Stay Tuned For This Party Political Ad

Or not. Annie Mole is hot on the trail of a Tube ad campaign featuring Barack Obama's image that nobody is quite sure about.

The London Bus Boycott

I'm having a customer service battle with both our horrible bank and Transport for London, which runs the Underground and the buses. To sum up, there has been a botched transaction of an automated payment that neither one wants to take responsibility for, despite hours on the phone and a few shouting matches with snarky, lazy customer service types. For this, neither one deserves my limited funds.

I think I've resolved that it will be more than worth it to sever our ties with the bank, but denying TFL my money will be a little bit more of a challenge. For obvious reasons, there's no real market alternatives, except for minicabs, black cabs, and overground rail. I'm already off the overpriced, overhyped bullies of the street they call the black cabs, which leaves minicabs and overground rail. But I have resolved to avoid using TFL services whenever possible, because they've made me angry. Today, I have to get up to our old neighborhood, and I've decided to ride my bike, despite the on-off rain. Rail would be an option if I wanted to walk some distance, but I think I'll just stick to the old pushbike.

We'll see how this goes.

That Worked Out Well, Didn't It?

Boris' Tube drinking ban ended up making things worse:

Thousands of people have marked the banning of alcohol on London transport with a party that ended with arrests, assaults and cancelled trains.
Drinkers, many in fancy dress, gathered on Tube trains and station concourses in a last celebration before the ban came into force at midnight.
But police said what should have been a fun event came to an "unfortunate" end.
Six Tube stations were closed, while police made 17 arrests. Six assaults were reported on Tube staff and police.
There were also numerous reports of damage to Tube trains, which led to suspended services.

Think George W. Bush and the Middle East, only with beer.


UPDATED: London/Diamond Geezer is right.

Boris Lies

Well, we learn from Annie Mole that Boris' promise to bring back the Routemaster may not happen, which means we really will be stuck with those stupid, not-designed-for-narrow-London-streets bendy buses, which can't fit down the street, annoy taxi drivers because they can't fit in the designated bus stop areas, and by the way endanger pedestrians.

Of course, being a good right-winger, Boris would go back on a promise to do a good idea but would never back down on an authoritarian promise, which is the Tube drinking ban. Annie Mole reminds us of the final night parties on the Circle Line. Drink up: Happy hour is now enforced by law.

UPDATED: For more good anti-Boris vitriol, go visit London Geezer, who unfortunately doesn't make his permalinks obvious.

Hello, Boris, part deux.

Annie Mole was right. As she notes on her wonderful blog, Boris' first move as mayor will be to ban drinking on the Tube as a crime prevention tool. For those who haven't ridden on the Tube, it's not uncommon, particularly on the weekend and particularly on lines going to and from football matches, to see riders knocking back a lager on board the Tube. I've never done it, but it's nice to know you can.

I can think of a really good reason to ban drinking on the Tube, but crime isn't it. (Cleanliness is--but then we'd have to ban dogs too, and you'd better believe that would be a non-starter.) I've never witnessed a crime on the Tube, nor does it seem to be a frequently reported problem. So, what Boris has done is a conservative political stunt that would make Karl Rove sit up and notice--frighten voters about a non-existent problem and then identify a way to eliminate the non-existent problem by taking away a civil liberty. Bravo, Boris. It's gonna be a long four years.

Updated: Look! It's here already!

Happy Wednesday!

The former Miss Mind The Gap has a happy message for you.

Public Service Announcement: The Final Word

BBC Radio 6 Music awarded Emma the Don of the Week award, whatever that means.

Public Service Announcement: Emma's Back

Well, not as the Voice of the Tube, as far as I know, but at least you can go to her website:

This is an emergency!

Public Service Announcement: You're Fired

The voice of London Underground loses its job.

I'd link to another of my favorites over on Emma's website, but sadly, since the story broke, it appears her site is overloaded.

I'll save 'em for later.

Updated: Oh wait, I can get through. Here's one for you sudoku fans.

Updated again: Well, no you can't after all. We'll see how long this takes.

Public Service Announcement

The voice of the London Underground wants you to know something.

(Hat tip to Annie Mole.)

The New Tube Maps Are In! The New Tube Maps Are In!

Featuring the London Overground.

Looks like we can walk down to Gospel Oak and catch a train straight to Barking (hmmm) or Kew Gardens (yay!) using our Oyster cards.

As Long As We're Talking About The Tube

The Tube has its own unique species of mosquito.

Take that, you intelligent design folks.

Tube Icon Undergoing Change

Yesterday, I got an email from Transport for London informing me that the overland train lines known as the Silverlink Metro are now going to be known starting next week as the "London Overground." Not a big deal, but the overground routes will be included in the iconic Tube map starting next week. Annie Mole has a sneak preview of the new map. She says it looks crowded. I think it looks like a stone of potatoes in a half-stone sack.

