An Open Letter to TFL
I know, I know, I've been a bad little Librarian, running off and doing fun things (Foo Fighters concert, dancing to the BEST DJs ever to hatch from a Kiwi egg, yobbing it up at the Oz-Brasil extravaganza at the Clapham Grand, non stop BBQs) and then getting sick because of too much fun (five days in bed with a dreadful flu. Ah, the immune system of a tragic romantic female. How it plagues me.), and not telling you about it. But don't think I've forgotten how much you yearn for my quirky take on living in the seas over the waters over the seas (okay, so maybe my fever hasn't completely gone!)
To prove to you all how much I've been thinking of you and wishing you were here experiencing the homesickness, carb cravings, lack of good shoe shops, brilliant English summer weather, constant eating of far too much English cow (that's right, I can no longer give blood in Australia), comfort eating of Cadbury fruit and nut chocolate, obsessive baking (yes, I would too be thinner if you were fatter) and general wacky shenanigans that go with being a shy, retiring antipodean marooned on the vast island of cess that is London, I have decided to share with you my latest spur-of-the-moment fit of passion: a rant.
But not just any rant, no, fair reader. A rant that will not only give you a glimpse of how frustrating it is to traverse London as a wee young slip with nary a spine to call her own (PUN! Books! Spines! Get it?), but also how much fun it can be to have an English major that you'll never do anything useful with, except occasioinally pen (or in my case, tap) scathing letters to disgruntled public servants that will either be filed in the bin, or put in an email that you eventually receive years later as a *true* story written by an anonymous patron of the aforementioned dreadful service. SO, to get the jump on that slightly amused employee who decides to distribute my letter, I post it here for you now. Behold! An open letter to Transport For London, regarding their online travel planner facility.
*WARNING: CONTAINS EXPLICIT LANGUAGE, VIVID IMAGERY, AND A FAIR AMOUNT OF RIGHTEOUS INDIGNATION. NOT SUITABLE FOR CHILDREN UNDER THE AGE OF SATIRICAL CONSENT OR PEOPLE EASILY OFFENDED BY THE EXTREME OVERUSE OF FIFTY-CENT WORDS.*
Dear Journey Planner Programmers/ Project Manager/ Mayor of London,
I have been using Journey Planner (JP) almost daily since I arrived in London 2 months ago, in order to get around. I have found there are some rather serious problems with it.
Firstly, there is NO WAY it takes 16 minutes to walk from SW11 1EP to Clapham Junction Station - it's more like seven, 10 if you're really unlucky with the lights and maniac buses, and/or slow. But because JP has this ridiculous 16 minute thing built in, it hardly ever tells me to take a train and tube - it generally directs me to a bus, which is usually a LOT longer than a walk-train-tube combination, and NEVER as direct as JP makes it out to be. Bus stops, for one thing, are VERY difficult for the uninitiated to locate. Especially as the bus drivers seem incapable of, or unwilling to, assist in anything more than giving you a stern glare for daring to breathe in their bus. Seriously. Welcome to London.
Another problem: JP can be prohibitively complicated. In, I assume, an attempt to make non-Londoners either never want to come back, or leave as soon as they are financially able, the program sends you on ridiculous wild goose chases for platforms and bus stops that MAY be the fastest way to go if you make every connection and know exactly where the platform/bus stop is (which JP does not tell you) and have superpowers that can get you from one side of Waterloo to the other in the blink of an eye, but are, to mere mortals, prohibitively complicated.
As it seems that most seasoned Londoners ignore JP and just use their train/tube/bus map and make it up themselves (and generally do a far superior, less confusing, and more timely job of it), I can only assume JP's biggest users are tourists, and your goal is to confound, bewilder and alienate. I'm sorry to say JP falls down SEVERELY in the tourism department, that is if your goal is to help rather than alienate people who come to your city to spend large amounts of foreign cash. If your goal is the latter, then please continue. You’re doing a stellar job. I have never experienced such a convoluted way of making a - relatively - simple system such a frustrating and – yes, I’ll say it - hideous experience.
