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.”
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New York LED Subway signage. This is amazing but if it was introduced in London, someone would probably just scrawl a cock on it. (via Big Spaceship)
I believe (but can’t find a reference on the Internet; I must have read it in a book) that the Design Research Unit experimented with backlit strip maps for the Victoria line stock in the 1960s, but had to abandon it, because maintenance would have been too expensive (and too necessary- the lights weren’t reliable). I imagine that given the technology of LEDs, they’d be able to make something like this work.
Having said that, I suspect that this might be a one-off trial device, not a full production run. (I wish there were more detail on either Vimeo or Flickr). Meanwhile, it is a nice solution to the way the New York subway runs multiple lines with the same stock down the same physical tracks, which has meant until now that strip maps often weren’t practical.
2009-03-05
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Information Pollution on the Underground Map
A wonderful illustration of just how much useless cruft TfL have wedged into the post-2000 Tube map.
