Irritation.

[senji]

Today I'm irritated at TfL. Now, you see, if I'm interested in traveling on the Docklands Light Railway then the nice DLR people will let me download a nice timetable like this. On the Tube and the other hand you can't download such things, even though they exist for at least some (possibly all?) stations.

Comments

[requiem_17_23]

Is it bad that I read DLR as DDR, then thought "no, not the memory, the arcade game", then thought "Philistines!" ?

Wandering off on a World of Warcraft theme

[bellinghman]

Hmm, timetables for arcade games.

Or even just timetables for games.

OK. I want the timetables for the ships departing Menethil Harbour to Auberdine and Theramore Isle. Or, if that's too much, I want bus-stop-style expected waiting time indicators.

(If you don't know WoW, this will pass right over your head.)

Re: Wandering off on a World of Warcraft theme

[bellinghman]

City of Heroes?

Do you have to wait for a train or a ship, though? In Wow, the ships, trams or Zeppelins can be a few minutes wait if you just miss one.

Wow has the interesting feature that you can actually get from one end of a 'continent' to the other without ever having to load data. It _will_ require data loading for ship trips between the two continents, but you can theoretically run at full speed for ... half an hour, I'd think ... without ever having to pause.

(In actuality, you'd have to be very high level to be able to do that. Oh, and pretty bored. It's quicker to fly, or even ride.)

[slakko]

Similar boards exist for all stations, but they are far less informative than the DLRs versions. Further, recently the format of these has changed, to remove the useful 'here are all the times for the first 2 and last 2 hours of operation' information and replace it with first train, last train and typical frequency information in a simpler format and larger font. Let me be the first to accuse TfL of 'dumbing down' in this instance.

I suspect that a board which has as much information as the DLR version for most tube lines would not be particularly helpful. During morning peak a large number of lines claim to be operating 30+ trains per hour - so having a board which says "and at these minutes past each hour:
00 02 04 06 08 10 11 13 15 17 19 21 22 24 26 28 30..."
might not be particularly useful. The DLR can give so much more detail precisely *because* it is a less frequent service.

[senji]

I'd settle for less detail, so long as I could download it from the safety of my desk :).

The bit that really impresses me about the DLR is that they're organised enough to have this information on the web at all.

[mooism]

This sort of information used to be available on their website for London buses, but they took it down about a year ago *sigh*