Sounds promising
But I'd still like a properly mobile version of their journey planner website that didn't take ages to load, didn't have adverts and didn't pop up the on-screen keyboard every time you navigate on the page!
The people in charge of the London Underground transport have released a report [PDF] in their month-long tracking trial of Tube users – and the results are fascinating. Transport for London (TfL) used Wi-Fi access points in 54 stations in central London in December last year to track nearly six million mobile phones, and …
I can recommend the 3rd party "Tube Assistant" app - although not sure if it can take advantage of live arrival information (if that's in any feed from TfL).
It's very good at telling you the different route options and how long each route *should* take, plus where to sit/stand to minimise your travel to the exits from he station.
No apps.
Do you really need a few million of the clueless looking head down inside some of those stations?
People will think "Signage, how quaint." But changing signs could cut 2 mins off the journey time of 1 million commuters is basically 3.8 years of journey time each day. Signage also keeps the visitor looking up, not down, so they're less likely to trip over someone.
Alternatively discouraging some of those 17 odd routes should stop squeezing some of the severely congested stations during the rush hour. I wonder if tfl realized just how massive a surge some of those stations were getting who were not entering or leaving, but just passing through?
This (in principle) is a microcosm of the concept of the "smart city." Using the passengers not to track them but as probes within the system and hence identify ways to improve the system.
I applaud the results, but I doubt many other trials will be conducted so scrupulously. :-( That's the problem. But for now thumbs up.
"Do you really need a few million of the clueless looking head down inside some of those stations?"
They're already looking at their phones, why not give them a nice easy sat-nav type app which tells them exactly where to walk. That way they can point different individuals in different directions, perhaps routing that tourist family on a slightly longer journey so they don't have to get mixed up with all the commuters.
"It may even be possible for TfL to update commuters in real time about a faster or less crowded route to their destination,"
I wonder whether that would suffer from oscillations. The less crowded route then becomes the most crowded one. That state being advertised then switches the load back to the first one.
Any app or signage would have to be selective about how many passengers it told about an updated route.
I have seen people take the tube from Warren Street to Goodge Street - I'm sure that the walking into/out of the stations is further than the distance between the stations.
The other one that gets me (now that I arrive at Euston) is the convoluted route to get to Euston Square - it's a short walk along Euston Road, or multiple changes on the tube, so which does TfL recommend?
"the convoluted route to get to Euston Square - it's a short walk along Euston Road"
Presumably you mean Euston Square tube station - Euston Square itself is just in front of Euston railway station. Euston Square tube station used to be called Gower Street which was appropriate because that's where the entrance is. When it was renamed Euston Square it really should have been provided with entrances & exits at the Euston end of the platform.
Back in the days when I commuted into Marylebone or Paddington to work very near Euston the route I'd take depended on the weather, something TfL should take into account. On wet days it would be the longer route via Oxford Circus on the Bakerloo & Northern lines to avoid as much walking outside as possible.
A pedestrian subway link to ES station from Euston itself would be nice in the wet weather.
And whilst we're about it, rather than the cavernous concourse at Euston, why not split the holding space for arrivals and departures on to two floors with ramps leading down to the platforms, so that arriving passengers aren't fighting their way through the massive crowds waiting for the 16:47 London Midland calling at all stops to pergatory and the queues for Burger King?
Oh crap, I've gone off on one of my 'why don't stations learn some of the good points from airports?' rants.
"Do the apps tell people they should walk instead?"
Yes. The TFL route finder will flag when a connection can be walked, but the problem is many of these walking connections count as tapping out and then tapping back in, so if you don't have a travelcard or aren't hitting the daily cap that's two journeys you'll be charged for. There are a small number of connections where tapping out at one station and tapping in at another won't be charged, but frankly unless you work for Londonist remembering where this is permitted is nigh on impossible.
Why people leave their phones to constantly search for wifi networks. Not only does it put quite a drain on your battery you're also exposing yourself to all sorts of possible nastiness.
Of course it's much more hip these days to place the blame on the people who didn't protect their wifi access point instead of the people who, in the end, basically tried to connect to it themselves (or by proxy of course).
