See the new timetable for the A here. The biggest change is the cut to the Southampton-Hedge End Velvet Sunday service.
The new S1 timetable is here. Minor changes all round. Most significant is a weekday morning peak journey from Lordshill is extended to start back from Lordshill North. In fact all journeys that don't currently run to/from Lordshill North will do so from Tuesday.
Don't forget that it's a Sunday service across all operators this Bank Holiday Monday 26th May.
Should anyone wish to view the new service timetable on Timeline for Velvet B4,which starts in June it is shown under service 15 and not B4-PAC
ReplyDelete15 will clash with Brijan 15 at Tesco!
DeleteI notice the error on Traveline in showing Velvet's B4 as service 15 has still not been corrected-As the Velvet operation is now much reduced, and therefor vehicle reqirement a lot less, it still seems to have quite a few lost services due to vehicle breakdowns over the area it now covers-I hope in the future this can be rectified somewhat,although I appreciate all operators have problems at certain times with their vehicles-PAC
DeleteTotally off topic, but have you noticed that Bluestar have turned off the voice (the next stop system)? It appears that the council and their contractor VIX, just cannot get it to update properly, to fix the numerous errors which include wrongly named stops, and stops that dont even exist, as well as the ones that are completely missing! Can you imagine what the press would make of it, if they hear about the system which has cost £1000 per bus (not sure where the funding came from?), needing to be switched off completely, because it doesnt work? I congratulate Bluestar for having the guts to tell them that they are not going to stand for this second rate system any longer.
ReplyDeleteThe new Hampshire County Council timetable for the New Forest area which commences on 1st june 2014 is now out. There are plenty of copies available from the Bluestar box in Bargate Street in Southampton. New services such as Gardbus 139,Morebus BeachBus 112 back again this Summer, and revised New Forest Tour timetables are all shown. The advantage with this timetable is that if you live in Totton or on the Waterside, all Bluestar services in the area are shown, and avoids carrying around all those stupid little leaflets that Bluestar insist we have. Also First H1 and H2 in Hythe area is shown and not kept a seceret from the public, as they do not show it in their Southampton area timetable,nor for that matter do they show their service 40. Just wish that Southampton City Council would do a similar timetable for all the operators in their area,as it is quite difficult to find details of the small operators unless you go onto a website.
ReplyDeleteLooks like a comprehensive guide. Unfortunately the PDF edition from the HCC website has a map that omits the seasonal 112 Beach Bus that operates via Lepe and Buckler's Hard.
ReplyDeleteJust to clear up a couple of misconceptions in Anon 29th May @ 01:44's forthright comments about the "next stop" audio visual system...
ReplyDeleteVIX are not the council's contractor, they are Bluestar's chosen supplier. All operators receiving funding for 'next stop' in South Hampshire as part of the government's Better Bus Area Fund (Go South Coast, First, Stagecoach, Velvet) has been free to select their own supplier as we each had different preferences. Therefore if the system has been switched off on bluestar buses (which would not surprise me, we've had terrible problems with ours too) it is because Bluestar's chosen supplier has been unable to deliver to the standard required.
It is very frustrating that these systems seem to be so difficult to get working, but it is entirely unfair to blame the council.
Thanks for the reply to this Mr Stockley. Whilst I understand your points, surely Bluestar have switched it off, not because the contractor has been unable to deliver, but because by your own admission, the system just isnt good enough? At a cost of £1000 per bus, this seems a terrible waste of money, which could have been spent to provide better bus services, rather than cater for the tiny percentage of visually impaired customers, and then let even them down!
DeleteI don't understand your distinction. The system is designed and built by the contractor. So if the system isn't good enough, that's squarely down to the contractor for designing a poor system - I don't understand why you seem to be saying it's not?
ReplyDeleteThe case for next stop announcements is not just about the visually impaired. It's also about a widely held fear among irregular bus users that they will miss their stop. The whole range of measures being provided now and in the near future by the Better Bus Area Fund and other similar funds (including next stop AV, wifi, bus refurbishments, regional smartcard) is about making bus travel more attractive to irregular users and therefore growing public transport patronage.
The £1,000 per bus that you are concerned about, taken across the whole Bluestar fleet, would not pay the running costs of a single bus for even one year , whereas it will guarantee next stop info on the entire bluestar fleet for the next five years. In the context of trying to attract more people to bus travel on a long term basis, that seems a reasonable investment to me.
£1000 per Bluestar bus would probably pay for the maintenance of the whole Velvet fleet ! Lol.
