Social media platforms used by transport operators

[WAB]

A question from an innocent in this technological jungle. How easy would it be for a consortium of rail, bus and ferry companies, Network Rail and the like, transport authorities and the like to set up their own messaging service? It would have controlled and restricted access for posting so that no post can appear except from the companies, etc. or with their approval. This would give a single source for all disruption and similar information and wouldn’t allow anything else. (I do not use Twitter/X or any of that lot.)

So something like JourneyCheck but in a timeline rather than categorised format?

 

[enginedin]

How easy would it be for a consortium of rail, bus and ferry companies, Network Rail and the like, transport authorities and the like to set up their own messaging service?

My favourite quote from having worked with software developers:

Technology is not the difficulty, people are

From a technical perspective, very easy. From a political and funding perspective, very difficult. Lots of companies would say "why should we pay to reinvent the wheel when we can use a social media platform, that people are checking anyway, for free"

 

[thenorthern]

Who by? These two amazing statements seem at odds to my actual experience on the platforms.

The press has described Bluesky as "left wing" and a "progressive echo chamber". It certainly doesn't set out to be political but it's userbase is seen as left wing.

 

[Gloster]

The press has described Bluesky as "left wing" and a "progressive echo chamber". It certainly doesn't set out to be political but it's userbase is seen as left wing.

Which bit of the press? The Mail, Telegraph, Express and Sun, for example? All famed for their reasoned neutrality and complete lack of bias.

On a more serious note. Could it just be that leftward-inclined people are more likely to have left Twitter/X for another service in recent months, while those of the opposite persuasion are more likely to remain?

 

[James H]

I'd like to see a GBR website with a page for every train on the network each day, which would allow an easy point of reference for all service updates pertaining to that train and that route.

 

[Ant1966]

Which bit of the press? The Mail, Telegraph, Express and Sun, for example? All famed for their reasoned neutrality and complete lack of bias.

On a more serious note. Could it just be that leftward-inclined people are more likely to have left Twitter/X for another service in recent months, while those of the opposite persuasion are more likely to remain?

Good point, sure theres an element of that going on.
I'd probably describe myself as (slightly) 'left leaning'. Its hard to truly dissect 'why' you feel as you feel about a given individual, but with Musk I'm pretty sure its not only political. The guy just comes across as a -------- (fill in your own word here) Which would be annoying, but its moved beyond that now. Completely unelected, and now with some serious influence in the world. Scares me a little tbh.

 

[PaulJ]

Southeastern have a WhatsApp channel, often with updates every hour for disruptions even with no updates.

And SE about to start on Bluesky too.

 

[Djgr]

The press has described Bluesky as "left wing" and a "progressive echo chamber". It certainly doesn't set out to be political but it's userbase is seen as left wing.

I think you need to widen your choice of press!

 

[thenorthern]

Which bit of the press? The Mail, Telegraph, Express and Sun, for example? All famed for their reasoned neutrality and complete lack of bias.

On a more serious note. Could it just be that leftward-inclined people are more likely to have left Twitter/X for another service in recent months, while those of the opposite persuasion are more likely to remain?

The Times has mentioned it and the Guardian as well.

 

[AlterEgo]

At the present moment Bluesky is seen as a political place for those on the left who are not happy with Twitter. I didn't say Twitter wasn't seen as political but rather it is at the present moment seen as less politically charged than Bluesky.

Out of interest, are you on Bluesky? A lot of the railway and aviation community decamped there becuase it’s simply a nicer place to talk about a hobby.

 

[thenorthern]

Out of interest, are you on Bluesky? A lot of the railway and aviation community decamped there becuase it’s simply a nicer place to talk about a hobby.

I do have an account on it yes.

 

[dosxuk]

The problem with Twitter and TOC's is not the right wing / crypto nonsense that has inflicted the platform, but that you now have to be a signed up member of the site to see anything that you haven't been directly linked to.

There's nothing wrong with them having a presence on those sites, and to interact with users there. But they should not (and regulated to not, IMHO) be using it as a primary channel for disseminating disruption information. That information should (must) be available to everyone, without having to sign up to specific channels to view and follow.

 

[enginedin]

That information should (must) be available to everyone

Devils' Advocate comment might be: where does this stop? For data to appear on a website, you have to have a device capable of accessing the internet, and have to sign up to a private company who can (in theory) control what data is sent across their network. Both of these have accessibility issues regarding cost / technical skills / etc

 

[Djgr]

The problem with Twitter and TOC's is not the right wing / crypto nonsense that has inflicted the platform, but that you now have to be a signed up member of the site to see anything that you haven't been directly linked to.

There's nothing wrong with them having a presence on those sites, and to interact with users there. But they should not (and regulated to not, IMHO) be using it as a primary channel for disseminating disruption information. That information should (must) be available to everyone, without having to sign up to specific channels to view and follow.

