His work includes a comparison with my own maps, which he says are "effective prototype implementations, but the unfamiliar unlabelled layout makes it difficult to relate to the underground". Touché! To his credit, Nicholas addresses almost all the deficiencies of my tube maps with his own software and goes significantly further in implementing the same kind of analysis for other transport networks (even including an example of using street data from my friends at OpenStreetMap).
His approach and background reading are covered in detail so the final paper will be a great resource for people working in this area in the future. I do hope he finds time to release the software for us all to use too. As well as the more traditional academic and print references, it's nice to see a hat tip to people putting their thoughts and experiments online such as myself, Rod and Oskar. Whilst a blog is no substitute for peer review and academic rigour, I strongly believe that the more of these ideas we share then the better all our work will become.