2012-01-24
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2012-01-17
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station timetable by smallritual on Flickr.
Steve Collins (who goes by smallritual online) has been posting scans of the nearly impossible to find Danish Design Council book on British Rail’s design and identity. As he writes of the pocket timetables, “In a sense, the invisibility of this kind of design is the point.” Certainly I look at that now as almost a work of art, whereas for most of my life it was just background.
2011-09-22
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2011-05-06
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Always good advice, this. (via Bossiness is in the eye of the beholder | Quad Royal, via unreliablewitness via pandemian via nevver)
2011-04-04
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An SFMTA information leaflet on “bike boxes”, from the SF Bike Coalition’s report, New Bike Boxes Arrive on Market Street.
In London, where these are called ASLs (Advance Stop Lanes) and are all over the place, I don’t know if there have needed to be informational leaflets about them. On the other hand, they’re routinely ignored (not just by the obvious scooter and motorcycle culprits, but also by pretty much anything with an engine, if they want to), so perhaps it’s not such a bad idea.
2011-01-20
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2011-01-12
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John Bull in How Do You Solve A Problem Like Southeastern? at London Reconnections (via iamdanw).
The post explains why the train operator had so many problems both with snow, and with getting their updated timetable to their customers. It’s well worth reading.
2010-03-08
Licence Fees Across Europe
After reading one too many commentary pieces on the fall-out of the BBC’s Digital Strategy Review, and hearing the odd friend suggest that the British didn’t know how good they had it, I decided to complile a Google spreadsheet of TV licence fees across Europe.
Once I had a first version out, Chris suggested that I should add a column stating whether there was an ad-free state broadcaster, and that’s there now; there’s also a heatmap visualisation.
Unfortunately, the GBP Equivalent column seems a bit fragile- Google Finance hiccups every now and again and it doesn’t work. Publishing also seems not to allow nice formatting (‘£145.20’ not ‘145.2’), so I’m linking directly to the editing page. Still, hopefully there’s stuff of interest for people there.
2009-11-06
More on NY Subway LCD Maps
The always-informative Martin Deutsch pointed out that the LCD strip maps are standard on the new R160B subway stock. It turns out they’ve been entering service since 2007, as covered in the New York Times City Room blog, after a 2005 mockup.
Of course, this being America (land of the PATRIOT act, etc) they have a suspiciously apposite acronym: FIND, Flexible Information and Notice Display. One wonders how long that took compared to actually building them. Martin also notes that “The previous generation used strip maps with LED indicators which, IMO, are more readable, but less useful when they move trains to other lines. They do have a ’Route change - listen for announcements’ (or similar) light for that occasion.”