> The system looks at which SSID's your device is trying to connect to
No, no, no - RTFReport:
"When a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet has WiFi enabled, it will search for a WiFi network to connect to. This involves the device sending out a probing request that contains an identifier specific to that device, known as a Media Access Control (MAC) address. If a WiFi network is
found that is known to the device, it will automatically connect. If the device finds unknown networks, it lists these in the device settings so the user can decide which, if any, to connect to.
During the pilot, if a device was near one of the 1,070 WiFi access points in the designated area, and it had WiFi enabled, we would have collected the request(s) to connect, even if the device did not subsequently do so."
Every mobile with WiFi enabled transiting through TfL's system will be probing their APs, even if they don't register. This leaves a MAC address record in the AP, which is harvested with a timestamp. This happens in shopping malls and airports (at least) for footfall analysis and is a fairly standard feature in the boxes. TfL have merely put the information together from their many APs in a useful way.
Last year TfL held a hackathon and exposed a wide variety of data feeds to the entrants (traffic light timings, road status information, traffic queues, ...). For all their flaws, they're being quite good at attempting to find ways to embetter their service offering.
I believe iOS does a pretty good job of MAC address randomisation when not associated, Android is generally very poor.
According to this, MAC address randomisation on iOS is "useless" while there is no such thing as "Android". Depends on the vendor, but "generally very poor" is correct, where it exists at all.
"Why people leave their phones to constantly search for wifi networks. Not only does it put quite a drain on your battery you're also exposing yourself to all sorts of possible nastiness."
That was my first thought too on reading the article. It's no wonder so many get "battery anxiety". Since it's a phone with a data connection, I fail to see why having WiFi on would make a user think they might be missing out on something unless they have such a poor data plan they are prepared to sacrifice a level of security by allowing their phone to connect to any old WiFi WAP they happen to be near, It does seem to be the vast majority of people too.
"Because London Underground offer free, fast, reliable Wifi to pretty much everyone on the tube"
That'd be it. I have an unlimited data plan, so wifi isn't something I generally bother with. The tube network is one of the few places where I do switch it on.
"Because London Underground offer free, fast, reliable Wifi to pretty much everyone on the tube"
I have seen the ads for Virgin Media wifi and assumed that since I was not a VM customer I wouldn't get this.
Or at the very least I would have to register with them to get it.
Am I mistaken?
"Am I mistaken?"
Not entirely. You can access the "Virgin Media" WiFi if you've got a login for Virgin Media, EE, Vodafone, O2 or Three. The mobile operators alone account for something like 85% of the market, so there's a very good chance you've got access.
It is surprisingly fast and performant.
> Why people leave their phones to constantly search for wifi networks
Because it's a complete pain in the arse with the standard UI (at least on Android) to toggle GPS, cell data, or wifi, at least up to Marshmallow where they FINALLY put those in a settings dropdown.
I rooted my phone so I could write simple apps I could tap to do each.
Who gives a stuff. People know where I am because they can see me. If I had a reason to be hidden I wouldn't go out or I would change my appearance and my phone every time I did.
Do you seriously make sure you switch wifi off every time you leave the house / office / girlfriends house / local whose wifi you use / coffee shop whose wifi you use / train station whose wifi you use / airport whose wifi you use . . . . .
It would be like having to faff with my phone to switch bluetooth on every time I want to listen to music on my headphones. Who honestly really gives a shit whether people can see them walking around?
@Mark110 ..... "Do you seriously make sure you switch wifi off every time you leave the house / office / girlfriends house" ......
When leaving the girlfriends house.... yes, and swap SIMS, clear the text messages and phone logs, turn off the secondary email account, and wipe stored location data. Leaving anywhere else I don't bother.
AC for the same reason as the steps taken above.
"When leaving the girlfriends house.... yes, and swap SIMS, clear the text messages and phone logs, turn off the secondary email account, and wipe stored location data."
Methinks you'd have it easier to have a seperate phone for visiting your girlfriend
;)
"Do you seriously make sure you switch wifi off every time you leave the house / office / girlfriends house / local whose wifi you use / coffee shop whose wifi you use / train station whose wifi you use / airport whose wifi you use . . . . ."
Sometimes.
"It would be like having to faff with my phone to switch bluetooth on every time I want to listen to music on my headphones. Who honestly really gives a shit whether people can see them walking around?"
