Thursday, October 11, 2012

Guerrilla Stickers Stick It to the London Tube

It looks like the guerrilla subversive spirit of GCaP tactics has reached across The Pond to the London Underground in the form of patron-placed alternative signage.

The small irony here is that I refer to the London Tube map in my GCaP classes as a paradigm for performance models:

2.4 More Like The Map Than The Metro
When I was writing the GCaP book, I asked the London tube authority for permission to use their classically dense map. In incredible bout of British bureaucratic officiousness, they offered the tube map at £100 per impression—an offer my publisher was only too keen to refuse. Hence, the map you see on p. 9 of the GCaP book is that of BART, an authority who were pleased to see it further advertised by a taxpayer, as long as it was sourced—an offer my publisher was only too happy abide by.

On a side note, I had recalled that the British authority that I dealt with was called the London Tube Authority. But when I went to check on that title, not only couldn't I find that label, it seems there have been a real procession of governing bodies and corporate owners, especially during the Thatcher era. None of them have been particularly successful. There's some hard lessons to be learned when the privatization affliction is aimed at public transport systems. It's easy to see how Londoners could be induced to go guerrilla with satirical stickers.

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