Absolutely agreed. Twitter (or what it calls itself) is no longer fit for this purpose for that reason.

 

[AlterEgo]

The problem with Twitter and TOC's is not the right wing / crypto nonsense that has inflicted the platform, but that you now have to be a signed up member of the site to see anything that you haven't been directly linked to.

There's nothing wrong with them having a presence on those sites, and to interact with users there. But they should not (and regulated to not, IMHO) be using it as a primary channel for disseminating disruption information. That information should (must) be available to everyone, without having to sign up to specific channels to view and follow.

But the disruption information is also available on Journeycheck/NRE, and their own site, as well as loads of other places. What exactly is the objection?

 

[DelW]

Those posters taking the view that the politics of X, as driven by its owner, are irrelevant, might like to consider the real-world damage that Musk is doing to British society. He seems to be doing this as collective punishment for our having dared to elect a mildly-left-wing Government.

In the summer, racist rioters were driven on by wild misinformation and outright lies posted principally on X, as well as other sites. Musk encouraged and aggravated this by pushing the view that "civil war in Britain is inevitable" to his followers.

Now MSN is reporting that he is describing Britain as a "tyrannical police state" and is defending Stephen Yaxley-Lennon aka "Tommy Robinson" who is in prison for contempt of court.

MSN

Musk had already attacked the Prime Minister over the summer when he dubbed him “two-tier Keir” for clamping down on the far-right protests against Muslims and immigrants.

The apparent theory was that liberal protesters were allowed to protest while those on the right were arrested, ignoring the fact that some were setting fire to hotels housing migrants and putting people’s lives in danger.

Earlier this week Musk said that Britain is a “tyrannical police state” and shared a post from far-right activist Tommy Robinson, who is serving 18 months in jail for contempt of court, and wrote: “Why is he in prison for 18 months?”

Personally I wish to have no interaction whatsoever with this site, and I don't think it's appropriate for any official bodies (like TOCs) in this country to promote it in any way at all. Musk seems to be on a power-mad mission to spread his toxic neo fascism across the world, and is destroying any reasoned debate on his site.

 

[Davester50]

Because many ordinary people aren't preoccupied with such matters. One could equally argue that Twitter's previous owners actively sought to manipulate public opinion by the kind of tweets they did or did not allow to be posted, and how thry banned certain people. I'm not sure where such arguments take us.

Exactly.
The moderation for perfectly legal opinions on Bluesky is like Twitter a few years ago. Twitter has never been better than now.

 

[En]

What matters is what works. The reality is that, if they use social media for updates on such situations at all, most ordinary people are far more likely to look at X/Twitter rather than Bluesky. The organisations I've seen moving to Blue seem to be far more concerned about virtue signalling than what works for their customers, and that is absolutely the wrong starting point.

Xitter is circling the drain if not already spinning down into the trap
if not being associated with an overt fascist is 'virtue signalling' then i suggest you check you world view , or is the misogyny, treating women and childern as chattels as well the homophobia and transphobia that is now Musk's and Xitter's position acceptable to you ?

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 27 Nov 2024 ==

Got no idea what you mean about Bluesky being political, its anti-political as far as i can tell as many people there want to get away from that drivel.

exactly, the fact,someone is saying Xitter is not politicxal and bluesky is political suggests that they themselves are political and perhaps misleading others aobut their true intentions ( top tip Quislings never thrive and Elon is not going to notice people shilling for Xitter on some niche interest web forum)
but it;s the same mindset that people were claiming there is two tier policing in the UK and that fascists were beign targetted while other groups were being 'let off' , when the evidence suggests that fascist groups are treated with kid gloves by some Police services when they take to the streets rather than the baton charges and dynamic tactics using dogs and horses that are there to break up group disorder before it turns into a full on riot or basrricades

 

[thenorthern]

The telephone line for Northern Rail is the worst for updating information. Regularly I catch the last train at just before 10pm which when I get to the station I find out it's cancelled. Northern's Twitter is then closed for the evening so I call up Northern who put me through to National Rail enquiries when when I say the problem they don't seem to understand they have to call me a taxi. They also seem to read out that the train is cancelled and the stations where it's cancelled and a load of other garbage.

Thankfully then after 11pm the Northern phone line diverts to the control room where the staff are much more helpful.

 

[david1212]

I'd like to see a GBR website with a page for every train on the network each day, which would allow an easy point of reference for all service updates pertaining to that train and that route.

Once Shadow GBR is up and running a link from the website front page should be the primary source of information not any third party website or app. From there debatable how best it would work. There could be a path follow through to a page for every train that is similar to Real Time Trains.

No logging in should be required. When not logged in X ( Twitter ) sometimes only shows old pages. Facebook may show some then decide to totally block if not logged in.