I always turn BT off when not in use. It's not a faff.
If you think this kind of thing is too much hassle I don't know how you deal with real life.
It's easier to leave WiFi on and have it autoconnect to known networks, than be constatly turning it off.
Perhaps the bigger problem is the high cost of data meaning WiFi is the preferred way to connect - would you like a 1GB tariff for £20 and use WiFi, or a 5GB tariff for £40 and save a few minutes of battery?
I charge my phone each night, I haven't turned WiFi off since I bought it in May, only when I've been doing really daft things like playing games or watching video all day does it not last until I climb the wooden hill to Bedfordshire. What you're saying may have been true 7 years ago, but I think the way idle WiFi is handled now seems much more battery-friendly.
"27 per cent used a completely different line and went through Green Park (to our mind the smartest route)."
Oxford Circus is one of the few Underground stations that has different tube lines on adjacent platforms. To change from the southbound Victoria line to the southbound Bakerloo, you just get off the train and walk 20 yards from one platform to the other. No steps, no escalators and little congestion. Takes about 20 seconds
To do the same at Green Park you have to go up stairs, through tunnels and down an escalator - takes about 5 mins and does congest the station.
Seems unsurprising that the wisdom of crowds over hundreds of thousands of journeys, correctly selects the 'smartest route'.
What is odd how many people actually do go via Green Park. The speed of the trains and the number of stops between start and end stations is usually far outweighed by the interchange time or how long it takes to get up and down from the platforms. Changing at Oxford Circus is therefore 5-10 mins quicker.
However the tube map makes it look like they ought to be about the same distance only with fewer stops via Green Park, so going on the map alone, Green Park perhaps feels like it ought to be faster.
If I can I avoid changing lines at Green Park. There is far too much walking to do.
Oxford Circus is an interchange I use a lot (B to V lines generally) but I find that the signage in the station absolutely awful when using the Central line (or trying to get out).
For me (I don't go into the city very much so I'm not counting those stations) the worst pinch point is the tunnel from the Paddington station side ticket hall to the D&C platforms - particularly the westbound platform. When the Heathrow Express was planned they should have given some thought to the plight of foreign visitors with all their luggage struggling up a (invariably blocked) narrow staircase and then down another.
It will only get worse once Crossrail is runnung.
Actually Crossrail could make it *easier*, certainly for those who have to use the Jubilee, Bakerloo, Central, Northern and the southern half of the Circle and District lines, mostly because you can get to those lines by staying on the Liz Line to Bond Street (Jubilee, Central), Tottenham Court Road (Northen, Central), Farringdon and Liverpool Street stations. The speed on the Liz should make transfers easier than sitting on the Tube.
If you have to change at Green Park it's quicker to go up to the booking hall and back down again than to follow the signs through the labyrinth.
If you need to change from the Northern line southbound at Euston to Victoria Line do it on the City branch as it's only 50 metres at most - no stairs or anything.
UK public body gets it right for once. I am amazed that they got someone in who knows about ICO guidelines and data security.
Equally creditable was that there was someone in house who knew that would be a smart move and who managed to convince others of the fact.
Equally creditable was that there was someone in house who knew that would be a smart move and who managed to convince others of the fact.
Absolutely. I hold most public sector organisations in very low regard, but TfL are being very innovative, and have done some brilliant tech stuff, like Oyster, like extending the Oyster functionality to any contactless payment cards and devices, like driverless operation on the DLR. I recall they also did a trial to see if they could reduce congestion by stopping people walking up the escalators (which it did, but changing people's habits is seen as too difficult).
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But the way our infrastructure is organised lots of people have to pass through. I live in Liverpool and have worked in Southampton for two years and Windsor for 18 months. You quickly learn how to navigate the tube most effectively to make your connection.
As others have said above, the quickest way from Euston to Paddington is to leave Euston and walk to Euston Square to get your connection - takes much longer by Tube.
>"you must be on drugs to want to live or work in London"
Pretty sure that if I stopped I'd still want to be here.
Have lived and worked in Paris and Berlin too - each has its merits but given free choice (which I guess I do have for a few months still) I'd stick with London of those three.