Here In My Car, I Feel Safest Of All

On the two thoroughfares at the termini of our street here in Highgate, traffic grinds to a very slow crawl inbound at rush hour in the morning. Should motorists continue about four miles farther down the road into Central London, they will be assessed £8 (roughly $16) simply for crossing into London's congestion-charging zone. That's in addition to any parking fee you might pay. Yet, buses run down these same roads, and trains rumble underneath--and if you live in the far distant sticks--let's say, Manea, in Cambridgeshire, you can still catch a train to one of 14 terminus stations in London. Except when there is a major fault, the buses and trains run frequently, more frequently than any other mass transit system I've ever used.

So why do people drive? And I ask this because of this article in Wednesday's Guardian in which I learned that the share of Britons who travel by car rose from 27% in 1959 to 87% in 1996, while the share using buses and coaches shrank from 42% to 6%, the share using rail shrank from 18% to 5%, and the share using the world's greatest personal transportation system, the bicycle, shank from 11% to just 1%. The article was accompanied by two photos of Britain's first freeway, the M1: One from 1959, when it first opened, nearly empty, and a second one today, with bumper-to-bumper traffic.

During our visit to New Jersey, we learned that Mrs. Werbenmanjensen's sister lives just three miles from her work (kudos to her for choosing to live close to where she works, although her husband works a much longer distance from their home). She drives because, well, it's New Jersey and it's not like they can be bothered with serving any commuter other than the single person in a single car. It turns out that a colleague of Sister Werbenmanjensen lives in the next development over, and when it was brought up that they could carpool, Sister Werbenmanjensen said, "No, because I want to go when I want to go."

In a free society, of course, we're all free to do as we wish, but if all people "go when they want to go," you have a lot of people simply stopped in traffic. If you have an alternative, though, why would you settle for that?

Down The Tube

Um, it'll be too late get off the train by the time it leaves the station, so if your Underground train ever starts going the wrong direction, you might want to consider a brace position.

(Hat tip to the delightful Annie Mole.)

The Air Is Safe Down There--No, Really!

Annie Mole, as usual, has awakened me to yet another phenomenon of riding the Tube.

But before I do, I'm going to just mention that it could potentially offend the sensitive, so if you were turned off by our recent post on seasickness on the Jersey-Weymouth ferry, stop reading now.

OK.

Two words: Tube snot.

Just, Um, Hanging Around

This is one of those stories where it's better just to show, rather than tell:

A shoemaker has been described by Tube bosses as "stupid" after he made a pair of boots that allow travellers to hang upside down on carriage handrails.

Dutch-born Eelko Moorer designed the boots in his studio in Hackney Wick, east London.

The boots took him about a week to make and they have been on display at a British Council exhibition in Italy.

But London Underground criticised the designer, saying his design could result in serious injury.

A London Underground spokesman said: "This is a dangerous and stupid act that could result in serious injury to not only the individual concerned but also other passengers."

Mixed reaction

The boots have been designed with a slot carved into the heel which allow them to hang from handrails.

Mr Moorer got girlfriend Alice Wolff to try the boots out on the Tube.

"We had a somewhat mixed reaction from other Tube travellers," said the designer, who is also a shoemaker.

He went on: "Some people were surprised, others liked it and others were appalled. I had been on a Tube train a while ago and thought how boring and similar journeys are."

Hat tip, as usual, to the delightful Annie Mole.

Are You On The (Street) Level?

Time Out times London's shortest Tube journey and finds it's better just to walk.

(Hat tip to the delightful Annie Mole, who gets some props from Time Out herself. Lucky her.)

Getting Back At The Tube

Annie Mole points us to Bad Oyster, a snarky site selling plastic wallets and stickers for the ubiquitous Oyster smart card used on the Tube, buses and some rail services. My favorite: The "Mind the Gap (between your expectations and the service provided)" wallet.

Getting Around Sans Tube

It's been quite a few months on the London Underground. Since roughly last September, major hunks of the Northern Line--and several others, of course--have been shut down on weekends because of "capital projects," although the nature of the capital projects has been invisible to the customer. First it was our branch of the Northern Line, which necessitated, for example, taking the bus if we wanted to go to the theater on a Saturday night. Now it's the Charing Cross branch through central London that is affected, which necessitates, for example, taking the bus if we want to go to the theater on a Saturday night.

Also on weekends, because of platform renovations Northern Line riders cannot get off and change trains at King's Cross/St. Pancras, which, with six different Tube lines running through it as well as numerous intercity rail lines, is only the biggest transfer station in the system. That's no inconvience to Northern Line passengers now, is it?

So it's with some gratification that I read a couple of items over at Annie Mole's. First, some art students have gotten together to inform passengers about walking times between stations in central London. This is helpful in part because there are so many delays on the Tube that there were half a million claims for refunds last year by Tube customers.

The Tube is lovely, one of the best mass transit systems in the world when it works. It is unfortunate that quite often it doesn't work.