When the tube goes belly-up, as it did yesterday, people turn to the TfL website for information. Which lines are running normally, which sections of track are suspended, how bad are the delays along your route, that sort of thing. Good news, then, that the site was resilient enough to survive yesterday's icy disruption without collapsing. But, when tube services go very wrong indeed, just how useful is the TfL Live Travel News webpage? Not as useful as you might think.
It's new, you know, the TfL Live Travel News webpage. They updated it in November as one of their collection of widgety Travel Tools. Previously information about service disruption was provided as text, and now it's provided in Flash. Sometimes there was an awful lot of text, and it could take a long time to scan through to find any delays that might apply to you. Now there's only a simple shortlist of line status summaries, plus a weeny map with coloured-in disruption. The list is great as a swift way to spot which lines have problems and how serious those problems are. But to discover precisely what's wrong, I'm really not convinced that this map is the way to go.
Here's what the TfL Live Travel News webpage looked like at half past seven yesterday morning, mid-meltdown (if that's not completely the wrong term for snow-induced network collapse). Looks dire, doesn't it? But in fact far more of the network was running than you might have guessed.
What can we tell instantly? It's to the list that our eyes turn first, and this tells us immediately that only one tube line is working properly. Well done Victoria line (running 100% underground obviously helps). It's also clear that three tube lines are completely suspended. If you were intending to travel on the Circle, H&C or W&C lines, think again. And see too that the Central line is running with severe delays, presumably throughout, so that might be worth avoiding. Five lines out of eleven, and we already know everything about them. So far so good.
But what of the other six lines, the ones that say "Part suspended"? There's a really important question here - which part's suspended? - and that's not an easy question easy to answer. Let's start with the Northern line, because we can guess from the map. A little bit of the Northern line is suspended, up at the top on the Barnet branch. Probably between High Barnet and, erm, somewhere Finchley-ish. It's hard to be sure, because the station names are written in such minuscule letters. OK, so I've shrunk down the map to fit it on my blog, but even on the real thing I defy you to be able to read the names of any of the stations. Only by clicking on the Northern line bit of the left-hand list, or by using the zoom-in button, can you be certain that Finchley-ish is actually Finchley Central.
Which leaves five other lines, all of them part suspended, but where the map is of no help at all. On the map the entire Bakerloo line is coloured in, but only some of it is shut. The rest of the line is suffering from severe delays, but it's impossible to distinguish which bit's which. Ditto on the District, Jubilee, Metropolitan and Piccadilly lines. Can you tell which section(s) are suspended from the map? Can you hell. The problem is that suspensions and delays are both shown on the map in an identical manner, by colouring in that section of line. The end result therefore fails to distinguish between parts of the network that are passable and those which are impassable. The map shows only disruption, not possibility.
Annoyingly, it's now possible to read about the problems on only one line at a time. What's up on the Jubilee... click... aha. Where's the suspended bit of the Piccadilly... click... aha. If you need to travel on two or more disrupted lines there's no longer any way to read all the necessary information in one go on one page. To get the complete picture yesterday would have required clicking on the map at least six times, once for each part-suspended line. Not great. Travellers are no longer entrusted with the complete picture - instead important information is available only in bitesize chunks.
On days like yesterday, what I really want to know is how I can get to work. This means visualising the tube map and crossing off the bits that aren't working, then seeing what's left and working out whether I can travel that way. The map failed to tell me this yesterday, and I only worked it out by clicking to view some text and inwardly digesting precisely which sections were suspended (erm, Edgware Road to Wimbledon, that's not me is it, and Earls Court and Kensington Olympia, no that's not me either). The map attempts to provide a visual solution but it's really only a hint, and the true meaning is embedded at least one click away underneath.
And that's not all. The map purports to "show undisrupted lines and stations in grey", but that's a lie. The DLR and Overground are always shown on the map in grey, which you might take to mean they're never disrupted. You'd be wrong. The DLR was suffering from delays yesterday morning, while the Overground was suspended in at least three different places. Trouble is that neither the DLR nor the Overground are part of the 'Underground' network, so their disruptions aren't allowed to appear on the 'Underground' map. They appear instead, in text form, on their own separatetab. It's TfL apartheid, that's what it is. It would be much more effective and efficient to show the whole lot together on one map, but petty empire-building dictates otherwise.
Actually there is a map which shows tube, DLR and Overground disruptions together, and you'll find it here. The Real Time Map shows a broader network of services, so it's rather more useful. It's also bigger, so it's easier to see what's going on and to read the names of affected stations. OK, so it still doesn't distinguish between suspensions and delays, but it's a far more useful object than the official tiny TfL widget-y map. It always amazes me that it's not linked from the Live Travel News page, only from the DLR and Overground tabs, but there you go.
And one more thing. If there was one major headline story on the TfL network yesterday it wasn't about the tube, it was about buses. Not one London bus ran on Monday morning, not anywhere on the network. Quite unprecedented, and a major reason why so few folk made it into work. And was this mentioned anywhere on the main Live Travel News webpage? Nope. It was written in big capital letters at the top of the bus tab, but tube travellers wouldn't have noticed. Poor old buses, always the poor relation, even though there are huge swathes of the capital untouched by the tube network where buses are the only TfL option. This is no joined-up solution, more a segmented hierarchy.
So, TfL, your new dynamic Flash travel map doesn't quite cut the mustard. It looks impressive, but its functionality is limited. It purports to tell you more, but actually tells you less. It hides all the important information one level down, making it impractical to scan quickly and pointless to print. It's not even instant, and many's the time I've had to sit and wait for the Flash to load when all I really wanted to do was make a quick check and leave the building. Could. Do. Better.
Three requests, then, please, oh TfL webtool department... 1) Provide some clear way of distinguishing on the map between delays and suspensions (maybe the latter in bold, or shaded, or black-edged, or something). 2) Allow us to bookmark a single page where all tube disruption information is listed in text form, like it used to be, not buried in Flash. 3) Either provide information for the DLR and Overground on the tube disruption map, or remove them!
