alex.mullr.net/blog

Yep, finished – exams, school, and more importantly, properly moving this site over to NearlyFreeSpeech. Hopefully it’s all working fine (seems to be from my end) but if you notice any weirdness, please leave a comment somewhere or send me an email.

Thanks, and have a good Summer,

Alex

I spent an hour this evening sitting on a stationary District line train in West London, so I’ve had a little time to think over what’s wrong with the transport system in London – and I think I’m getting towards understanding something (in my head, at least). The problem with Transport for London is that as they’ve grown since 2000, they’ve forgotten the things that make smaller companies nice. And actually, this isn’t at all specific to TfL – the same could be said for any large company.

The example from today was that there were three District line trains stood still in three consecutive stations. A small company (the Last.fm, Pownce and Twitters of the world) would have decided that the Piccadilly line trains should make an unscheduled stop on the platform next to us so that we could move across and continue our journey at some kind of speed. The large company (Microsoft, Apple, IBM or in this case, TfL) had so much going on that it was impossible to organise and execute – our tube driver admitted that he had asked for another train to stop, but that the District line controller and Piccadilly line controller would have to “discuss” first, by which time it was far too late for us.

The ideal turn of events for this evening would have been for a Piccadilly train driver to notice the massive congestion and just stop his train so that we could all hop on – but of course that’s never actually going to happen. I know that example was convoluted, obscure and totally random, but that’s what most of my thoughts are like.

Actually, be careful what you wish for – the day Twitter goes anywhere near running our tube network will be an interesting one…