Bus Chaos

In a recent publication from our local council I was initially pleased to hear that they are proposing to add smart ticketing across the city for the bus services.

As a curmudgeon who has long been hoping for such a thing to spread as this should make life easier for people and perhaps increase the takeup of public transport I was optimistic.

Unfortunately my optimism was to be unfounded.  As I could not find any details either in the document, or on the web links it gave I emailed the public transport coordinator for the council.

It turns out that phase one is for a 'smart' paper ticket!  Basically a day rover ticket that will be accepted on the two major operators in the city and only valid on the day of purchase.  Not exactly what I would call smart ticketing.  No mention of whether the smaller operators would accept it either.

Phase two however is equally disappointing - this will consist of smart card tickets, with each operator issuing their own. 

One of these operators already has as smart card ticket scheme and reading between the lines it appears they are not prepared to make any changes so the second operator will have to adopt their scheme or they will 'take their ball home'! 

As yet however there are no clear plans to make them compatible between the operators, apparently this will be left to the individual companies to negotiate and the council seem to have no plans to mediate.  This seems ridiculous as there is a standard navailable (ITSO) for both the hardware elements (cards and readers) and the software.

At present, we have up to two years to wait to see what develops.

As I was now in bus mode, I decided to also query the signs which are appearing at the bus stops which simply report the time of the next bus based on the timetable.

Apparently the system was intended to use real time tracking from the buses, using a system developed by another county.  That county then scrapped the system forcing a rethink and partnership with yet another county.

This latest system does not yet integrate to GPS tracking from the buses and this is under development.  This is why we get the timetabled times.  When the GPS tracking is enabled it will display minutes to the next bus if available or the fallback is the timetable data as at present.

Having visited the county where it is running and seen it in action I can see it works.  I suppose the next question I shall have to ask is why is the integration taking so long?