Monday’s Friday Reads – 5 August 2024

1. Is that Seattle video sarcasm, actually lampooning the “Car is King” mindset – or were they serious?

2. “Beautiful Bus stop” ??
   I nominate Vauxhall.
   Or Newbury Park

3. LT display colours
   One curious omission in the “basic” colours, I think.
   Where is the human eye most sensitive to colour?
   Green
   Um.

4. I experienced Slough’s “Award-winning” bus station in February 2014. This was the time of severe rainfall and flooding in the Thames Valley. Rainwater ran down the curved sides and poured onto those waiting underneath.

5. @Greg T

   The Cities by Diana Seattle video was heavy sarcasm, and brilliantly done I thought. Really nails the absurdity of the North American driving culture.

6. @Greg T

   If you use Green on a display one in 12 men can’t tell it apart from red. So you get to pick o red OR green for displays.

7. I’m very unhappy with the coloured stripe at the top of display boards etc.

   Stripes for the Northern, Piccadilly, Victoria and Jubilee are for all intents and purposes invisible, even to those with perfect colour vision, let alone the colourblind. They disappear into the background or into the surrounding framing.

   I am not colourblind: I know they’re there, but if you’re not paying attention, you could miss something vital.

8. My feeling is that London has too much reliance on colour. The tube map is a case in point, except for one early Beck version which had the names printed on the lines themselves. You have to match the line to its name in the legend solely by its colour. I think there is a strong case for marking the line ends with letters, much as that is an unlondon approach

9. Re colors and whatnot:

   A pet peeve with native English speakers is their obsession with using names rather than numbers. If the tube lines had numbers instead of names, it would be super easy to fit the numbers in several places on the map if needed. Compare with German public transit maps where underground = U + number, the commuter trains with the shortest stopping distances (for heavy rail) S + number, the next rail tier is Rb (Regionalbahn) + number, and then Re (Regionalexpress) + number. S and U are also universal logotypes which looks the same everywhere in Germany. As a bonus the bus stop sign (iirc also used for tram stops) is a part of the rules for road signs, so they are also universal across all of Germany.

   Super easy for anyone to read the map as long as you can read the alphabet and the digits in use. Afaik the digits are the same in all of Europe, while the letters are the same except in Serbia, Bulgaria, Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, and I would think that it’s not super hard for anyone from those countries to learn a few letters.

   Way easier than for example to remember that one of the underground lines in London got it’s name from that the queen at the time had their 50th birthday two years before the line was put in operation. And that line uses a word as it’s name that is similar to the same word in a bunch of other languages, in contrast to some of the other line names.

   Another thing that might be a good idea to borrow from German maps is that they usually come in two or three different versions depending on what “scale” you are looking at, and the lines that are “lesser than the scale of the map” are shown with really thin lines to just mark that they are there, without further explanation. I.E. a map showing all the Rb and Re rail lines usually show all S-lines as thin green lines and all U lines with thin blue lines. Meanwhile on a map that focuses on the S and U lines each line gets it’s own line color, while all the Rb and Re lines are iirc grouped together.

   A thing that I think London does great though is that the bus maps are actual street maps, which makes it somewhat easier to find each bus stop.

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