junction and Vauxhall were both up in the 20s, if I’m remembering it right).
Having said all that, I’m still mildly tempted to do something with the idea for London. I can also see that it might well be necessary for US cities; can anyone make one for San Francisco, please?
2010-06-06
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Oh, very nice. Shame I can’t figure out which image it is on the original site, but no doubt you could make more of an effort, if you wanted it bigger.
2010-04-01
2010-02-16
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Victorian-era posing stand for the long exposures required by the daguerreotype process
Sadly the source page doesn’t explain what the labels are.
2009-10-04
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XB-70 Valkyrie Cutaway (posted by subnutty to the cutaways group on Flickr)
