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Express ticketing that isn't

Sitting on a National Express coach from Heathrow to Gatwick, I'm pondering the failures of system design of some so-called express ticketing systems, namely the one National Express has rolled out to its coach stations. For my trip back home I'd bought a Young Persons Coach Card online for £10 in the knowledge that I'd save on my tickets (I don't recall why I didn't buy tickets at the same time, but I wish I had).

Walking into the Central Coach Station at Heathrow and seeing the queue for the ticket counter, the natural thought may be to try out one of the Express Ticket terminals that isn't in use. Thinking I could avoid the queue, I went and touched the screen to start the process. A screen of popular destinations is displayed. So far, so good.

The first hurdle is right there though. Which terminal at Gatwick am I flying out of? I dig into my bag for my iPod, checking its calendar to see if I noted it down. No mention of it - my fault for not thinking about that when I put the flight into my calendar - but it'd be nice if the system asked who I was flying with and pointed me in the right direction.

Taking a guess at the South Terminal, I then wonder what the difference is between a single and a return. Do I get any savings for buying a return? Does it just mean I can do it in one go without having to hassle with ticket machines on my return? No assistance there, so already a little frustrated, I select a return ticket.

Choosing the first coach leg was easy, I just chose one of the ones in 20 minutes or so. Does the specific coach really matter? What happens if I've not finished this process and got to the bus by that point? Can I travel on a different one instead?

Now for the pain of selecting a return journey. Prompted with a calendar for this month, I tap on the right arrow to move on to September. About 20 times, my finger hurting more each time. Frustration building significantly, I contemplate giving up, but persevere and finally manage to get the button to accept my prodding.

Selecting September 2nd, I'm presented with yet another list of coaches. Out comes the iPod again so I can check on my return flight time. After scrolling through three or four pages of early coaches I can select one in the mid afternoon that seems like it will suit (again, I wonder what happens if I can't make that coach).

Now that I've selected my ticket I'm offered two pricing options, one an "On-the-day return" ticket and the other the same but with and extra £1 added for insurance. "On-the-day return"? How's that for confusing terminology (it makes me think same-day return), when you've just told the system that you want to return on September 2nd.

Choosing the one without insurance (I'm not going to pay extra out of choice when I'm frustrated by the transaction already) I get an itinerary with a button to press to say I agree to the conditions of carriage. Tapping it, I get another button to click in the corner of the screen to confirm that I'm really happy with the conditions. Not that I had read them, but of course I agreed... I want my ticket, let me pay you already.

The second button tapped and instantly a warning notice appears telling me that I didn't enter my payment information quick enough, even though it didn't actually give me a chance to enter my payment information before telling me I was too slow. Clicking the "yes" button to try again, it gives me a chance to put my card in.

"Authorisation failed." Oh how I wanted to scream. Why do these machines not have alternative payment options so people can pay with cash if desired? Not knowing if there was an issue with my card, I went to try and get some money from the cash machine (successfully) and wandered over to queue up for the ticket desk - something I should have done from the start.

After a few minutes of queueing I was at the desk and talking with a friendly ticketing agent. She took me through where I wanted to go (the terminal question came up again, but she just chose a terminal for me), put me onto a specific coach (but told me it didn't matter which one I took), asked me if I wanted an open return or a specific service (after I asked, she told me the prices didn't differ for that extra level of flexibility) and gave me the ticket. I paid with the same card that the machine had turned down.

As she was taking me through buying a ticket I remarked that I wished the 'express' machines were this easy. She agreed, much like the London Underground ticketing guy did about the problems with Oyster cards on another visit to Heathrow earlier in the year.

I think these machines could be vastly improved upon by simply defaulting to an outbound non-specific coach for the same day and a non-specific coach for the return journey. If people want to change the dates or choose a specific coach then let them, but I suspect the majority of people using those machines are looking to travel now and don't know exactly which coach they'll want to return on. People should be warned that by choosing an open ticket they're not guaranteed a seat, but how often have you tried to travel on a service only to find out that it's full already? Maybe I've only ever travelled on frequent services but I've never come across this problem.

Surely all the system really needs to know is the destination, that you want to travel now and return at some point in the near future and whether you qualify for any discounts (OAP, child, young person's card, etc.). Keep it simple! I get really frustrated when I see technology put in place supposedly to make things easier or faster for people and all they do is make it more stressful, confusing, slower and generally much less satisfactory.

Posted in Information, Transport at 4:11 PM on Friday 24 August 2007 | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: National Express Travel Transport Coaches Usability Interface Design

Timestamp and address support in KML module

In addition to the recently implemented views support in Drupal's KML module, the latest Drupal 5 version of the module now adds support for time and addresses.

