"According to Transport for London (TfL) figures, the number of journeys taken on the Tube in the year to April is expected to reach 1.1 billion—a bit over one seventh of the world’s population. So 164 accidents means that—if my sums are right —0.0000164 per cent of those journeys end in an embarkation/debouchment-related owie." On TfL's Tube poster campaign.

"Starting today, you can get public transport directions for London within Google Maps. One of Europe’s largest metropolitan areas, London is a major destination for both business travelers and tourists. More than 1 billion passengers are serviced by Transport for London (TfL) every year across over 18,000 bus stops and over 250 Underground stations." Good. Questions: Does this mean TfL has a GTFS feed, or that Google converted the data? Is there any way of getting data back out?

"Does TfL actually want to be open? Is the organisation just doing what it's told, or is it genuinely committed to making data available to third party developers?" Interesting coverage here (including the apparently unauthorised release, then withdrawl, of the MyTfL app).

Sure, base your headline on the pathological case of the highest rise, based on the withdrawl of a product (the excluding-zone-1 day Travelcard) that is bought by fewer people than use cash these days. I mean, the young person paper day Travelcard also rises by 50%, but who uses that? (Get Oyster, for heaven's sake.) Yet this 74% figure will stick, and be repeated (again) when the rises actually take effect in January. Sigh. One expects this nonsense of the Mail/Standard/Metro, but the BBC can and should do better.

TfL's fare rises. This is interesting: "One new initiative to be introduced in January is that during the evening peak, all Tube journeys into Zone 1 will be charged at the off-peak rates, as opposed to the peak fare currently charged." Also: "Tube cash fares are now used by under two per cent of Tube users."

Speaking of TfL: "With only a few months until publication of the government’s spending review, which will decide which parts of government live and which parts die, the lobbying is in full swing. Particularly fierce arguments are raging around the Department for Transport (DfT), which must make cuts of 25% or more in its budget. That is provoking rows, both nationally and locally." Complete with that old chestnut, Crossrail vs the Tube.

"I’m sure we’re all very grateful to the shareholders of Barclays for spending some of their marketing budget on slapping their logo all over the bikes and uniforms of staff but frankly this new roundel brings crass commercialism crashing down to whole new levels of bad and for that we have to blame Team Boris."

"The Cycle Challenge is a competition to see which team can cycle the most miles in a month. Teams that come top win great prizes."

Transport for London's Underground station entrance and exit numbers plotted onto a map. I'm not sure why this is concentrating on differences rather than pure numbers, but it's interesting.

Obviously, the Evening Standard has to headline this "London's ailing Tube", which I've shortened, but nonetheless this is an interesting interview with Mike Brown, managing director of London Underground.

"Transport for London (TfL) today confirmed that it has purchased the Oyster brand from the TranSys consortium." TfL cancelled the TransSys contract early and there was a worry that they'd lose rights to the brand, but apparently it's all worked out ok in the end, with the machinery (but, oddly, not ad rights) also being TfL-owned now.

The Economist on river transport and its prospects in London, noting Thames Clippers, the 30 knot speed limit west of Wapping, and the tangle of pier ownership. "For the moment, Thames Clippers’ civilised catamarans to and from Waterloo... remain a secret pleasure for the cognoscenti".

"Mobile and web information should be available by the beginning of 2011, and the roll out of new Countdown signs will begin a few months later." Seems annoyingly slow.

"Acclaimed British artist Richard Long has designed the next Pocket Tube map cover for Art on the Underground" Bizarrely, there's nothing about the actual map redesign in this press release. Maybe this is a kind of large-scale A/B testing?

Transport for London in combative form on this press release, suggesting that this could run and run. Looks like there'll definitely be an outage on Thursday.

"The data is imported from Oyster via a greasemonkey script that runs when you log into your online TFL account." Which is great, except that Oyster card holders who don't use auto-top-up pre-pay get "Journey history displays records for journeys taken using pay as you go credit." when they look at the Oyster pages. Still, nice hacks for those who do have data.

TfL have apparently completed fitting the iBus technology to their 8000-bus fleet. Now to get the data out: even Evening Standard technology bloggers are calling on the Mayor to give third parties access.

Open day in March this year. For once I've been organised and booked tickets.

"this policy has absolutely nothing to do with common sense value-for-money policy-making and everything to do with ideologically-nonsensical politicking." Why bendy buses are good value, and the problem of stairs.

"From 5 January 2009, an 18-month trial will allow motorcycles, mopeds, scooters and tricycles - but not those with sidecars - to travel in most red route bus lanes." I blame Boris.

This was really great, before NPTDR forced it down. Of course, TfL pimp their travel tools on their site with lovely pretty iPhone icons, but when someone else does anything that's actually useful on the web, or for a mobile device, and which doesn't rely on crap Java servers with dodgy session tracking, and where all the information isn't spat out in PDFs, then licence trauma ensues. Bastards. TfL run the bus routes. The people who get the data from them should be as open as possible.

"[O2] integrated Oyster card technology and a Barclaycard Visa card into a Nokia 6131 handset and gave it to 500 testers who spent six months using the phone as a mobile wallet." Not surprising, but it's good to see it making it to live trials, at least.

Those posters about Bank/Monument being closed for interchange? They're not kidding. It's three (yes, not two) seperate stations at the moment. Except for the semi-secret passageways that are still open (detailed herein).

RSS feeds for service updates, across modes, with per-line resolution. Can someone hook this up to tubevictoria and friends on twitter please?

A long piece (which I've only skimread) looking at the reasons why Google Transit feeds might not be forthcoming from UK public transport providers, despite the fact the data should all be there.

The home for all of TfL's design documents, including the LU signs manual that I love so much, but also newer things like the Overground signs standards.

The (soon to reopen, hopefully) museum has put what looks like its entire poster archive (certainly hundreds of them) online for browsing and purchasing (in A3/A4). Lovely.

"Less than 3% of Tube journeys are now made on single and return tickets, with Oyster accounting for more than 60% of all trips, said TfL." Well, that pricing 'worked' then.

Screenscraping the TfL site to feed the hungry Twitterers. I did that for a while for IRC, but stopped using the tube and got fed up parsing HTML. I wonder if tubetwitters should have a different "voice" to the current (terse) updates?