notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

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?

Can You Change Some Change?

There’s been a bit of buzz about the Dollar ReDe$ign project, especially the Dowling Duncan and Raffael Hannemann entries. There’s one thing that’s bothering me, though.

If this is truly an attempt to consider radical change for US banknotes, the spec should eliminate the one dollar bill. Sure, redesign the $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100, but if you’re thinking big, cut the little one.

I can’t think of another Western currency that has paper money worth so little. The UK eliminated the old 10 shilling note in 1969, replacing it with the decimal 50p piece; the pound note hasn’t been produced in England and Wales since the pound coin was introduced in the mid-’80s, and it was formally withdrawn in 1988. The smallest UK banknote is the fiver. The dollar is currently worth 64p.

Similarly, the smallest Euro note is €5, with €1 and €2 coins. Denmark and Norway both start at 50 krone, which is also roughly worth £5. The Czech Republic recently phased out their 20 Kč note, which was worth 66p, in favour of coins and the 50 Kč note.

Meanwhile, the US Mint is complaining nobody uses dollar coins, while no doubt dollar bills wear out terrifying quickly (just like the old UK ten bob note did). Maybe the shift from cash to electronic transactions will save the dollar from itself, but that seems like wishful thinking. Perhaps some Americans reading this can understand: why is the dollar bill so entrenched?

Watching For Attribution

bojo:

So, apparently this picture got picked up by the world we live in and is now doing the rounds. Great!

Only trouble is that Tumblr makes it really hard to know this stuff is being shared. It’s only because I saw an unusual amount of activity that I went into my Flickr stats and discovered that it had more than 500 notes from other Tumblrs! Surely there’s a better way for me to know what’s happening to my stuff? Can’t somebody join the dots?

Hm. Once you know something is on Tumblr, tracking it is easy: likes and reblogs tend to show up in templates, and if they don’t, there’s the API (or the Dashboard) to see. From that point of view it’s better than Twitter, where you get no visibility on favourites, although it’s probably only on a par with Flickr, which has the aforementioned stats for pro users, and Recent Activity (including showing who faved things) for everyone.

For the larger point, though, I suppose there might be a programmatic way of doing that. Google’s profile (based, I believe, on link rel=me data) knows that I have husk.org, flickr.com/photos/blech and notes.husk.org, and so Tumblr could (if they were so inclined) notify me on my dashboard if something from any of them were linked to.

I can imagine it taking quite a lot of niggly (and hard-to-scale) code, and things would probably still fall through the gaps, but it might be a nice thing for Tumblr to do to counter the perception that it’s just about the mindless reblogging.

Amazing. Fantastic. Wonderful.

There’s a word I’m desperately trying not to use. That word is “Awesome”.

I don’t know how much of it is the reflexive use it seems to have on the internet, and how much is English snobbery, but I really don’t like using the word. I’m pedantic enough to think that something described with it should inspire a sense of awe, rather than just being momentarily amusing or impressive.

Also, it’s not as if (British?) English is lacking in synonyms. The title of this post contains three I thought of without trouble, and I’m sure with a bit more effort I could come up with a few more.

I suppose this is a plea to help with my self-policing. If you catch me saying That Word, and I don’t notice myself (usually I do, and mumble a very short version of this post) then feel free to give me a stern look. Thanks.

Death of a London Icon

This is a London taxi.

It’s iconic, and suited for London’s streets. It has a short wheelbase and hence a tiny turning circle; handy for the City’s narrow roads. The shape is internationally recognised. Sadly, they’re no longer all black - advertising wraparounds did for that - but they’re still a design classic.

Unfortunately, nowadays, this is also a London taxi.

This is a Mercedes van, compete with a horribly ugly stripe paintjob. It doesn’t have the same narrow wheelbase, and it certainly doesn’t have the iconic design.

This isn’t exactly a new change, though. I believe the regulations were changed to allow Mercedes to enter the market at least a year ago. Nonetheless, there’s been far less outcry of this change than there was when bendy buses replaced double deckers (sometimes, replacing the much-loved Routemasters on the same lines).

Personally, though, I’m far more annoyed by the presence of these ugly new taxis than I ever was by the (now doomed, thanks to Boris) bendy buses. At least they still looked like a London bus (since there’ve always been a few single-deck services, admittedly more commonly outside the centre). By contrast, t here’s something offputting about these new taxis.

