The purpose of pedantry

The following was the 'star letter' in issue 488 of bus industry magazine 'Route One'. Mr Palmer justly argues that the bus industry "needs to get much closer to the detail of the service". Now I feel utterly vindicated in my pestering of transport operators about the poor placement of signage and unusable websites and advocating for the wider presence of 'bus buddy' volunteers to offer passenger assistance and information, just as the erstwhile bus conductor used to do. In rural areas there is less bus signage and outlets for paper timetables are few and far between and stock levels and accuracy are seldom checked. DRT service footprints cannot be displayed on current timetable websites in Suffolk. A passenger survey in Halesworth found less than 2% of passengers using a concession pass have a mobile phone and can use it to access a SMS timetable.

Your front page photograph (routeone, 9 May) perhaps summed up for me how the bus industry still has a bit to go before car users will be persuaded to give buses a try. 

The photograph illustrated a real life bus stop, the kind of bus stop a car user may encounter on their attempt to give the bus a try for the first time. The bus stop flag lists services 2A, 50, 51 and 963, all of which have been withdrawn, some as long as two years ago. It also lists service 13 (no longer stops at that stop) and services 260/3/7/8 which have been renumbered and misses out services 9U and 62/62A which also serve it. Cue the bemused car user heading back for their car. 

Of course the car user could use the text service advertised at the bus stop to find out real times for buses on their smartphones. A great new idea. Except of course the bus stop location number is missing from the stop, so the service cannot be used. This is just one example of how the bus service provided is perhaps not as good as the bus industry thinks it is, and why managers across the country are scratching heads at passenger loss when they feel they have thrown money at passenger enhancing projects.  

I note another bus operator who recently launched a Wi-Fi service to a local route with great fanfare and branding, unaware that there is no 3G coverage along the route and as such, the Wi-Fi signal on the buses drops off eight minutes after leaving the terminus, never to return.

The industry needs to get much closer to the detail of the service it provides and to whether it actually adds value or simply wastes precious resources, or worse still, builds up the users’ hopes then leaves them underwhelmed. Back to the stop in question, well you could ask is the bus stop not a remote, little-used stop that has perhaps been missed under the radar? No, sadly it is the main bus stop right at the front door of FirstGroup HQ, one you would expect some of the biggest names in bus travel to have used and noted. 

Steven Palmer,
Aberdeen