Getting to ExCeL is a real pain - but London still gets it right

My mode of travel was determined not, as you may think, by the desire to conduct some form of transport experiment. It was actually so the family had use of the car on the second day and because, unlike Friday's, the Saturday rail fares were not prohibitively expensive.

At this point you probably expect me to recount in minute detail my experiences of rail and tube engineering works, the lack of road signs between the M11 and ExCeL (or indeed at the venue itself) and how a Friday evening crash on the M1 led to a four hour journey with detours via the rush hour of Dunstable (yes, there is one) and the boulevards of Milton Keynes.

Sadly, I have to disappoint you.

Instead here is a story of how London gets it right, where Birmingham fails.

Because of the lack of decent maps on the ExCeL website, I took their advice and plugged the natty postcode E16 1XL into a journey planner. I chose the Government's own www.transportdirect.info

When this website first launched I was working in the transport industry and I remember the problems. Typically, even though I was getting directions for a London conference where the boss of the initiative was speaking his own software advised me to leave very early the day before and change buses at 4am in Luton. On that occasion I ignored transportdirect.info and caught the train from Birmingham to Euston instead.

The travel website is a lot better now. It has all the train times, up to date engineering works and even finds the best fares.

However it still does struggle with London Transport. No matter how many permutations I tried it could not find a straightforward route between Euston and ExCeL Docklands.

I think it must be programmed to find the most direct route rather than the easiest, as my recommended journey plan included Underground, bus, light railway and a 14-minute walk from Aldgate to Tower Gateway.

On the day Aldgate Tube was closed because of a 'police incident', so I was spared the 14-minute walk and the journey was actually a lot more straightforward than it had appeared on paper. It was still time-consuming, involved several changes between Tube lines and Dockland Light Railway, but not half as scary.

So, given that I had to change so many times, how had London got it right where Birmingham fails?

The answer was the tiny, credit card-sized piece of cardboard I bought for an additional 20p at New Street Station. For a whole day I had the freedom of the entire Transport for London network. I could hop on and off buses, trains, trams, ferries, Undergound, Overground and the DLR at will. It didn't matter which operator was running the services. There were lots of different bus companies, but only one ticket.

Even if it did take half a day and several modes of transport to get to far-flung Docklands it didn't matter. And if I did the trip regularly I could buy a TfL Oyster card.

If only travelling around Network West Midlands were as easy.