London Underground (Random rant)

[TheAnimus]

I see what your saying - but because of under-funding for the last 20 years the Underground is struggling and hopefully in the next 5 to 10 years all this disruption will be for the better. On the Paris Metro - I thought it wasn't any better than the London Underground - cleaner though. HK and the Copenhagen ones are the best I've ever been to. Sydney one aint bad either.

More than just 20 years.............

The thing is its actually not that bad when you compare peek to peek. The paris metro is often far more delayed, and less frequent. Not too mention the dog poo (i mean really, on the streets it can wash away, but on trains!!?)

My complaint is how the engineering work is been done, my station was closed for 2 weekends to install benches ffs.

The classic example of the fiasco that was metronet (thanks mayor ken for flipflopping that one) is the waterloo and city line (aka the drain). This was not only opened late, but the refitting was so shoddy it failed to work most of the time because of siginalling issues. This is a line with only 2 stations!

Whats amazing is it still lacks rolling signals, and other such things. I fail to see how it can possibly cost so much to design some rolling signals for a line like the drain at more than £5M.

[TooNice]

Supposedly they are 'improving it' for 2012 but I can forsee even more chaos that there is now!!

As long as they don't make it worse than T5's opening!

[iranu]

We fail at roads and rail.

It's crap isn't it? Britain has more than any other country pioneered modern transport. It was our industrial revolution that set the ball rolling, so where on earth have we gone so wrong? We had the vision in the Victorian era to produce an amazing concept, yet paradoxically, that is part of the problem we face in the late 20th/early 21st century. We are mostly confined to the infrastructure laid down 100+ years ago. I'm still amazed at the vision and quality of engineering of such people who designed and built things as the London Underground and London's sewer system. Our trouble is that we rely on these systems and it's very hard to upgrade them to satisfy such massive demand that the original builders never envisaged, whilst allowing those systems to function. Yet we don't seem to acknowledge that and plan accordingly. Everything is done piecemeal. I'm always up for privatising nationalised industries where appropriate because I believe that governments are rubbish at running businesses and services in this country, however, if one is to privatise industries such as transport, which I see as nationally important, then one should expect that there is a "watchdog" or regulatory body that is going to protect the consumer and when the shoe is on the other foot the tax payer.

I've always found the LU to be pretty good, but then again I don't use it everyday and certainly not during "veal calf" rush hour. I've seen the upgrading and smartening of stations over the years and this is welcome. I think cross-rail is supposed to have had the go-ahead. People keep talking about global warming and public transport etc, but we are so crap at sorting it out we really ought to say, "bugger it, get the Germans in to manage it". The French can teach us how to do the roads, after all, have you seen the Tour De France and the smoothness of their roads?

FFS we spend a huge amount of council budgets paying out money to people who've had their cars damaged by potholes and such so why don't they spend that cash fixing the problem?

[Virtual Monkey]

Have you been to Sheffield? It's no-where near as big as London, but the tram system there is excellent.

[Emirzan]

Have you been to Sheffield? It's no-where near as big as London, but the tram system there is excellent.

Yes. Have you been to central London? Where the hell would they fit trams in?!!?

Only joking. It does work well in Sheffield but if anything London should invest in improving the underground and not in new forms of public transport. In my opinion the only good thing that has happened to the LU in recent memory is the oyster card. And even that has been having problems recently.

[Zadock]

I'm sure all the works will be worth it, the system is getting quite old now so its probably necessary to keep it safe... it has been causing absolute havoc though, I went to the motorshow last weekend and I think I got off lightly but a friend who was meeting us had to take the circle which of course is closed... he was about 2 hours late and very angry.

I think its pretty quick still, the bits that are actually underground feel very fast. They speed up a lot between stations and then the brakes are slammed on and your tossed out of your seat if your not paying attention.

[Funkstar]

Well I for one love the Underground.

Coming from somewhere (Aberdeen) that has a pathetic bus service and no local train service (trains are all national) getting round london when I visit friends is easy. Oyster card and away I go. Sure it has its problems, but for me it's brilliant

[TooNice]

The thing is, Aberdeen is small enough that you can get to many places in a relatively short amount of time anyway. I could walk to campus, the city centre and the beach in 10 minutes from where I stayed. Granted, getting to Altens takes longer, ditto if I want to go to the Tesco at the Bridge of Don and a taxi is almost compulsory to reach the airport due to the limited bus services to/from. It's not perfect, but it doesn't feel as expensive, and because it's smaller, it can't go as drastically wrong as I've found it could in London.

I say bring on double-decked underground trains! Okay so it's probably not feasible as the tunnel would need to be made larger, but I don't know if the trains can be made to go much faster. I can live being stuffed like sardine during rush hours, but at least fix the downtime. Please?

[Barrichello]

There are some crazy people out there that i do believe bring tube rage on themselves as well though with unnecessary short journeys Example, one of my old work colleagues who used to come in to London Bridge on the overground train would then proceed to spend around an extra 15mins with all the hassle to change to the tube (involving lots of escalators "for one stop" to get to monument Tube stop. Crazy. Its a 5minute walk across the bridge for gods sake!! Would then moan that he was late cause of the tube

[kidzer]

I've only ever used the Underground once, when I was down in London a few weeks back for the Karting event that Team Scan won (Your're welcome guys ).

I had to get from London Bridge to North Greenwich, so I only had the one line to be on for about 15mins, but even in the evening heading back to LB to go back to Gatwick it wasn't too busy - the train was clean and the stations were quite nice (admittedly the Jubilee line has been upgraded a lot in the last few years I beleive), I especially like the ticketing system - I had my travelcard and its a pretty slick operation to get through barriers!

Up here as Funkstar et al have said, we have buses that spend a decent chunk of time in traffic, which isn't ideal, so the Lundergound was amazing for me - London Buses were quite good too, I got one to North Greenwich Station on my way back aswell, they seem to be very frequent around that part of London!

[Funkstar]

There are some crazy people out there that i do believe bring tube rage on themselves as well though with unnecessary short journeys Example, one of my old work colleagues who used to come in to London Bridge on the overground train would then proceed to spend around an extra 15mins with all the hassle to change to the tube (involving lots of escalators "for one stop" to get to monument Tube stop. Crazy. Its a 5minute walk across the bridge for gods sake!! Would then moan that he was late cause of the tube

That is soooo easy to do though.

I've done that a lot, my excuse is that i don't live there and am still learning where everything is though.

[chrism]

If time's not an issue, generally I prefer to walk rather than take the tube.
£4 is ridiculous for a single ticket in zone 1 though, making it rather frustrating on the odd occasion I forget/lose my travelcard.

[Stringent]

The tube is excellent. When it works, then again so are computers.

We did have a great pioneering train system in the Victorian age. Everyone has taken that and improved on it. Without really sorting out the tunnels and everything I doubt we could do much better. Plus the average English workmen seem to come it, have 1hr tea, then 20mins then 2hrs breakfast .... So it will never get done!

[Emirzan]

That is soooo easy to do though.

I've done that a lot, my excuse is that i don't live there and am still learning where everything is though.

http://rodcorp.typepad.com/rodcorp/2..._tube_map.html

Map with 'walklines'. Basically the stations it's quicker to walk between. Which on a bad day would be all of them.

http://www.blog.co.uk/srv/media/medi...1156103&size=l This one is quite useful too.

[Oobie-]

Completely agree.

We fail at roads and rail.

I can get on a train and be in Paris in under 2 hours. If I get on a train and head to London, I'll be lucky if I get there in 3 hours.

Yup, same applies for going to Belgium 2hours~.

Takes longer to get to Liverpool or something.