When there is disruption it is the route(s) that is/are important rather than now the operator and in time depending how services are grouped but thinking back to when InterCity, Network South-East and Regional Railways maybe the sector.

Take say Birmingham International to Wolverhampton. When all is running to plan passengers can use their preferred operator chosen from West Coast, Cross Country, Transport for Wales and West Midlands Trains maybe with an advance ticket. When problems the priority becomes making the journey even if Coventry <> Nuneaton <> Stafford <> Wolverhampton. Checking this should not require accessing multiple websites / apps.

Now for the operators that use Journeycheck you have to get to their front page from a link then it only shows their services. If this was made national again how do you segregate to be most useful?

 

[Deepgreen]

Not a social media platform, but I experienced an incident today on a journey to London from Guildford that showed that some passengers are better informed from web sites about train running than staff. My train from Haslemere to Waterloo was described on the platform screens as still being at Haslemere, and was therefore at least 15 late by then. I checked RTT and that showed it still at Haslemere, BUT then checked 'Traksy' which showed it approaching Guildford! Meanwhile, Waterloo passengers had been advised to catch a train from p1, which was a slow working via Epsom! Sure enough the Haslemere train hove into view about three minutes late, while most of its potential passengers were preparing for their 90 minute journey to Waterloo via Epsom.

Surely staff have access to track diagrams with real time information so as to avoid this sort of very poor misinformation? In this case, I (and anyone else who has adopted 'Traksy') was better informed than the staff. If all else fails, why can't staff use 'Traksy'?

If this post is deemed to be in the wrong thread, could it be moved, please?

 

[Tom]

There was an intermittent train describer outage in that area all day. The Guildford TDC is what pushes data out for Haslemere itself, but Guildford station and its surrounding areas actually can come through (I think!) 2 or 3 different TDs.

For most systems, it really depends on what TD they're looking at to cover a signal section - you don't leave the ZG *only* area until you're just coming up to Shalford Junction though. All systems that use berth steps to trigger a 'report' (e.g. RTT, Darwin, CIS) won't know about something happening until an event occurs around a specific monitoring location as opposed to signal section.

I suspect you got lucky with time as to when you looked, as all systems would have struggled until data started to come through again for any given train service whether that be by the TD starting to work again or the train entering the coverage area of another.

 

[Deepgreen]

There was an intermittent train describer outage in that area all day. The Guildford TDC is what pushes data out for Haslemere itself, but Guildford station and its surrounding areas actually can come through (I think!) 2 or 3 different TDs.

For most systems, it really depends on what TD they're looking at to cover a signal section - you don't leave the ZG *only* area until you're just coming up to Shalford Junction though. All systems that use berth steps to trigger a 'report' (e.g. RTT, Darwin, CIS) won't know about something happening until an event occurs around a specific monitoring location as opposed to signal section.

I suspect you got lucky with time as to when you looked, as all systems would have struggled until data started to come through again for any given train service whether that be by the TD starting to work again or the train entering the coverage area of another.

Thanks for the very informative reply.

 

[Doctor Fegg]

Or they see that Twitter is on a death spiral and signed up to accounts on Bluesky before a cyber squatter beats them to the punch to register a Bluesky account under "TOC name" in the hope of getting a nice pay day when the actual TOC has to buy the account from them.

In theory Bluesky circumvents that by allowing you to use your domain name as your handle.

So I have @cycle.travel as the Bluesky handle for my site of that domain, rather than @cycletravel.bsky.social.

 

[Frontera2]

As of this afternoon, Southeastern are providing live updates on Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/serailway.bsky.social, in the same fashion as their WhatsApp channel (https://bit.ly/seWAchannel)

 

[whoosh]

It's a real shame what Elon has done to X because it generally worked well before. You could use it for whatever you wanted, from just following businesses to using it as a 'town square' or whatever Elon talks about it becoming now - and you didn't have right-wing, racist/nationalist, nonsense rammed down your throat from accounts you don't even follow.

And it's the way that Twitter/X's algorithms have been tweaked that have resulted in me commencing my migration to Bluesky. Twitter/X's feed is now full of spam and messages I am not interested in, whereas Bluesky is fully focused on letting me see messages from those I follow.
I will use both for the time being, but as soon as most of those, I wish to follow, have moved to Bluesky then I will put my X account in stasis. Hopefully, most of the main transport operators will move across soon.

Have any of you been on Facebook lately? Utterly riddled with it. There's a huge amount of British nostalgia looking sites that drip feed racism - quite often having taken over other pages, and administered in places like Vietnam and Nigeria.

One popped up the other day - Brits Only - with a picture of a street circa 1950s with double deck buses.

