Offering a chat forum, news on travel, daily London news, games and a commuter happiness index, Tubehell.com also plans to renovate tube travel by lobbying national government and local government for improvements – currently, there is an online petition urging; “John two jags Prescott” to travel on the underground for a week.
Founder Samir Satchua,formerly a lawyer at New York law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison, said: “There are 2.5m tube journeys made on the tube every day. We are crammed in like sardines for a significant proportion of our waking lives, but we don’t seem to talk about it, at least not on the tube. So perhaps we can chat about it online. My idea is to create a truly democratic and interactive community for London’s much neglected and ill-treated tube travellers.”
Designed by Kerb Ltd and privately owned , Tubehell is being promoted through an ongoing media relations campaign, with a view to rollout in London and SouthEast press to coincide with the first ecommerce consumer offers.
Commuters will eventually be able to buy products and merchandise direct from the site.
Meanwhile, London Underground’s project manager, Chris Best, has claimed that the train system needs to be taken into the 21st century.
Speaking to Silicon.com, Best mentioned future plans for LU include installing a radio and digital transmission system linking all the stations together. Extra revenue is to be generated by selling off spare capacity and using it for commercial purposes, where projections of images are shown on the walls of tunnels in stations.
Best even suggests hopes for the future use of mobile phones on the underground, a notoriously impossible place to receive a connection.
The 20-year service contract with LU worth 1.2bn has been awarded to the CityLink telecommunications consortium.