DeleteSeriously though I think anon 1 June 2337 has a point - if all the money spent over the years on dubious technology had been spent on running more buses we would have a better service. Southampton is on at least the third real time info system on bus stops and it still doesn't work ! If the money had been spent on increased frequencies we wouldn't need real time info !
To put your suggestion into perspective there are approximately 600 buses in South Hampshire so £600,000 have been spent on next stop announcements. Each bus costs around £100,000 to £150,000 per annum to run with fuel, drivers, engineering and depreciation costs so that £600,000 one off spend on next stop announcements would have (at best) funded 6 additional buses for one year or one additional bus for 6 years (ignoring inflation). So with that 6 additional buses what realistically could be achieved in terms of improving frequencies?
DeleteNot all operators in the country have had problems with Vix. What exactly is the difficulty locally? Is it less the company itself and more the local infrastructure and suchlike?
ReplyDeleteI agree that not all operators have had trouble with VIX. The biggest issue locally appears to be that the system was installed using out of date council information on bus stop names and locations. which VIX seem unable to update. I also agree with "Tired Old Git", that the money could have been far better spent, as the real time technology does not, and I would suggest, never will work, for as long as it relies on mobile signals, which constantly fail! I read Mr Stockleys replies with interest, but cannot fathom why anybody catching a bus would be worried about missing their stop? Really?! Is that really worth £1000 per bus? Irregular bus users are supposedly the target for this system, yet the regular bus users(the people we really need to look after) are being driven to insanity by a computerised voice, droning the names of stops, preceded by the words "next stop" on every occasion. In my opinion, the whole thing is totally unnecessary. Whatever happened to the request from a passenger, asking "Driver, can you tell me when we get to Central Station, please?". In that way, we offer a personal service to the visitor or irregular user, and maintain the confidence of our bread and butter commuters.
DeleteAs a footnote to this debate, I would like to recount a conversation overheard, shortly after the next stop system was introduced....
Passenger - "Driver, would you pass on my thanks to Bluestar, please".
Driver - "Certainly Sir, what for?"
Passenger - "For finally giving me the push I needed to go and buy myself a car again. I cannot stand listening to that moronic voice, for nearly an hour each way, every morning and night. Its akin to audio bu**ery!"
Free wifi, bus refurbs, and better ticketing ideas, are worthy uses of this fund, but the "next stop" system will lose more customers than it will ever gain, as the regular customers do not like it. They do however like the silent scrolling sign!.
Whilst I understand the point Phil is making about attracting irregular passengers and the need to help visually impaired passengers, the council investment is happening against a background of constant cuts by the same councils to bus subsidies and hence withdrawal of marginal routes. I realise that wifi etc is a one-off capital spend and the other is ongoing revenue spend, but surely there is no point in having buses with wifi etc if there isn't a route that goes anywhere near where you want to travel. I suspect 99% of passengers feel the same.
ReplyDeleteI too find the Bluestar announcements annoying particularly when they are not working properly. I-Bus in London works well but then as it is TfL, no doubt vast sums of money have been thrown at its development and ongoing maintenance. Hopefully the bugs can be ironed out but I still feel that scrolling signs is the better answer - this works well in Bournemouth which has a large elderly population, and in reality most passengers and drivers are happy to help visually impaired folk anyway.
To counter anonymous at 0301, the outdated council information regarding bus stops has come about because over the years operators have changed bus stops, both locations, installations and removals without informing the local authority who have a responsibility to maintain the Naptan database. I had the same problem in Dorset where when we undertook the stops survey in Weymouth ready for the RTI scheme for the Olympics we found 44 bus stops with no formal Naptan record. Next stop announcements are a wonderful way of finding deficiences in the bus stop records as buses announce or miss out announcing stops where the records have not been updated. My colleague who maintains Naptan for Hampshire has explained this quite forcibly to the senior management of the operators concerned and steps are being taken to eliminate the errors.
ReplyDeleteKen. Traveline and Naptan coordinator (Dorset)
"My colleague who maintains Naptan for Hampshire has explained this quite forcibly to the senior management of the operators concerned and steps are being taken to eliminate the errors."
DeleteAt last!
I am fed up planning a day out in rural England using Traveline and Google maps for bus times and stop locations respectively, only to find phantom stops that no longer exist, the biggest problem here are remote stops on busy dual carriageways that are along a bus route, normally served by a single operator, and if the stop turns out not to exist on the ground then getting to one that does can be a bit of a problem!
Anon: "but cannot fathom why anybody catching a bus would be worried about missing their stop?"
I would have thought that would be obvious. No? If you are unfamiliar with an area/ route then how are you to know when to get off in order to get to your intended destination? This applies to irregular or frequent bus users. You say ask the driver to let you know, well most of Joe Public don't want to have to do that and some perhaps wouldn't be aware that they can.
