Owing to overwhelming demand by apps that use the service, the London Underground feed has had to be temporarily suspended. We hope to restore the service as soon as possible but this may take some days. We will keep everyone informed of progress towards a resolution.
In the meantime, if you want to see how it does looks when the API is up and running there’s a video clip of Matthew Somerville’s recent Science Day hack visualisation over on my Flickr photo and video stream.
Back in December of 2009, I wrote about Paul Clarke trying to solve the problem of where’s my train; that there must be a definitive, raw source of real-time (train) information and that
I assert that train operators know where their assets are; it would be irresponsible if they didn’t
Whilst the plethora of train operators that fragmented from the ashes of the old British Rail network haven’t answered this challenge yet, Transport for London has, opening up just such data as part of the London Datastore API. In today’s age of talented web mashup developers, if you release an API people will build things with it if the information is useful and interesting and that’s just what Matthew Somerville of MySociety did at the recent Science Hack Day … a (near) realtime map of the London Underground showing the movement of trains of all of the Tube lines. A screen grab wouldn’t do it justice and it takes a while to load, so a video grab might help here.
Coming down the escalators at Waterloo and want to know whether to head for the Bakerloo or the Northern Line to take you north of the river? Now you can tell which line has a northbound train closest to Waterloo.
Want to see just how close the gap is between Leicester Square and Covent Garden on the Piccadilly Line really is? Now you can.
Of course, this doesn’t solve every problem …
If you’re on the escalators at Waterloo how do you get 3G data coverage to view this mashup on your phone as Transport for London still haven’t manage to achieve cellular coverage underground, unlike Amsterdam, Berlin and other cities?
The site will probably be the target of a tutting campaign from the Health and Safely police insisting that such a visualisation will cause people to run for the train and of course, they might trip and hurt themselves.
If you’re at the top of the escalator and the train is in the station, now, right this very minute now, how do you get down to the platforms quickly?
Whilst I can’t answer the first two of these questions, this publicity stunt from Volkswagon at Berlin’s Alexanderplatz U-Bahn station might just hold the solution for the third question … a slide!
Written and posted from the Ramada Hotel Berlin Mitte in Berlin (52.529858, 13.383858)
London seems to have gone ever so slightly maps crazy of recent. Not only is there the Magnificent Maps exhibition opening at the British Library at the end of this month but BBC4 has joined in with two documentary series on the subject, Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession and The Beauty of Maps.
It’s all very geotastic …
One of the themes that threads through both the BBC4 series is that a map says as much about the fears, hopes, dreams and prejudices of its target audience as it does about the relationship of places on the surface of the Earth. Nowhere could this be more ably demonstrated in some of the bookmarks that have been appearing in my delicious stream over the past year or two …
First in this occasional series is the Tourist Tube Map. It’s the iconic, Harry Beck, design of the London Underground map. Or is it?
Some of those stations don’t look like they’re in the right place … and can you really get free admission to the Elephant and Castle?
Written and posted from the Yahoo! London office (51.5141985, -0.1292006)
As Paul Clarke has pointed out on his blog, not once, but twice, “I assert that train operators know where their assets are: it would be irresponsible if they didn’t. And that this information is held within their internal systems“.
Here’s a good use case for his proposed solution … wheresmytrain …
Piccadilly Circus Tube station, Bakerloo Line southbound platform, round about 5.00 PM. The dot matrix displays tell us … that a train is “held” somewhere but with no information as to what this means. The platform announcer tells us “the Bakerloo Line is currently suspended” and immediately afterwards the “control room” tells us that “a good service is currently running on all London Underground lines“.
One is these statements should be correct, the other two should not be. By means of resolution, an Elephant and Castle train turned up 2 minutes after all of this has occurred, making all three of the above statements erroneous.
Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)
First reviews of the new Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy book, not written by Douglas Adams on account of him being dead, find it “not really funny” and “less a case of So Long And Thanks For All The Fish and more a case of So Long And Thanks For All The Money“.
#wherecamp, the geogeeks (un)conference of choice, is coming to Europe in the form of the aptly named #WhereCampEU. Naturally, I’ll be there.
Follow it for a while, running parallel to Shaftesbury Avenue and it comes to an abrupt end, due to someone building 125 Shaftesbury Avenue, which is also the Yahoo! London office, right across it.
New Compton Street used to continue through the Yahoo! office, across Crown Street, or Charing Cross Road as it’s now called, into Little Compton Street and into Old Compton Street in Soho. If you walk down Stacey Street onto Shaftesbury Avenue, turn right toward Cambridge Circus and start to walk up Charing Cross Road, you’ll see Old Compton Street on the right.
But wait. Little Compton Street? Where’s that? It used to be there, at least it was there in 1862, but it’s long gone now. Or has it? Slap bang in the middle of the Charing Cross Road is this strange, cast iron grid set into an island. It’s almost-but-not-quite a pedestrian crossing.
With your back to Old Compton Street walk over to the grid, peer down and there in the tunnel below you’ll see two old road signs for Little Compton Street, fixed to the brick wall. No one seems to know how they got there or how long they’ve been there but they’re a hidden-in-almost-plain-sight reminder of the London that used to be there, right under your feet.
(With thanks to Roman Kirillov for the loan of his arms, his eyes and his camera for the close up shots; there’s times when an iPhone camera just isn’t anywhere near good enough)
The Bakerloo Line is part suspended today due to engineering work which is due to last over the Bank Holiday weekend, so naturally everyone either piled onto the Waterloo & City Line or onto the Northern Line at Waterloo this morning.
And on the Northern Line, somewhere between Waterloo and Embankment and underneath the Thames it all got a bit cozy as we suffered the inevitable and inexplicable “Tube stops for no apparent reason”.
Sad to leave my family and @twbell's as I head back to Berlin for a couple of days; but as B would say, "it's only for one sleep".06:33:07 AM July 29, 2010from TweetDeck
