flaneurs | Entries tagged with themes: public transport

The instructions:

III. (a)Travel to or from your workplace one day using a completely different route to any you've ever used before.

I have a new job which involves a 1.5 hr commute from Oval to deepest Leytonstone. A journey of this length should give me lots of opportunities so I started playing with journey planner, removing various options to see if it would send me from work to home via somewhere interesting.

My normal route home is a bus to Leytonstone station, then Central Line to Bank, then Northern Line from Bank to Oval. I could go to Wood Street station to Liverpool Street or to Leytonstone High Road and travel on the GOBLIN. One possible route involved taking HS1 from Stratford to St Pancras!
( hidey )

Current Mood: accomplished

secretlondon

2014 is the year of the bus. 22 June is the morning after the solstice. Together they seemed to make a good time to try some night bus flannage - flan 1c.

I've tried to make a map but google maps decided to delete my stop markers and was generally being irritating. Flickr doesn't recognise my password, sent me a nonsense email when I reset it, has the world's worse captcha and is also being very un-user friendly.

I tried to stick to the instructions as much as possible as it makes it more interesting.

The instructions:

Choose a number (n) between 3 and 20.
Get on the first bus that comes along (and that you're able to get onto).
Get off the bus at the nth stop. If the route terminates before you've gone n stops, then just get off at the terminal stop. [Alternative to this step: if you can see in advance that the nth stop doesn't serve any other routes, you can stay on until you get to one that does.]
Get on the next bus that stops at this stop.
Repeat the two steps above until you're in an area of your city you're not familiar with, or until you've been on 5 different buses, or until you're bored of waiting at bus stops.
Navigate your way home by a method of your choice.

I used www.random.org to generate a number between 1 and 18 and added 2 to it to make a number between 3 and 20. This made n=8.

I had a coffee in a local late night kebab shop then set off -
( coffee )

1. 4.40am. East Street/Walworth Road. 12 to Oxford Circus.
2. 4.53am Stop D St Thomas' Hospital/County Hall. This is where I started my flannage last year!
( westminster )
3. 4.55am N109 to Oxford Circus. Only 7 stops to terminus.
4. 5.03am bus terminated at a stand, AP Oxford Circus. No buses leave from here.
5. 5.05am Walked to the first stop I could find - OV John Lewis'. No shopping on Oxford Street at this time! N113 to Edgware.
6. 5.17am stop N - Park Road/Lords Cricket Ground
7. 5.20am N13 to North Finchley
8. 5.25am Finchley Road O2 Centre

This is where it went wrong. The next bus was the same as the one I'd got off and was 14 minutes away! Should I wait and do another 8 stops? A large group of drunken people turned up so I decided to cross the road and go back.
( No go )

9. 5.37am 82 to Victoria. First bus of the day! It follows the exact same route as the N13 so I went back to the same stop - Park Road/Lords Cricket Ground. I got off a stop early to take photos.
( churchyard )
Churchyard (closed until 9am)
( mosque )
London Central Mosque

10. 5 trips done, but what now? Another hop.
11. 5.57am 13 to Aldwych. It follows the same route so 8 stops sends me back to Oxford Circus.
( Year of the Bus )
It's the Year of the Bus! Regent Street will be closed from 9am for a bus cavalcade.

12. 6.10am 23 to Liverpool Street.
13. 6.22am Royal Courts of Justice. Alight here for the London School of Economics.

This bus was busy - lots of people with suitcases, the traffic had increased and I couldn't sit down. It seemed like a good place to stop.

This was fun, but bus arteries made it less fun than it could have been. I don't know St John's Wood at all so it was nice taking photos there. Travelling through London when there's no traffic is great!

Current Mood: irritated

squirmelia

Inspired by

nou and

bob's bus challenge tweets, on June 7th, I decided to attempt challenge I.(c) again - get on the first bus that comes along, then get off after n stops, and then get on the next bus that comes along and get off after n stops, and so on.

I have done this challenge before, and decided to use the same conditions I have twice before, to see what changed.

My start point was again opposite Westminster Cathedral in London, and n was set to be 9.

( Read more... )

nanila

I took my toddler daughter on an afternoon jaunt in Vienna last week.

We got on the D tram just outside the flat where we were staying, and went two stops to the Opera. We disembarked and waited for the next tram, which happened to be a #2. We got on that, intending to ride to the end, but unfortunately the tram emptied out considerably beforehand. Without an audience to entertain, Toddler Daughter became a bit bored staring at Mama (she was riding in the sling), so we got out at the second to last stop after a 25-minute ride.

This turned out to be just outside the Ottakring U-Bahn station, which is one of the termini of the U3 line. So we went down into the station and boarded an empty train. Toddler Daughter very proudly sat in her own seat across from me for the entire journey. A woman sat next to her at the third stop and stayed on, chatting with us, until we arrived at Volkstheater, where all three of us disembarked.