" it's truly the worst capital city in Europe"
Certainly not in the whole of Europe. Any number of the Eastern European capitals are drab, grey and possibly dangerous. But certainly fair enough to say of Western Europe. Compared to Madrid, Lisbon, Amsterdam, Berlin etc it is grey, overcrowded and far too expensive compared to what it has on offer.
Interesting article and good use of software and analysis.
Mind you, i was always fascinated by the tracking ability of such as Rollercoaster Tycoon from way back when, admittedly in the thousands than the millions.
"Michael Schumacher, waiting in the queue for the go-karts (and subsequently whizz round lol) with a burger in one hand and a red balloon in the other, having recently puked up on the sidewalk between the Astrospacer and the popcorn stand"
The ride is suffering a 30 minute extended wait whilst Mr Bean causes havoc on the ride.
NEW SIGNAGE :
Whilst you're at it Tfl, couldn't you erect thousands of new signs with wording such as :
"SMILE it doesn't cost much."
"SMILE and make someone's day, it could be yours"
"SMILE just do it"
"SMILE you miserable bastards"
"WHO're you looking at?"
It can't be that expensive to translate such signs into 173 other languages now can it?
TFL could easily erect such signs. However, nothing on earth would make regular tube commuters other than deeply, darkly miserable. And radiate the vibes so strongly, everyone close to them is infected.<p>
Additionally, anyone happy on the tube is obviously suffering form a serious mental problem or has injected some very strong drugs.
People smile for a variety of reasons: they are experiencing pleasure; they are having an enjoyable conversation; they are greeting someone known or unknown, they are watching/listening to something enjoyable or humourous for example.
Which would apply to the "Smile" sign suggested for the tube?
If you can get the straw from between your teeth long enough to realise that using the tube in rush hour is a highly stressful exercise that the majority of Londoners are forced to endure twice a day during their working lives, then you might just get the other brain-cell away from the thought of a recent ovine hook-up and try it yourself sometime and see how you get along. I'd rate you at two weeks.
Outside London = Loser
Inside London = dead from cardiac arrest at 55 due to supporting the rest of the knuckle-dragger's from outside the M25 who spend their time thinking we are all rich and live like Jeremy Corbyn.
By using advanced distributed networks of mobile communications together with cloud based machine learning we can improve the way in which a million people all physically move to the same square mile to sit in front of rows of computers connecting to distant data centers.
Perhaps one day these computers will allow for self driving horseless carriages
They're not looking at the journey as a whole, but station transits within a journey. Oyster and ticket data already tell them exactly how many people do each journey in terms of stop-to-stop. What they've never really known before is what route you take between those stops. They've done some sterling work in the past estimating flows by analysing CCTV footage, but this makes that look like stone age technology.
...people who leave WiFi on while on the tube and not all the commuters. How representative is this sample? How clueful in general are those people? How attentive are they to the signage/patterns/whatever might help them shave a couple of minutes from their daily commute? Would disabling WiFi be more beneficial than investing in better signage?
NB: tracking Oyster cards means tracking regular commuters, not occasional visitors, tourists, and such, so that is also biased.
Actually, I wonder if the "WiFi-on" populations has a disproportionally large fraction of foreigners who do not have mobile data plans and are happy for any free WiFi between sights? [Not a Londoner and my WiFi is usually off, so I don't even know if you can register on the TfL WiFi with a foreign mobile number.]
The proportion of commuters that don't have a smartphone and don't have wifi turned on is practically zero, as anyone who uses the tube will be able to tell you. Most travellers at peak times are connected to the free wifi and those that aren't almost certainly haven't bothered to turn their wifi off.
And no, tracking Oysters doesn't exclude occasional tourists, visitors and such. Tourists use Oyster too. If they don't they use paper tickets. The only people who cant be tracked across multiple journeys are people buying and discarding paper-based single tickets. Given that's anywhere up to six times the cost of Oyster that is, again, going to be insignificant.
"Not a Londoner"
Well, duh.
The main group of people using paper tickets are people who live outside London who buy an all zones travel card as part of their rail ticket. There's been some work on integrating with the ITSO systems used outside of London, but I'm not sure how that is progressing.
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They are one of the very few organisations I allow to send me emails on a regular basis.