If we are to make bus travel sustainable for the "regulars" then surely we need to make it as attractive as possible to new users, or perhaps only these "regular" users should be permitted to use these services and the short fall in running cost be made up by bottomless subsidy's for empty buses that a "regular" might want to use"?
As for real time systems I seem to remember the first one City Bus installed in the 1990's worked reasonably well.
Hmmm...check the info first, then spend £1000 per bus,not vice versa. You can have all the fancy dan kit you like,..the old maxim applies garbage in,garbage out.
ReplyDeletePerhaps you should have removed the 44 'illegal' stops,and corrected the errors that way ! Obviously the guilty party was probably F you know who.
No such thing as 'illegal' stops - you can have 'inactive' stops on NapTAN but there is a due process for removing those.
DeleteThese stops become more important when you're registering your services electronically (only Stagecoach does this nationally and their Trapeze data sets are consequently more up to date than most other operators) - if the stop doesn't exist in NapTAN and you're operating the service, then you need to get the local authority to 'add' it to NapTAN. But for all you know, another operator might be operating a service past the stop, so you can't just 'remove' it. I know of services within the Western Traffic Area where one operator uses a stop, but it falls on a busy corridor served by another operator, just as often but the stop is not observed by one, and is by the other.
In Ken's (above) area NapTAN updating is done quite quickly, my only other experiences relate to another traffic area where one county council regionally handles the data co ordination - they themselves are good, the other surrounding counties less so. In one instance one of the surrounding counties changed the co-ordinates of a vital terminal point in one town we ran in, causing a lot of problems as by this time we were on EBSR. VOSA will reject a non-compliant EBSR and the data checks have to be undertaken prior to submission.
It's actually very easy for any operator to work out what 'stops' appear on their service lists, and Traveline does ask ALL operators to undertake periodic data checks (you simply go onto the traveline site, download the relevant PDFs and check the listed stops against the service)- shall we just say some operators are better at this than others, we'd best not name them here but those in the know will automatically think of names.
Surprisingly not! Over 20 of the unrecorded stops were where the now defunct Sureline Buses operation (not the current South West Coaches) had agreed to flag stops with Weymouth and Portland Council on roads that they served that were off the main roads. We simply created the appropriate records for these. Some of the others were in former Hail and Ride areas, and others were the formalising of single records where bus stops were flagged "buses also stop opposite". Naptan v1 (the original 2002 surveys) only recorded actual physical infrastructure such as flags poles shelters and yellow boxes and not "unmarked or ghost" stops associated with them. Naptan v2 formalises these to allow the creation of text codes and all the other underlying information needed for tracking and journey planning with modern apps. Naptan is organic, it changes every week somewhere, and the important thing is getting the message across to operators and local authority staff on the ground that changes need to be passed to the Naptan manager. The problems in and around Southampton (and not just Southampton) have happpened incrementally over many years with stops being created or deleted, moving slightly or having names that are no longer relevant and whilst this may not have been problematical in the pre RTI days, the arrival of on bus announcements has highlighted these issues.
ReplyDeleteKen, Traveline and Naptan Coordinator (Dorset)
The Xelabus new timetable is now being shown on their website-However there is a discrepancy between the one shown on Timeline to the one they show, in that on Timeline the 1510 ex Eastleigh is shown as School Holidays only, whereas on their version it's shown as the 1715 ex Eastleigh as running School Holidays only-I must presume it's the 1510 that runs School Holidays only,but who knows-The evening journeys operated by Velvet I am happy to report are shown.-PAC
ReplyDeleteThe above refers to the X4,although the new times for X7 are also now shown-PAC
DeleteXelabus will shortly correct the error shown on their website for service X4,as to the fact it will be the 1540 ex Eastleigh as not running Schooldays and not the 1715-In my posting 6th June 2014 15.32, I put the 1510 which should have been the 1540 an error on my part - I note however that X32 is still shown - PAC
DeleteI also note that on checking the Xelabus website again since this morning the X32 has now been deleted.- PAC
DeleteAlso the X32 is still shown (Sainsbury's Hedge End shopper service) & I thought that ended on Fri 7th June!
ReplyDeleteCredit to Xela for showing Velvet evening trips & also mentioning First's Sunday "A" service. But no mention if any Xela passes/tickets are usable on these services.
ReplyDeleteYes we will be accepting Xela tickets. We're not actually required to do so, but many of the users have been our regular customers for years, having forced them to buy Xela tickets for their daytime travel there's no way I could bring myself to make them pay again!
ReplyDeleteWell done Phil Stockley.
Delete