Daughter and I stopped in the Museumsquartier for a hot chocolate. Afterward, we played on and around the big blue plastic lounge chairs that they put out there in summer. When she finally tired of this, I strapped her back into the sling and we went back to the U-Bahn, where we boarded a packed rush-hour U3 train for two stops to collect her daddy at Stephansplatz, and finally returned to Karlsplatz on the U1.

squirmelia

A few weeks ago, I attempted another bus themed challenge (June Challenge: I (c)), using the same conditions as last time:
n = 9.
Start point = Opposite Westminster Cathedral, on Victoria Street, in London.

I got on the first bus that came along, and then got off at the 9th stop, and then got on the next bus that came along, and so on.

( Read more... )

Current Location: London, UK

spiralsheep

Report of my railway line flan through Tunbridge Wells in April 2013 (yes, I accidentally met Disgusted Of but she was disgusted on an unexpected topic, hee!).

squirmelia

Saturday evening, I attempted June Challenge I.(c), with n as 9. I got on the first bus that came along, and then get off at the 9th stop, and then got on the next bus that came along, and so on.

My starting point was opposite Westminster Cathedral, on Victoria Street, in London. I was quite excited about doing this challenge from Victoria, as I had the feeling that I could end up anywhere.

( Read more... )

kake

Like we did last year, bob and I decided to make simultaneous attempts at Theme I: Buses, subtheme (c), starting from the same stop, with me taking n=5 and him taking n=6. (To paraphrase this task: you get on the first bus that comes along, stay on for n stops, get off, repeat.)

Last year I ended up in Cheam (map), and he ended up going to Streatham and back (map). I did wonder if this year's journey would be quite similar to last year's, but as it turned out I diverged very quickly and ended up in Putney. In fact I came very close to crossing the Thames, which is quite impressive given that Croydon is often considered to be practically the southern edge of London.

( Anyway, here's my trip report, including photos. ) ( Stats. )

Here's a map of my journey, and here's my photoset on Flickr.

nanila

After a couple of months of waiting to have the opportunity to trek to east London, I went on the Emirates Air Line I mentioned in a post here in June. And I brought a bunch of my work colleagues with me. (Afterward, we dined at Yi-Ban, a tasty dim sum and Chinese restaurant near the Royal Albert DLR station.)

We made a potentially disastrous miscalculation and decided to go on an evening when there were Paralympics events at both the O2/North Greenwich Arena near the southern terminus of the Air Line and at the Excel Centre near the northern terminus. But it turned out to be just fine. Lots of people around and a nice buzz of excitement in the air, but no queue.

Taster image:

( 15 small pictures tracking the ten-minute journey over the river, with some words too. )

I highly recommend an excursion to try out the Air Line. Now that the Olympics and Paralympics are over, queues are likely to be nonexistent. You get some spectacular views for a fraction of the price of the London Eye (£3.20 with Oyster pay-as-you-go or £4.30 cash for an adult).

nanila

I've just started commuting from Birmingham to London on a weekly basis, and one of the things this is allowing me to do is explore bus routes I've never taken before. This week I stayed with a friend of mine who lives near Elephant & Castle. I looked up the best way to get to her place on the Transport for London Journey Planner and it suggested a route, involving multiple buses, starting near the Albert Memorial in Hyde Park.

However, I discovered on walking out of my workplace building that there is a tiny bus stop hidden on the other side of the Royal Albert Hall that serves exactly one bus, the 360. The 360 begins just outside my building and terminates at Elephant & Castle. I experienced a thrill that I hope

flaneurs can understand, hopped on the bus and looked out the window for most of the 40 minute trip. It wended through South Kensington (very pleasant), Chelsea (also pleasant) and to the north bank of the Thames, where it traveled down to Vauxhall Bridge. Then it turned and went along the south bank of the river, affording more lovely views before finally heading down to Elephant past the Imperial War Museum. It was a delightful journey.* I was happy to return to work on this small and uncrowded route in the morning. The Tube would definitely have been faster, but not nearly as pleasant.

* Although I was a little miffed with myself for going wrong by getting off at the last stop instead of the penultimate one, which forced me to retrace about 100 metres to get the second bus to my friend's house.

squirmelia

I enjoyed the June challenges so much that I attempted another in July. I attempted I.(a) - get on the first bus that comes along and get off when you see something interesting. Unfortunately it didn't work so well for me, so then I did something else..

( Read more... )

tim

I was busy in June, so I decided to do the June challenges in July. I don't expect credit or anything :-)

Theme I, option A says:

"Get on the first bus that comes along (and that you're able to get onto).
While travelling on the bus, look out of the window until you see something interesting.
Get off at the next stop, go back, and thoroughly investigate the interesting thing"

I started from home, in downtown San José, California. I live right on a transit mall street, so I literally walk out the door and see a bus stop with six or seven different bus lines. VTA buses are terrible, but even on a Saturday afternoon, where I live is enough like a transit hub that there are buses every few minutes. I only had to wait a minute or two before the 23 bus (destination: De Anza College, in Cupertino) arrived...
( Read more... )

mummimamma

This is my June challenge, posted a day late - I needed to buy a new computer to upload the pictures first! So I did the challenge of starting from a railway terminus. I did a small change to it, since the railway goes straight into a 700 metres high mountain (and it's not a "hikers" community after all), so I followed the light rail tracks instead. And then I could go the whole distance, from terminus to terminus. Almost 12 kilometres on foot. The light rail is just two years old, and everybody here in Bergen is very proud of it. When it came everybody I mean everybody - had to take it to the terminus and back again. And a lot of my friends with little children still do, as a part of a Sunday outing.

