Get out of the Tube
A big problem with travel in London is that many people don’t need to take half the journeys they do using public transport, particularly the Tube.
At weekends, the Piccadilly Line is choked with tourist traffic moving around the West End and Covent Garden. The front end of some Tube trains is practically in the next station before the back end has left the last one, and some stations are mere minutes away from each other by foot, but those unfamiliar with using alternative routes stick to the Tube despite congestion, overcrowding, and in the summer, dizzying heat. In one day in early December 2006, the London Underground network carried four million people, and the average almost every day is three million. That’s a billion or so noisy iPods, smelly armpits and bad tempers every year. Walking has got to be a more attractive option – cheaper, healthier, less stressful by far, and London is a damn site better looking when you’re not thirty feet underground.
The Real Underground map illustrates clearly that the Tube Map everybody knows isn’t an accurate representation of the geographical arrangement or distance of stations (it’s basically a circuit diagram, having originally been designed by engineering draughtsman Harry Beck in 1933). Fortunately, maps such as the one on the right (see shortwalk.blog.co.uk for more info) provide information on the walking times between stations, printed versions are available providing walking routes as alternatives to taking the Tube, and Walkit.com provides a fantastic resource for planning walking routes in London.
TfL’s Journey Planner also provides some useful information on getting from A to B, including walking some parts of the way, but doesn’t focus on walking, or cycling, and won’t give routes using exclusively either mode - apparently, TfL haven’t been overly keen on supporting development of Walk It - digital-lifestyles.info quotes a TfL official as saying that it would be “counter-productive to invest public money in another journey planning tool specifically for walking”.
See also Going Underground, Underground Etiquette, and the London Underground song (NSFW lyrics).
Quite Random is the blog of Nathan Nelson, a human male who lives in the UK and is not entirely sure what he's going to do when he grows up but is interested in international development, photography, secularism, technology, music and movies and other things anyone of his age would be.