They don't spam, I get one email a week with weekend disruption due to engineering works and the very occasional email for an extraordinary disruption.
The emails are informative and useful to me and they don't take the piss by spamming me with crap.
The website for bus arrivals could be a bit quicker IMHO but it does work well.
I tend to agree, even though you've attracted downvotes. Everyone seems happy to congratulate TFL. I don't see how collecting personal information (MAC address and location) without consent is legal. The law says you can't do it, not that you can do it as long as you anonymise it eventually.
Would you all feel the same way if this were Google collecting information without consent from all Android devices?
Is it personal data?
Surely it only identifies you as a person if your MAC address has been tied to your identity, otherwise it's just a (hopefully) unique key.
I'm not aware of any mass-collection of this data, I don't believe there's a way of knowing that if I'm carrying DE:AD:BE:EF:12:34 in my pocket, then I'm Bob Smith, of 55 The High Street in Lower Peover. Certainly I work for a mobile network and it's not captured at point of sale.
(Obviously I'm ruling out services like TheCloud where you might have signed up, with your MAC and personal details, to access the service. However TfL haven't said that they're using external data and for once, given they seem to have a pretty good idea about what they can and can't do, can't we just believe them?)
Since Waterloo - Kings Cross is the only tube journey I do anything like regularly:
- Via Oxford Circus is undoubtedly the best option. The Victoria Line was specifically routed to allow quick step-free connections to the Bakerloo line there.
- The slowest bit of the journey is due to the signage at Kings Cross, which directs you down a newish feels-like-half-a-mile tunnel to the "Northern Ticket Hall". If instead you get off the Victoria Line train and follow the signs for the circle line you'll end up in the old ticket hall, and and you'll be out much faster.
I don't often travel at rush hour, so best options may be different then due to congestion.
My experiences of the tube was that there seemed very deliberate efforts, via signs and general herd movement, to get people to walk the slightly longer route. The quick route is there for those that know it, and if 20-30% of the rush hour uses it, things don't get congested. But if 40% or more of the rush hour traffic uses it, then congestion problems occur.
Learning each station's quick route and which end of the train you're aiming for is part of the charm :)
Asking a pair of city dwellers "what's the fastest way A to B?" is always good for a laugh. Parisians and Romans are great, but for getting a couple of Londoners arguing, ideally when others start chipping in, is great for an icebreaker.
My vote is on Oxford Circus, cross tube platforms are just grand.
Oh yes. Walk into Monument and follow the signs to the Northern line (and proibably DLR) and you'll end up going all over the place through a warren of tunnels and it will take you a good few minutes. However a more direct route is to walk down to the Eastbound Disctrict/Circle platform then proceed to the Northern line.
Obviously they don't want the corridor that links the N and D/C lines to become completly clogged, but the official route is somewhat round the houses.
I'm pretty sure your ancestors, about the time we invented speech, happily trogged through the forest thinking 'I won't listen to these new fangled word things unless I need to' right before he was ate by a sabre-tooth tiger, having ignored his tribe mate's shouted warning. I bet you don't ever watch TV except for the odd documentary about Gregorian Chant, and you believe central heating should be controlled by an on-off switch, not a thermostat.
"TfL already tracks its passengers using the electronic Oyster card, which a huge percentage of Londoners use out of convenience and cost on their daily commute. But that data only tells the transport folk where people go into stations, where they exit, and any transfers they make to other lines."
The card tracks the exits? I'm trying to picture the method, and failing. In my city's system, all an exit has is a one-way turnstile -- it doesn't track or require a card to exit. What am I missing?
Your city obviously doesn't use point-to-point billing. With an oyster card you either 'tap out' of a turnstile in exactly the same way you 'tap in', or the system assumes you took the most expensive possible journey and are trying to dodge paying for it. Then bills your card accordingly. So you very rarely get journeys of the form [In at Turnstile x]->[Out at 'unknown']
Presumably in your city the length of the journey does not affect the price charged.
In London it does, so you touch in and touch out and the system knows where you entered and where you exited and consequently the length of the journey (zone-based) for which it has to charge you.
Same applies when using contactless payment cards on London underground. You have to touch your payment card again when you leave and it figures out how much to charge.