You need another example? No problem: JP told me it would take an hour and a half to get to a job interview across London. It didn't take me anywhere near Zone 1, even though that would have been direct and I had to pay for that as I was going from South West Zone 3 to North West Zone 6; I had to transfer five times; I allowed two and a half hours and was ten minutes late. I then figured out my own way home purely from the tube and train maps in my A-Z, and it took less time than JP had quoted me to begin with. And that was on the Picadilly line, stopping for breaks every couple of minutes, and then the District, which has to be the slowest line known to subway travellers worldwide. I transferred three times and was home in less than an hour and a half. HOW CAN YOUR PROGRAM NOT FIGURE THIS OUT???
PLEASE, for the love of your fellow mankind who was not born with the tube map etched in their brain or on a TShirt, PLEASE fix these ridiculous problems. I've gotten so I have to TRICK the stupid JP into giving me the answer I want.
And guess what, that bus it suggested I take to Tooting that takes 40 minutes and comes every 8 minutes (which 8 minutes, I wonder?) will - yes, that's right - take far more time than the train and then tube I could take in its place. And as I know it doesn't take me over a quarter of an hour to walk to the train station from my address (seriously, did you time someone on a walker frame? Or a seriously drunk person who kept stopping every five paces to throw up and/or urinate?), I know I can be there in less than 40 minutes and won't need to suffer the nausea brought on by a) waiting for a bus or b) travelling on a bus. While I feel I have learnt how to somewhat "cheat" the JP system, by ticking or unticking boxes, and putting in stations instead of postcodes (oh, and your postcodes could match up to the ACTUAL ones too, that would be useful. Use streetmap.co.uk - everyone else does), I can't see how this works well for anyone, and I believe it needs a serious overhaul.
The forms are good, I'm VERY glad you have an advanced search screen, but the data it retrieves is faulty and was obviously not written by someone (or thing) that understands how London Transport - that is, the experience of it, rather than your organisation - actually works. And seeing as I doubt you have access to an artificially intelligent computer program that has experienced the joys of travelling in London, why not use you staffs' expertise? Or your patrons? Maybe if you had two options: "the algorithm suggests" and "Greg from Notting Hill suggests" it would work much better. I understand this may be prohibitive, but think outside the box, people. Because what you got IS broke, please fix it [sic].
Thank you for your attention, and allow me to complement you on an otherwise quite amazing public transport system. You ain't New York, but you're still damn fine. Get a computer program that reflects that.
Kind regards, the Travelling Librarian
To prove to you all how much I've been thinking of you and wishing you were here experiencing the homesickness, carb cravings, lack of good shoe shops, brilliant English summer weather, constant eating of far too much English cow (that's right, I can no longer give blood in Australia), comfort eating of Cadbury fruit and nut chocolate, obsessive baking (yes, I would too be thinner if you were fatter) and general wacky shenanigans that go with being a shy, retiring antipodean marooned on the vast island of cess that is London, I have decided to share with you my latest spur-of-the-moment fit of passion: a rant.
But not just any rant, no, fair reader. A rant that will not only give you a glimpse of how frustrating it is to traverse London as a wee young slip with nary a spine to call her own (PUN! Books! Spines! Get it?), but also how much fun it can be to have an English major that you'll never do anything useful with, except occasioinally pen (or in my case, tap) scathing letters to disgruntled public servants that will either be filed in the bin, or put in an email that you eventually receive years later as a *true* story written by an anonymous patron of the aforementioned dreadful service. SO, to get the jump on that slightly amused employee who decides to distribute my letter, I post it here for you now. Behold! An open letter to Transport For London, regarding their online travel planner facility.
*WARNING: CONTAINS EXPLICIT LANGUAGE, VIVID IMAGERY, AND A FAIR AMOUNT OF RIGHTEOUS INDIGNATION. NOT SUITABLE FOR CHILDREN UNDER THE AGE OF SATIRICAL CONSENT OR PEOPLE EASILY OFFENDED BY THE EXTREME OVERUSE OF FIFTY-CENT WORDS.*
Dear Journey Planner Programmers/ Project Manager/ Mayor of London,
I have been using Journey Planner (JP) almost daily since I arrived in London 2 months ago, in order to get around. I have found there are some rather serious problems with it.