I wonder what accounts for the lack of complaint. Is it the fact that taxi drivers are each their own little companies, so there’s no overarching bad guy (TfL, or London Buses, or Ken) to pin the blame on? Perhaps it’s the aforementioned dilution of the homogeneity of the taxi, because of advert wraps and different colours, which has been going on for a couple of decades? Is it that the new taxis are accessible? (If so, there’s one hell of a double standard there- bendy buses are far better for wheelchairs and pushchairs than Routemasters, and generally better than modern double deckers). Probably it’s a combination of all of the above, and other factors I haven’t thought of.

Still, every time I see a non-standard taxi, a small part of me sighs, and I suspect it always will.

Emails

marco:

Some people can never be helped enough, some people are never satisfied.

But occasionally I get the best kind of email, and it makes it all worth it.

File under: it’s easier to complain than celebrate.

Flickr Catchup: A Technique

I’ve been on holiday for a fortnight, so I haven’t had a chance to check Flickr. How to catch up?

Well, the search box on the “photos from your contacts” page has a handy filter: “from your contacts”. Put in space, press return, and you get… an error. Then go to advanced search, change “date taken” to “posted”, and put in the date you went on holiday, and you’ll end up at a page like this.

(Note the date in the URL; you can change that if you want to skip the navigation outlined above.)

That’s sorted by “interestingness”, so you’d hope the better / more noticed photos would come to the top. If you’re more egalitarian, you could always go for “recent”, and then start at the end of the list and work forward. 

If I was away from a computer more often, I might use the API to turn this into a service, but I’m not, so I won’t. Also, as I’ve noted before, it’s a shame more sites don’t offer filtered search to your contacts. I kept up with Twitter pretty well, but I have no idea what I’ve missed on delicious, for example. Hurrah, then, for Flickr.

Typologies at Tate Modern

Tate Modern is advertising its Exposed photography exhibition, but if you don’t want to pay, there are still some gems to be found by going up to level five.

In room eight of the State of Flux collection, a selection of images from Bruce Davidson’s Subway series, taken in New York in 1980, are on display. Usually he works in black and white, but these are in colour.

They’re also stunning collection generally, and I could easily fill a post just with selections I found online. If you’re in London and can get there before the room changes (which is, unfortunately, a bit unpredictable), you should.

Also on the fifth floor is a collection of rooms entitled Photographic Typologies. To some extent, Davidson’s series could have fitted here, but instead you get an entire room of August Sander’s work, which is well worth examining. (I missed an exhibition of his work in Paris last year, so this was a nice chance to see a subset of it for free.)

Meanwhile, another room - perhaps inevitably - has two of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s composite photographs of industrial works.

All in all, the two together are well worth a look. If you’re in London, just pop in; if you have to visit, start with these, take a restorative cup of tea, then see Exposed. It’s worth it.

Irn-Bru, now in dots

 The Irn-Bru can in one of the Washington Post’s trademark stipple portraits, in a story about their quest for a new recipe that doesn’t include artificial colourings; a job that seems, well, difficult, given its “radioactive orange” shade.

The headline’s worhth a mention, too: “It Isn’t Iron and It Isn’t Brewed, But Irn-Bru Hews to Its Orange Hue.”

(via, via)

The Future Of Magazines

I have a worrying feeling that Instapaper isn’t the future of magazines; it’s a short, brief possible now of magazines, for those of us who understand it.

Yesterday evening I started reading this Wired article, which I found via the Instapaper front page. I got home to find it was also in the print edition of Wired UK, but of course I’ll finish it on the phone, on the way to or from work. I also read far more on the Guardian in Instapaper than in its own app. Generally, I seem to be able to find more than I can manage during weekdays from my delicious network and other recommendations.

Meanwhile, every publisher seems to want to get their icon onto my phone (and, if and when I get one, an iPad). The Times are pushing their app on video screens in the Tube; Wired and Popular Science are just two of many magazines which hope to bring not just interactivity and a nice experience, but that promised land of a sustainable business model.

But, but; does that mean that each of them ends up in a silo, or a glass box, with the web sites turning into vestigal stubs, paginated into unusability? If that happens, where does that leave my Read Later bookmarklet? And are those of us who do graze on articles and reviews and, yes, blog posts, no matter where they come from (and with less concern for who published them than whether they’re interesting) just too small a tribe to be on publisher’s radar?

I hope I’m being overly alarmist here. I hope the app fad dies down, and that the focus returns to good simple texts on generally available web sites. Still, I’m a little worried.