Each of the placemarks now has a timestamp based on its creation date in your Drupal site, allowing you to filter your content by a specific time frame using the Time controls in Google Earth.

Also, if you have added address information to your nodes then this will be added to the placemarks as well (in both freeform format and the xAL standard), allowing content to show up in Google Earth even if you haven't added specific coordinates to it through your Drupal site. The geocoding is down to Google Earth and sometimes things will default to 0,0 if it isn't able to work out where in the world it should go.

Posted in Drupal, Geographic at 11:10 AM on Tuesday 21 August 2007 | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Geocoding Time navigation KML module

Map localisation in an international context

When you use an online maps of another country using a mapping service like Google Maps or Yahoo Maps, would you expect the place names on that map to be displayed in your own local language and/or script or to be in that of the country you're looking at the map of?

I was posting a video to one of our sites (naturally Drupal-based) at work today to test some functionality, and started wondering when I came to add a location to the post. The point of the test wasn't to check the mapping-based functionality in the site, but that is what caught my attention.

The video I was posting (one about giant hornets, and very cool, even if they do freak me out) was filmed on the Japanese island of Honshu, so naturally I wanted to geolocate it somewhere there in the general sort of area so others could see where it was filmed.

As I zoomed in to Japan I quickly noticed that all the place names were in Japanese with no English equivalent. That left me out of luck as somebody who knows the English name of the place but knows nothing of Japanese script. Looking to the west of Japan, Russia is in the same situation, having place names only in Russian. China, on the other hand, actually has place names in both English and Chinese (and they also have a localised version of Google Maps just in Chinese). Check out this map to see a couple of examples from that region of the world.

So my first question is, why are the maps showing multilingual names in some places but not others? Is it about data availability, perhaps the level of effort it would take to merge multiple datasets of place names for some countries?

Hopefully names will, in time, be shown in different languages for other countries too.

For these maps to be a truly useful international as well as local resource, place names should ideally be available in the local form as well as in other forms. Instead of picking one 'international' language such as English, they should probably be available in the local language of the country that the company has aimed a mapping portal at (Google has ones for the US, UK, France, Germany, Russia, China, and about ten others).

So, for example, the US and UK portals would show place names in English by default, with the local language of the country displaying alongside. For others, such as the French portal, the French versions of place names could be used with the local version, falling back perhaps to the accepted international (usually English?) name of the place where there was no translation available. In Russia, the Russian version would be used if there was one, along with the local version.

Traditionally, maps were published by governments or other mapmakers within a country and would typically have the place names conveyed in the language of the publishing country (maps made in France would have all the names in French, etc.) because that's who the maps were targeted at. In a more connected, distributed world, the publishing country becomes less relevant and the target countries much more so.

It may be a lot of work but at the end of the day I think international maps should be localised into the language of the user. If the problem is data availability then the likes of Geonames and the implicit database of linkages between articles of different languages in Wikipedia could play a great role here with their growing databases of place names. In OpenStreetMap as well, we have the ability to store place names in as many languages as they have names (e.g. name:en=Isle of Man, name:de=Insel Man, name:fr=L'Ile de Man), though I think currently we only render the default name value on the main maps (which is likely to be the local language of that country). In the future this could be improved upon, as long as the data is in the database.

Update: a website called diddlefinger.com has been adding its own labels on top of Google's maps of Japan for a year or so now. Interesting use of the API to make things more usable for an international audience.

Posted in Geographic at 8:15 PM on Thursday 16 August 2007 | Comments (0)
Tags: Maps Localisation l10n Cartography

Where to find maps of the Isle of Man

When I first started adding road network data for the Isle of Man into the OpenStreetMap project, there were only a few map sites online that had maps of the Island, and none as easy to use as the Google Maps service (which at the time did not include maps of the Island, and still doesn't to this day) which rocked the world of web mapping when it launched.

As I recall, the sites with maps of the Island at that time were limited to MultiMap and the Ordnance Survey Get a map service.

