tubechallenge.com

Howdy,

Just route-plotting to fathom out a likely route, but concerned that the number of changes/on-foot sections I have marked down is too high.

I've got 75 legs, from Amersham to Upminster (65 from Harrow & Wealdstone to Upminster).

Is this likely to be too many?

There's no definite answer. You could make a route that only involves 30 or so journeys - from one end of each line to the other, plus branches, plus connections between the ends - but it would be terrible. So number of journeys isn't indicative of the strength of the route.

However, I'd say 75 is at the higher end of a "good" route, but of course it depends on how many stations you're repeating. The less journeys you make, the more stations you will repeat (see example above), and the converse is also true. So for a 75-journey route, you should be repeating as few stations as possible.

Fair point, there's a direct trade-off I guess.

I 'only' double up 43 stations, and only 8 stations three times.

That sounds like a lot, but I haven't checked my route to see how many times I do multiple passthroughs anyway.

My routes tend to be around 70 legs (counting bus journeys/runs as individual legs - some 5-8 of them)

my route has two legs. my left, and my right.

You beat me to it.

All hail the great Geoff & Neil winning route! I wonder if anyone's collecting all these 'nuggets' of information and working out x as we speak.

The sheer number of possibilities renders such an exercise futile.

Alas! *gives up*

And even then, you'd have to have the same level of service, if not better.

There is no single best route, so why do we waste time trying to work out the routes of other people?

Surely if the number of legs is 5x and the changes 4x, then they are 50 and 49.
The number of changes must be 1 less than the number of legs.

Or am I missing something here?

I agree - my thought exactly. But why would he give it away like that? I thought this was some kind of a smoke screen since I had a much higher number (stated somewhere above).

Anyway, I went back and redid my math - not counting runs/buses/trains as legs and not counting changes within a leg e.g. changing at Kennington/Camden Town for the correct Northern branch and guess how many legs I had on the route we tried in March? Yes - 5x(50) with 4x(49) changes/runs/buses/trains inbetween - a bit of a coincidence since I'm sure there is not much in common between the routes, except that they both start in Amersham and are clearly both very good!

I also did the same analysis on my tentative route for our next try in September/October - coming up with 56 legs! (assuming Shoredith replacement bus and T4 open again).