Active Women Programme

According to The News (B&D Council Newspaper) there are hour long cycling sessions at Central Park Dagenham on Wednesdays at 12.30pm, free of charge. The numbe to phone is (020) 8227 3167. A little light Googling revealed this page:

http://www.lbbd.gov.uk/LeisureArtsAndLibraries/ActiveLeisureHome/Pages/WomensSport.aspx, which mentions Breeze Cycle Training, but the places on the p[age where you might click don't seem to be clickable, at the time of writing, and the contact is susy.davies@lbbd.gov.uk / 020 8227 3984.


susy.massey@lbbd.gov.uk / 020 8227 3984 seems tyo be the main contact person for the programme.

stibasa widens official net

I am now the local (ie B&D)  rep for http://www.20splentyforus.org.uk/ and a volunteer for www.sustrans.org.uk. Sustrans has a paid officer working in Barking (Gascoigne Estae, mainly)  and thios means there will be more cycling and walking events, to which all will be welcome (usually if not always). I will advertise these on Stibasa.

These organisations aims are compatible with LCC's and definitely fit into the stibasa philosophy. Threre's a formal lonk at local level now, though.

District Line and S stock

I had my first experience of the new and long overdue dot-matrix train describer at Barking station, platform 6, last Sunday. The trains (or more correctly, services) were all described as 'District Line'. I thought, Ok, maybe it's not a good idea to describe them as Ealing Broadway, Richmond or Wimbledon as the correct thing to do is to get the first train and change where appropriate (typically Earl's Court). However, the first train along was a C stock train bound for Hammersmith via Edgware Road.

Admittedly such trains do run on the District Line Wimbledon / Edgware Road Branch, but this was clearly a Hammersmith & City Line Train.

When the new S stock trains entirely take over, the platform and train descriptions will become more important as the type of train stock will not give a clue to its route. The trains on the Metropolitan line will be 8 coaches  long, and those on the District, Circle and H&C will be 7 coaches long. As things currently stand the Met doesn't come to Barking, so even that hard to spot difference won't help.

I say as things currently stand, because there is talk of returning the Met to Barking and running the Ham & City out of Aldgate. This is all rather academic, because all these lines are joined together and all the trains can run any route, in theory. When the trains are all S stock they can run Upminster to Uxbridge if they want.  As they run on largely the same tracks they use largely the same platforms, so changing is dead easy. All they must avoid is service patterns that confuse the customer.

Share car sharing social enterprises

I was perplexed to see gocarshare.com featured on BBC TV's 'Click' not because it isn't a good idea, but because www.liftshare.com/ has been around for years. As far as I can make out they do the same thing. Do we register our journeys on both?

Cycle Route Planning

As you may have noticed, Google maps now has a "get directions" option using cycling, to add to its walking, public transport and driving options. The feature is "in beta" meaning that it's being tested in real life use. Google are openly crowd-sourcing correctiona and improvements. This is not a bad thing in itself, except that

(i) Google's map layers are on a bas map created by TeleAtlas, which also accept corrections/amendments.

(ii) There are several other "get directions" options on the web, which having come into existence before Google's offering, have already made much progress with gathering user generated information.

In addition to Google, some contenders are: Cyclestreets.net, transportdirect.info and tfl.gov.uk/cycling. (This excludes cycle route maps, both on line and offline. These show predetermined links on a base map, to help you piece together a route in the traditional way.)

These each have their merits  and demerits, but I personally think cyclestreets.net is the pick of the bunch.

What's clear is that there should be collaboration here, rather than rival/parallel offerings.

Split train tickets and save money

http://splitticket.moneysavingexpert.com/

I saw this useful utitility - Tickety Split - reviewed in A to B magazine. I'm not sure whether fares oracle Barry Doe has reviewed it yet, but I'm sure he will.

A split ticket means instead of buying a ticket from (say) Dorchester to Plymouth, you buy a ticket from Dorchester to Exeter and another from Exeter to Plymouth. You don't have to change trains at the spliiting station (Exeter in this example) - the split is valid if the train stops there.)

Currently Tickety Split only works with walk up single fares, so anyone who really wants to save money on fares can only really use it to uncover where to try out splitting their journey, and then use the information to save on advance fares. Independent rail ticket site redspottedhanky.com says (according to A to B) that "its licence forbids it from selling split tickets, although changes in the pipeline may allow it to offer advice of this kind."

Extending the range of ticket typess that Tickety Split can explore is a work in progress, and given the incredibly complex train fare system in this country, it may be some time before it can handle a really useful range of ticket types, but having internet based information about where these splitting points are must surely start a reform of this paricular "quirk" in the system.