On the 18 October 2013 Tim Fendley from the Living Map Company (tim@livingmap.com) gave an interesting presentation on public information provision and focused on the project ‘Legible London’. Tim highlighted that due to people getting lost or not being able to navigate round London was causing a loss in retail activity (particularly if a visitor only has three hours to go round Oxford Street and gets lost).
Living Map presentation
Tim said that there was a language for the tube (tube map) but there was no language for walking. For the development of a mapping system for pedestrians there was a need for the maps to clearly identify a couple of key landmarks. Since the implementation of the ‘Legible London’ scheme there are now 12,000 signs across London and these are used approximately 2 billion times per year. Tim said that the Economist magazine had reported at 12% increase in people walking in Central London (http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21582576-urban-pedestrians-buck-national-trend-footfalls) and that the on-street maps played a role in this.
There are three key pillars to the system:
1. Last mile is not looked after
2. Integration with the transport network
3. What the user has via other information (e.g. smartphone)
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