Firstly, there is NO WAY it takes 16 minutes to walk from SW11 1EP to Clapham Junction Station - it's more like seven, 10 if you're really unlucky with the lights and maniac buses, and/or slow. But because JP has this ridiculous 16 minute thing built in, it hardly ever tells me to take a train and tube - it generally directs me to a bus, which is usually a LOT longer than a walk-train-tube combination, and NEVER as direct as JP makes it out to be. Bus stops, for one thing, are VERY difficult for the uninitiated to locate. Especially as the bus drivers seem incapable of, or unwilling to, assist in anything more than giving you a stern glare for daring to breathe in their bus. Seriously. Welcome to London.
Another problem: JP can be prohibitively complicated. In, I assume, an attempt to make non-Londoners either never want to come back, or leave as soon as they are financially able, the program sends you on ridiculous wild goose chases for platforms and bus stops that MAY be the fastest way to go if you make every connection and know exactly where the platform/bus stop is (which JP does not tell you) and have superpowers that can get you from one side of Waterloo to the other in the blink of an eye, but are, to mere mortals, prohibitively complicated.
As it seems that most seasoned Londoners ignore JP and just use their train/tube/bus map and make it up themselves (and generally do a far superior, less confusing, and more timely job of it), I can only assume JP's biggest users are tourists, and your goal is to confound, bewilder and alienate. I'm sorry to say JP falls down SEVERELY in the tourism department, that is if your goal is to help rather than alienate people who come to your city to spend large amounts of foreign cash. If your goal is the latter, then please continue. You’re doing a stellar job. I have never experienced such a convoluted way of making a - relatively - simple system such a frustrating and – yes, I’ll say it - hideous experience.
You need another example? No problem: JP told me it would take an hour and a half to get to a job interview across London. It didn't take me anywhere near Zone 1, even though that would have been direct and I had to pay for that as I was going from South West Zone 3 to North West Zone 6; I had to transfer five times; I allowed two and a half hours and was ten minutes late. I then figured out my own way home purely from the tube and train maps in my A-Z, and it took less time than JP had quoted me to begin with. And that was on the Picadilly line, stopping for breaks every couple of minutes, and then the District, which has to be the slowest line known to subway travellers worldwide. I transferred three times and was home in less than an hour and a half. HOW CAN YOUR PROGRAM NOT FIGURE THIS OUT???
PLEASE, for the love of your fellow mankind who was not born with the tube map etched in their brain or on a TShirt, PLEASE fix these ridiculous problems. I've gotten so I have to TRICK the stupid JP into giving me the answer I want.
And guess what, that bus it suggested I take to Tooting that takes 40 minutes and comes every 8 minutes (which 8 minutes, I wonder?) will - yes, that's right - take far more time than the train and then tube I could take in its place. And as I know it doesn't take me over a quarter of an hour to walk to the train station from my address (seriously, did you time someone on a walker frame? Or a seriously drunk person who kept stopping every five paces to throw up and/or urinate?), I know I can be there in less than 40 minutes and won't need to suffer the nausea brought on by a) waiting for a bus or b) travelling on a bus. While I feel I have learnt how to somewhat "cheat" the JP system, by ticking or unticking boxes, and putting in stations instead of postcodes (oh, and your postcodes could match up to the ACTUAL ones too, that would be useful. Use streetmap.co.uk - everyone else does), I can't see how this works well for anyone, and I believe it needs a serious overhaul.
The forms are good, I'm VERY glad you have an advanced search screen, but the data it retrieves is faulty and was obviously not written by someone (or thing) that understands how London Transport - that is, the experience of it, rather than your organisation - actually works. And seeing as I doubt you have access to an artificially intelligent computer program that has experienced the joys of travelling in London, why not use you staffs' expertise? Or your patrons? Maybe if you had two options: "the algorithm suggests" and "Greg from Notting Hill suggests" it would work much better. I understand this may be prohibitive, but think outside the box, people. Because what you got IS broke, please fix it [sic].
Thank you for your attention, and allow me to complement you on an otherwise quite amazing public transport system. You ain't New York, but you're still damn fine. Get a computer program that reflects that.
Kind regards, the Travelling Librarian
posted by NomesD at 11:42 pm
1 comments
...and the building I thought was the Library (left).
