I've not written much about transport recently, sorry, I know that's why you're here. Yes there were helicopters last Friday but they don't really count, you can't flag one down with contactless. So enjoy some actual London transport news, partly sourced from elsewhere but mainly sourced by actually going out and travelling on it.
Bus News
London buses now have a red 'Welcome Aboard' sign stuck on (or adjacent to) the driver's cab. The sign is intended to be prominently visible on boarding. It shows four people walking along a pavement and a wheelchair user waiting in a shelter. It's bright and cheery, and you have to wonder why nobody's thought of doing it before. And OK, this isn't up-to-the-minute news, these stickers started appearing in August, but they do seem to be pretty much everywhere now.
Associated with the campaign is a separate 'Welcome Aboard' poster located further down the bus, perhaps not yet as widespread nor as obvious. It advises passengers about good behaviour and also lists four ways TfL can help with accessibility needs.
• Knowledgeable and friendly drivers on low-emission buses
• Low-level buses with a wheelchair space and ramps
• Free travel mentoring to help you travel more confidently
• Free 'Please offer me a seat' badges
I didn't previously know that TfL offered free travel mentoring but they do, as explained here, to help those with a mobility requirement or a disability to gain the confidence to become independent travellers. They do it for all transport modes too, even the cablecar, and the mentor turns up virtually or in person to accompany you on your first few practice journeys. I'm not sure how many unconfident bus passengers they expect will see this notice inside a bus, it might be nil, but it's worth a try.
Dangleway News
The cablecar is closed at the moment for a week and a half of serious maintenance. You could make a joke about service being suspended, but if you did you'd be at least the thousandth person to make that joke so don't. The cabins start gliding again on Thursday should you fancy a freezing dangle. Perhaps more excitingly the display space at North Greenwich is currently being remodelled and will reopen on Friday 16th December as "a brand-new and exciting cable car experience centre". Previously this housed a plane simulator and some promotional gubbins for an airline, so we can only guess what a cloud-based software company might fill it with.
Thus far there are some pretty coloured lights on the ceiling, a couple of chairs on the back wall and a painted backdrop in one corner. "Take a selfie in the clouds" says the instruction alongside the latter, perhaps because people like taking photos of themselves or perhaps because filling a corner with a colourful background is cheap and easy. I suspect clouds are going to feature strongly in the experience, certainly more than scalable digital enterprise management solutions because your average cablecar punter doesn't give a toss about those.
Alternatively the experience space might first be used to support the cablecar's Christmas offering, a "Festive round trip", which also launches on 16th December. For a mere £12 you get...
• A sleigh ride round trip on the cablecar
• A wonderful winter activity pack, complete with activity sheet, crayons and festive props and stickers
• A ToyChoc festive chocolate box
• A festive postcard for the Railway Children
• Festive atmosphere, including music, entertainers and decorations
If you take up the offer, expect your offspring to have consumed the two 10g chunks of organic chocolate before the halfway point. Also the 'festive props' are likely to be a letdown, the entertainers will probably be Dangleway staff dressed up and the promotional postcard can go straight in the recycling. But if you want to beat the queues then the good news is that sleigh ride tickets are already available online, so be quick before TfL launch their excitable press release and all the slots sell out.
Tram News
There's little better than watching TfL respond to a Freedom of Information request from a smug petitioner who thinks he's caught them out but totally hasn't. Take this classic of the genre published last week:
Dear Transport for London,
Whilst using the tram network it has become apparent that despite not being required to do so, many Customers are touching out after exiting trams. If you have the following information it would be most helpful.
1) For the last 5 years, how much additional Revenue has been received on Tram Link by Customers touching out upon completion of their journey? (I appreciate that this may be difficult to ascertain as each touch on a validator would most likely be treated as a new journey).
2) Is there any logic or algorithm within the Oyster system to detect such occurrences?
3) Could signage on validators be made clearer that customers only need to touch in (same as for bus) and not touch out? Put information in trams also maybe?
4) Is there any mechanism within the Oyster system to automate refund tram touch outs made in error perhaps by detection of touch in at 2 locations within a set time period within the running time of a maximum end to end tram journey.
5) If no such data exists or no thought given to this, has Tfl conducted any observational surveys at tram stops to ascertain the level of touch outs made by customers upon exiting trams? If not why not?
The TfL case officer politely points out, repeatedly, that any second validation within 60 minutes of the first is treated as part of a continuing journey so there is no additional charge. I do hope it wasn't one of you who submitted this FoI because I'd have to disown you for overconfident smart-arsed arrogance.
Rail News
One of the more unlikely casualties of the recent pandemic was the printed train timetable. Not every rail company was still producing them, but those that were stopped abruptly in early 2020 for a perfect storm of reasons. Firstly hardly anyone was travelling so there was no need to waste money on a significant print run. Secondly there was a widespread belief that printed material was unhygienic and might indirectly harm people, without much evidence. But the main reason was that train schedules were in flux so there was no point committing a slimmed down service to paper when it might all change again in a few weeks.
Passengers came back but timetables generally didn't, with rail companies assuming people were perfectly capable of finding train times online, indeed they'd been doing so for months. At several mainline termini you'll now find empty racks where pocket timetables formely flourished, or lacklustre displays of a few dull leaflets about delay repay and railcards. Timetables you can carry with you and consult at your leisure seemed to have died a death. But then I found these two yesterday stacked up in piles at Beckenham Junction station. They're both Timetable 7 - London to Bromley South, Orpington and Sevenoaks via Herne Hill or Catford (11 December 2022 - 20 May 2023).
One's a narrow pocket-sized version with 60 pages, sturdily printed, of the kind the public would normally expect to use. And the other is a massive A4-sized glossy version with 36 pages, the same timetable information and lots of white space. I wondered if it might be the large print version, but it turns out the font size is barely larger than the other timetable. I then wondered if it might be the staff version, a handy guide for uniformed personnel to keep at hand, but that didn't explain why so many copies had been made available to the travelling public. I took one of each anyway because they felt like an endangered species.
Southeastern are instigating a major timetable revamp this weekend with altered times, altered stopping patterns and in many cases altered central London termini. Beckenham Junction is getting its peak services to Blackfriars reinstated, for example. These timetables might therefore be part of a public information campaign, or they might herald the welcome return of printed timetables for certain companies on certain lines. I hope so, because if you want to attract passengers of all kinds back to the railway it helps to know when the trains are supposed to be running, especially if they don't run very often. We can't all whip a phone out to check, but give it a few more years and I expect we'll have to.
