Just a brief note to say that I sympathise and, to a considerable degree, empathise with your situation. We’re definitely still figuring out all this business about smart and safe usage, aren’t we? (That includes both users and designers…) Anyhow, good to see that you’re making balance such a priority.

I had been meaning to blog about this a month ago but never did, though a post by Jo Walsh has just reminded me about it. Jo writes about being frustrated by the transport system in London and especially the…

This time, the gates wouldn’t let me through, giving me only a cryptic number for the reason. The guy at the open barrier wasn’t much more helpful, especially after I told him I knew I had almost 8 quid on there. He told me I had no credit and I should see the guy at the ticket desk.

At the ticket desk I was told the same thing, that I didn’t have any money on there. I kicked up a fuss, knowing that I had money on there, and thinking that the last journey had cost me 20p. I explained the situation about 5 times, and he seemed confused. There was no record of me going into the system (I’d touched in, and the gate had opened), but then I’d come out, back to where I’d started. To them, after I’d told them what had happened, that was me going in without touching in, going one stop down the line, starting another journey without first touching out and then in again, and touching out for the first time. (Although why I got charged a double fine automatically, without them knowing that I’d touched in at the same place, I have no idea).

I didn’t leave the desk until he’d re-credited the fine (minus a fee for a single journey, if necessary). Thankfully, he did just that. I was very grateful because he didn’t have to, but as someone who was f*cked over by the system, I would have been very angry if I wasn’t reimbursed.

The London Underground guy told me that the Oyster cards had caused more trouble for the staff behind the desks than the perceived benefits, and wished they were never introduced.

As you say, the queues may be shorter, but they take longer because the queries are hellishly complex.

(sorry for the long comment!)

A lot I imagine, though it’s a very fine line here to daily mail pedo-map type yellow journalism or platial hooker map type banality.

But done carefully and correctly, could be powerful. I’ve recently been involved in preparing data on Darfur for google earth, and it’s quite disassociating working on that raw data, but the result will be good I think.

Like your insights into TfL. The one lament I’d add is that I want that tracking, but I want my ride data, and everyone else’s too. Imagine the visualizations.

I found this blog entry very, very informative. Thanks very much (read it 3 times I guess, to really get it). As a long year member of freifunk and current admin of http://freifunk.net I’ve become a fan of the “strategy of small steps”. So my tip would be not to try to implement the idea which has all the bells and whistles, but something straight forward. I also thing that the wifidog+georss would be nice, though I am not a big fan of wifidog’s centralized network structure; but this would also inspire others.

At http://freifunk.net we also thing about Google Map, and your entry gave me hints about openlayers.org and geonames.org — thanks for this. We’ll certainly try to keep the dependency on unfree tools as low as possible (though we will have to use OpenLayers.Layer.Google() to be able to have a good WMS for DE/AT/CH).

Anyway, thanks for writing this all up and keep us updated.

Jens

Heiko