The best navigation idea I’ve seen since the Tube map

I stopped using London buses when some coward put doors on them. Twenty years ago, you could board any bus headed in the right direction and when it diverged from your intended route you’d jump off and board another. You didn’t need to understand bus routes at all.

Now, when bus doors open only at specified stops, an absurd level of research is needed. It takes five minutes to work out where to wait and which route to take. Worse, buses use the dippy Paris Métro approach (Diréction Porte de Clignancourt) where only the final destination is on the front. This demands unrealistic knowledge of the outer suburbs. Where the hell is Clapton Pond? North? East? From the sound of it, the only reason I might go there is to dispose of a corpse (a task for which public transport is useless anyway: you need a white van or, for a real sense of occasion, a Mark 2 Jaguar).

Unlike the Tube, London’s bus network has never offered what psychologists call ‘cognitive fluency’. The glory of the Underground is the schematic map designed by Harry Beck; this uses names and colours for different lines (better than numbers) and can be translated into decisive action instantly; the economic value created by this map must run into billions.

Yet because cognitive fluency is intangible, its value is often under-rated. For instance, consider the effect of rebranding the London Overground as part of the Tube network. Much of the route existed for decades as the Silverlink train line. But since it did not appear on the Tube map, it was mentally invisible and so unused; ten years ago you felt a bit like Spencer Tracy stepping off the train in Bad Day at Black Rock.