"Everything in order as it should be. *Tearful with pride emoji* *Union Jack flag*"

Cue lots of 'Top contributors' telling us how good Britain was back in the old days before immigration.
Obviously AI had had a hand in the creation of the post. Just searching for a 1950s street with double deck buses would naturally pick a photo of a Great British street to be proud of, right? No - photo was of O'Connell Street in Dublin!

Not a user of social media, I decided to give it a try and look for information on any Northern disruption going on.

I Google “Northern trains disruption Twitter” and click the link to what I presume is Northern’s X page.

A third of the screen is taken up by a box nagging me to sign in or sign up to X, which I am not going to do.

The top post is about disruption TWO DAYS AGO on the Furness line.

The next posts in the list are -

November 2022 - news about last Pacer train service.
March 2024 - a reply to somebody called Jack, telling him that it is his responsibility to keep his phone charged so he can show his ticket.
September 2024 - a reply to somebody called Lila, telling her how to report a racist incident.
July 2022 - Northern offering a £1000 reward for information on who broke a train window.
December 2019 - picture of a Pacer in a scrapyard.
February 2022 - Rotherham Central station is closed due to flooding.

Useless. Or am I working it wrong? You never had this trouble with Ceerfax!

Yes, I have had this issue - even when logged in.

Ceefax! Glory days!!

I think most people are sensible enough to have views they're willing to debate and listen to others with an open mind, but you're often not talking to these people online. They're paid shills, bots or agent provocateurs (increasingly AI based) that are only ever going to attack you.

As the computer worked out at the end of WarGames, the only winning move is not to play.

Facebook the same - see above. 'UK time capsule' for example is administered from Vietnam. Looks all nostalgic to start with, but then there'll be a post of a street years ago with a phrase designed to stir up race hate, like "British civilisation so sad what we lost!"
Again the top contributors turn up with their drip feeding of racism.

On a more serious note. Could it just be that leftward-inclined people are more likely to have left Twitter/X for another service in recent months, while those of the opposite persuasion are more likely to remain?

I think so yes. Also, just people who are centre ground have as well.

Those posters taking the view that the politics of X, as driven by its owner, are irrelevant, might like to consider the real-world damage that Musk is doing to British society. He seems to be doing this as collective punishment for our having dared to elect a mildly-left-wing Government.

In the summer, racist rioters were driven on by wild misinformation and outright lies posted principally on X, as well as other sites. Musk encouraged and aggravated this by pushing the view that "civil war in Britain is inevitable" to his followers.

Now MSN is reporting that he is describing Britain as a "tyrannical police state" and is defending Stephen Yaxley-Lennon aka "Tommy Robinson" who is in prison for contempt of court.

MSN

Personally I wish to have no interaction whatsoever with this site, and I don't think it's appropriate for any official bodies (like TOCs) in this country to promote it in any way at all. Musk seems to be on a power-mad mission to spread his toxic neo fascism across the world, and is destroying any reasoned debate on his site.

It's genuinely renewed my faith in humanity that yourself and many others on this thread feel the same way.

 

[jon0844]

It's genuinely renewed my faith in humanity that yourself and many others on this thread feel the same way.

I work with people in the tech industry. The worst thing is that everyone who works in it knows about the issues, and indeed the problems of AI, but few are willing to do much about it or stand up and talk about the issues. AI, whether we like it or not, is something that investors are willing to throw money at - a LOT of money.

That said, some of the racist stuff is good old-fashioned racists being allowed to go wild with funding from shady groups that want to create division for political purposes (and I don't directly mean a political party, but one of the many thinktanks or similar that seek to influence politicians - and what better way than demonstrating 'public opinion' that has been artificially created).

 

[WolvertonWorks]

Apologies if this has been posted elsewhere (and mods please delete if so) but I've just followed a link to a posting on X about GWR being "sorry but due to staff illness, our social media customer support service will close at 7pm on week days for the rest of the year"

https://x.com/GWRHelp/status/1868732325061595377

 

[riceuten]

My interaction with social media (X.com included) has evidenced the outsourcing of this function (for some companies anyway) to third parties.

Whose "sources" are the companies' website, realtimetrains or opentraintimes- sometimes not even that. It becomes obvious when multiple simple queries over a period of time are answered with "I will have to get back to you on that" when even a station cleaner would know the answer

 

[12LDA28C]

My interaction with social media (X.com included) has evidenced the outsourcing of this function (for some companies anyway) to third parties.

Whose "sources" are the companies' website, realtimetrains or opentraintimes- sometimes not even that. It becomes obvious when multiple simple queries over a period of time are answered with "I will have to get back to you on that" when even a station cleaner would know the answer

What are you saying here exactly? Staff at a TOC will not be able to answer queries relating to Realtime Trains or Open Train Times, nor would they use these systems to answer questions as they are nothing to do with the Operators.