Things have come a long way since then though. The OpenStreetMap maps of the Isle of Man are not too far away from being complete (with a little help), but aren't yet ready for end users looking for detailed maps. Many of the other map providers do, however, have great coverage of the Island in their maps. Here's a bit of an overview detailing the merits of each of them:

Site	Overview	Description
192.com		Map of roads, railways and railways stations (marked incorrectly with British Rail logos), rivers, plantations, reservoirs and long distance footpaths. Does not allow zooming in to towns for detailed street maps.
Ask.com		Map of roads, rivers, some plantations and reservoirs. Includes detailed street map information.
Google Maps		Map of Island outline.
Microsoft Live Search		Map of terrain, roads, railways and railways stations, rivers, plantations and reservoirs. Includes detailed street map information. Island incorrectly attributed to the UK.
Multimap		Map of roads. Does not include detailed street map information (streets disappear from map beyond a certain zoom level) but does include the Ordnance Survey 1:50,000 map of the Island if you hover your mouse over the 'map' toggle to the left of the map.
OpenStreetMap		Map of roads, railways and railways stations, rivers, plantations, reservoirs and some long distance footpaths. The town street maps are not very detailed yet.
People's Map		Map of main roads and some rivers. The map disappears past a certain zoom level, but they do have excellent aerial imagery for the whole of the Island.
Yahoo! Maps		Map of terrain, roads, railways and railways stations (marked incorrectly with British Rail logos), rivers, some plantations and reservoirs. Includes detailed street map information.

I've included all the draggable ("slippy") map providers - or at least the ones I can think of right now - to give a bit of an overview of how their coverage differs, and also give a bit of a glimpse into the differences between their cartography and general feel of the maps. Also worth a mention here are the street maps that the Government provide for most towns across the Island.

With all these mapping services providing maps of the Island for free, is it really still worth continuing to build up the map data in the OpenStreetMap project? Of course it is! These maps are nothing but that: static maps, and some of them really great ones at that. They are great if all you want is a static map, somewhere to share a single location with someone else, or even the ability to overlay your own information on top of the map using that provider's API.

The whole point behind the OpenStreetMap project though (and to a certain extent, the People's Map project) is that the underlying map geodata is available and re-usable under a free license for you to be creative and do what you like with that data.

Maybe you're working in conservation and want to create a map showing all the rivers and different habitats on the Island, but not include roads. Maybe you are a walker and want to create a map that shows just the footpaths on the Island. Maybe you run a local listings site and you want to create a map that shows only the locations you want it to show and hide things that may not be of interest to your visitors. There are many possibilities, and the great thing is that if you have an idea, you can go off and use the data we're building up, allowing you to fulfil your idea without having to use the prescribed maps that are provided by the big providers.

Note: all the maps included above are copyrighted by their respective owners, and are included here under fair dealing clause for comparison of their individual benefits.

Posted in Geographic, Isle of Man at 10:11 PM on Saturday 11 August 2007 | Comments (5)
Tags: Isle of Man maps mapping

On cartographers and neocartographers

Neogeography has been growing pretty quickly over the past few years, much of it I think kicking off when people started mashing up location-based data with Google Maps, perhaps the most memorable of those early ones being a mashup of data from Craigs List classifieds site and maps from Google.

With so many mashups online already (over 50,000) and many more on their way, there is a bit of a concern from professional cartographers that neogeographers - or more specifically, neocartographers, the ones making the maps as opposed to the ones laying information on top of existing maps - who may not have a background in cartography, will ignore the many principles that cartographers use to create maps that are both useful and usable.

What is refreshing to see is that well respected cartographers such as Steve Chilton, Chairman of the Society of Cartographers, are encouraging cartographers and neo-cartographers to work together, towards the common goal of sharing geographic information more effectively and helping shape the way people look at the world.

"My contention is that cartographers need to embrace these neo-cartographers, and work with them in the way that they possibly didn't with GIS providers/users, and to get out there and influence the way we look at the world - which effectively is what this whole Google Earth phenomenon is changing in society."
Steve Chilton

You can read the (first part of an) interview with Steve over on Rich Treves' Google Earth Design blog. You may also be interested in his presentation "Here be Dragons: some principles of cartography and OSM" (audio) from the recent State of the Map conference.

In the OpenStreetMap project we're very grateful to have Steve share his cartographic skills (along with other cartographers such as Richard Fairhurst who presented "Why Mash-ups suck (and Cartography matters)" at the SOTM) to help better the quality of the maps that we produce from our community-collected data.

If you're a cartographer with an interest in neo-cartography - and ways in which you could help shape it - or a neo-cartographer with an interest in improving your cartography skills then there's one event you should go to this summer: the Society of Cartographers Summer School in Portsmouth between the 3rd and the 6th of September.

I wish I could be there to improve upon my - very basic - cartographic skills.

... Judging by my map of areas around Douglas for the Isle of Man mapping party and overview map of the TT course that I produced a few months back, I could definitely do with improving them!

Posted in Geographic at 10:45 PM on Thursday 9 August 2007 | Comments (1)
Tags: neogeography neocartography cartography