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Old December 21st 07, 02:05 PM posted to uk.rec.cycling
Paul Murphy
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Posts: 273
Default TfL Survey about rental bikes for public use

"Chris Malcolm" wrote in message
...
Peter Clinch wrote:
vernon wrote:


I'm not a confident user of the bus system i.e. I haven't
a clue which bus to catch or where to get off.


Glad it's not just me (and I'm from Bexley, so my general London
geography wasn't /that/ bad. I just see a bus with, say "Highgate" and
really don't know if it's where I'm wanting, and I note it's not going
that fast either, and generally walk if it's less then southern rail
termini to northern rail termini.


If you have a ticket or pass which covers bus skipping, an easy way to
travel by bus is use a small portable GPS, such as one of the hiking
models. Set up a way point for where you want to go, get on any bus
which is going in the right direction, and get off when it starts
going in the wrong direction. Repeat until near enough.

You can of course occasionally get into trouble with that method and
end up with a pessimised route to your destination, but I find that's
a small price to pay for being able to avoid the frustration and
despair of trying to understand and correlate the web pages of a
number of different bus companies.


I usually find Travelline Southeasts website to be helpful if it's just a
simple case http://www.travelinesoutheast.org.uk/ . I can access this on my
all in one pocket pc/phone/gps although the options aren't as extensive as
if I plan in advance from my home PC with a normal screen resolution. The
problems I've found with using GPS is although it's great in the open, it
doesn't like working in areas with tall buildings all around e.g. the City
of London I've not tried it on the top deck of a double decker in such
circumstances though. I see TomTom (the makers of my PPCs GPS software) have
only just come up with something called enhanced positioning technology to
get around the tall buildings problem so perhaps a future software upgrade
will solve this problem.

Perhaps as well as having a power assist option, the proposed rental bikes
could have a simple inbuilt gps with this capability. It would need to be
yob resistant though.

Paul


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