The introduction of six Overground line names continues to have unfortunate repercussions.
One of these concerns the Status updates page on the TfL website where for the last ten years you've been able to see a map of disruptions to the network.
Not any more, they've switched it off.
The map was removed three weeks ago when the big Overground digital switchover happened. All the new line names magically appeared down the left hand side but the new colours didn't appear on the map because the underlying programming wasn't up to it. The code was only capable of making everything orange, alas, not distinctly red, blue, yellow, green, purple and grey as required. Nobody had foreseen splitting the lines ten years ago, and the team who put together the digital map had long moved on, so rejigging it for 2024 was neither pragmatic nor appropriate. So they binned it.
This, arguably, is a triumph of branding over practicality. Someone in a high place will have decided that the most important thing was a consistent switch from old Overground to new, displacing the orange overnight. But in removing the orange from the map they've also removed 11 tube lines, Crossrail the DLR and the trams too, extinguishing every last drop of visual information people used to rely on. What's disrupted in west London? Can't show you. Which parts of Crossrail are closed. You'll have to work it out from the text. It is, to put it bluntly, a blinkered sacrifice.
And then yesterday this appeared.
It's an exhortation to download the TfL Go app and use that instead.
Live status map in TfL Go
Download our TfL Go app to see a live map of current status for Tube, London Overground, Elizabeth line, DLR and tram.
The TfL Go app uses a status map as its key interface, it's what you see when you open it up. This blanks out lines that aren't running and adds exclamation marks at stations with ongoing issues, and in this respect is much better than the old map on the TfL website. But you can't scroll out and see the whole thing, you can't switch to show just what's disrupted and you can't see the map and the accompanying text at the same time. You also can't check where the engineering works are next weekend, or indeed in six weeks time. It looks brilliant, indeed it's a damned impressive interface, but it's much harder to get an overall sense of what's going on.
TfL are also assuming you've got a smartphone, which of course not everybody has. Nevertheless they're nudging people towards TfL Go a lot these days, despite it being an app with a surprisingly limited range of features. It would be great if the TfL Go map could be reproduced online but apparently this isn't possible, it's custom built within the application itself, as an FoI request this week confirmed. The end result, alas, is digital exclusion, and all because nobody's capable of changing an orange line to six shades of Overground.