Here is the map of the light rail route
And here is the map of my walk

And here we start at the terminus:
P1000692

( Lots of pictures and occasional some words )

Current Mood: cheerful

nanila

Attention London flaneurs: The Emirates Air Line cable car across the Thames from Emirates Greenwich at the O2 to Emirates Royal Docks at the ExCel conference centre is now open. If you want to have a go, it costs £3.20 on your Oyster card or £4.30 in cash. If you're doing it for leisure rather than business reasons, it's advisable to ride during off-peak hours, as it slows down from five minutes to ten to provide more viewing pleasure.

Below is a 5 min 25 sec YouTube video of a safety test done on the cable cars a couple of weeks ago.

A link to a Telegraph article on the Air Line opening is here.

kake

bob and I decided to make simultaneous attempts at Theme I: Buses, starting from the same bus stop at the same time but with different values of n. I chose n=5, he chose n=6.

We began on a Saturday late morning at West Croydon Station; our first bus was the 289 to Purley, which confused me slightly, since it was going north and Purley is south from here (it makes a u-turn a bit further along the route).

I jumped off at Croydon University Hospital, leaving bob to stay on for an extra stop; I then got on a 60 to Streatham, and moments later sailed past bob waiting at Thornton Heath Pond (which, sadly, is no longer a pond but a roundabout). My bus then promptly got stuck behind some rather selfish car drivers.

The 60 takes a rather circuitous route to Streatham, so I was quickly sidetracked off towards Mitcham and then Sutton. Sutton being something of a bus attractor, I did wonder if I would end up circling around it for ever. This was the point at which I realised I would soon need the loo, so I decided that my terminating condition would be reaching a bus stop from which I could see a pub.

Finally escaping Sutton, I realised as I neared Cheam that I would quite possibly end up at the bus stop opposite the Prince of Wales, a pub which I'd previously visited and liked. And I did! So my flânage ended with a wee, a pint of Doom Bar, and a mushroom and brie sandwich.

Here is a Google map of my journey, and here is my Flickr photoset. ~~I will leave bob to report on his journey, but just as a teaser: it took a completely different route in terms of both geography and topology.~~ bob never got around to writing a trip report, but here's his Google map.

squirmelia

I did the June Challenge: I.(c), with n=3, in the borough of Richmond-upon-Thames in London. I got on 10 buses in total, although only 9 of them were part of the challenge, as the final one was just in the direction of home.

( More details and a map )

ewan

So I did the June Challenge Theme I (c)! Obviously, I did it in June, so this write-up is a little delayed. The theme itself was one based on buses, where one starts at home/work, takes a bus for n stops (where n in my case was 10), and then get off and get the next bus that comes along. I repeated this process 10 times. It took a few hours to complete.

Rather than start at home or work, I started on a Saturday afternoon after some lunch with friends, in gloomy north-west London. Here is a Google maps link for the route I ended up taking.

( Many photos )

Current Location: North-West London

bob

So for the buses themed challenge I did variant (c) with n=20.

I used the closest bus stop which had buses other than the ones I can use for my daily commmute. On the way to it I missed 4 buses but a 78 turned up relatively soon.

The 78 diverted from it usual route due to an accident so I counted stops when the driver let people off. At the 20th stop there was no other bus route so I stayed on it for what turned out to be one extra stop where the 78 terminated in a back street nowhere near any other bus stops. So I walked the way the bus had been heading to see when I would find a stop. Which thankfully wasnt too far.

I then got on a 136 which got me as far as Lewisham in its 20 stops.

I then swapped to a 199 for 6 stops which is where it then terminated.

Then I took a 320 for a full 20 stops which got me to just past Bromley High Street.

Then for once I actually had to wait more than a minute for a bus which was the 61 to Chislehurst. By the time this was getting to its 20th stop it was about 20:30 which probably a good time to stop since Orpington is a long way out and it was my 5th bus which was one of the valid stopping points.

I then picked off a couple of pubs in Orpington before returning home.

Google Map of my journey
Flickr photoset
bit.ly bundle of my tweets during the journey

spiralsheep

Get on the first bus that comes along. While travelling on the bus, look out of the window until you see something interesting. Get off at the next stop, go back, and thoroughly investigate the interesting thing.

My report is here, with two photos.

tim

Yesterday I did the first theme in the June challenge: buses. I picked the first option, where you get on the bus closest to your home or work, and stay on until you see something interesting.

( (+26) Ten years ago, Stevie O said, 'Look me up if you're ever anywhere near Santa Clara' )