Crowdsourced bus running information

[Feuillesmortes]

If I'm standing in the cold at a bus stop on an intermediate point on a route, I would appreciate information from other passengers from earlier points on the route in respect of delays or cancellation.

Has this been attempted? Sometimes twitter or the bus company app provides information, but that's not always real time.

In times of disruption, sometimes bus drivers will communicate their intentions (eg. to change route) to the passengers already on the bus, but the people at later bus stops have no clue.

 

[danm14]

Has this been attempted? Sometimes twitter or the bus company app provides information, but that's not always real time.

In Ireland, a Facebook group was set up by commuters (and even a couple of drivers) for the notoriously unreliable Bus Eireann 111 service, where they would report to each other whether the bus was running (as Bus Eireann used to be terrible at reporting cancellations); how late the bus left the terminus and who was driving it (for an idea of arrival times at other stops); as well as whether it was a single or double decker and roughly how many seats were left (for an idea of whether you'd actually be able to board).

It died off as numbers commuting declined due to Covid, and never really recovered - but for several years it was hugely active and used by a surprisingly large number of commuters on that route.

 

[Roger1973]

I suppose it's possible, I seem to remember seeing something during lockdown that an operator was trying to crowd-source loading information so people waiting could see if a bus was full or not, but I'm not sure how successful this was.

I can see the attraction of the idea, but can see it being open to abuse.

Real Time systems can be set to show 'cancelled' if the bus isn't visible (to the system) but this is not a great idea, as buses can either have kit that's defective, or there's been a data error either at system level or driver level, or the bus could have entered a regular or temporary dead spot.

TFL countdown tends to work on the basis that if the system stops 'seeing' a bus, it falls off the roadside displays, so you start walking then get passed by the bus... (There was a temporary dead spot in Lewisham town centre a few years back that caused a bit of this.)

The alternative is that Real Time roadside displays will show the 'scheduled' time of next bus until that time has passed - and you never know if that means the bus is coming or not.

An added complication with real time systems is they tend to be owned and managed by local authorities, who generally don't have staff on duty 24/7, and the extent that bus operators have control room staff with the time to do anything and access to systems is variable. Reading Buses control staff (for example) are quite good at putting something out on Twitter if a bus is running late, or is delayed / cancelled (even in the middle of the night), but I don't think they can do anything with the roadside displays.

 

[Lewisham2221]

There was talk of a facility with the Ticketer system, whereby control staff could mark an individual service as cancelled and this would be reflected as such on any systems which obtain tracking/running information via Ticketer. I'm not sure if this feature is actually "live" anywhere though.

 

[MCR247]

There was talk of a facility with the Ticketer system, whereby control staff could mark an individual service as cancelled and this would be reflected as such on any systems which obtain tracking/running information via Ticketer. I'm not sure if this feature is actually "live" anywhere though.

Some Trent Barton buses will show as cancelled on Notts City council displays, but not sure if that is via ticketer or someone manually informing them/changing it

 

[noddingdonkey]

Services in West Yorkshire can show as cancelled on the PTE website and displays but this doesn't show up on First's app. (The 184 service operated by First Manchester doesn't show any live tracking on Metro's site.)

Given the current state of the cancellations I've taken the trouble of setting up a Google Sheets App script to screen scrape the Metro running info for both ends of my route, if there is a cancellation log it to the spreadsheet and trigger an IFTTT webhook to ping my phone and thence my watch. My watch vibrates a lot at the moment.

It would be nice for this to be an official service, and for everything to be a bit more linked up so there is a definitive source of information.

 

[SeveerYeliab]

Stagecoach services seem to show as cancelled on their app (or certainly in the south east), however a lot of 'ad-hoc' cancellations (eg, where the bus has broken down and the return journey has been cancelled) doesn't show.
A lot of the cancellations shown on the app just seem to be what the depot know they cannot cover at the start of day due to driver unavailability, and I'm not sure how easy it is for control to cancel a service on the app at short notice.

 

[Feuillesmortes]

I wonder if I, as a bus user, can set up a Waze account with a username like "BusUserKent1A" and then invite other bus users to do the same thing.

In time, you would be able to see a cluster of fellow passengers moving on a bus, or sitting on a bus stop, and cross-reference this to the live data on bustimes.org

 

[Soundwave]

The Transit app has a crowdsourcing function. I've only ever used buses which are on-time. So, I'm not sure how it shows late running. But there is a button for me to report late running once you've boarded the bus.

 

[Baxenden Bank]

Bustimes.org does this for you (providing your operator is available on this platform)

Simply load up the service you are interested by the following menu: region/operator/routes. Having chosen your 'route' it will display the timetable and under that the VOSA registration / vehicles. Click on vehicles and it shows all the departures for the route so far for the day in the following format: vehicle / trip / to / map. If you know your departure time from the start point select map. If you are curious about running performance all day, click on the first one of the day then the time at the top right of the screen and you can look at each trip in turn.

It's not perfect, for example if you have multiple routes you can catch.

I live in an area served by a single route and the buses run out, terminate, then return. So if the bus hasn't run out, it won't be coming back. If it ran out late it will be late coming back late and I can also check that it departs the terminus (rather than returning private). Going the other way it has a cut-off point where it can take a short cut to the terminus (to make up time) or serve the full route. Having passed that point I know the bus will arrive soon after and can leave the house knowing that the bus will arrive.

I would rather rely on technology than bustwitcher94 who might have got distracted and missed the bus going past his house!

 

[MedwayValiant]

Thanks for the second paragraph! I think I knew in theory that bustimes could do what you describe, but I didn't know how to do it.

It's not unknown for buses to run but not to track (shouldn't happen, but sometimes does), and from the other end I have seen a bus fly past showing "not in service" while it was tracking, so it's not absolutely definitive as to what did and didn't run - but it's as good as we can do.

Assuming the data to be correct, I now know that of 52 scheduled journeys on "my" route today, 40 ran out and 38 ran back. Would it be unduly harsh of me to consider that amount of non-runnage to be very poor indeed?

 

[Baxenden Bank]

Thanks for the second paragraph! I think I knew in theory that bustimes could do what you describe, but I didn't know how to do it.

It's not unknown for buses to run but not to track (shouldn't happen, but sometimes does), and from the other end I have seen a bus fly past showing "not in service" while it was tracking, so it's not absolutely definitive as to what did and didn't run - but it's as good as we can do.

Assuming the data to be correct, I now know that of 52 scheduled journeys on "my" route today, 40 ran out and 38 ran back. Would it be unduly harsh of me to consider that amount of non-runnage to be very poor indeed?

It is not perfect, but is is much better than the not-so-old days of going to the stop and just standing there not knowing anything - as there are no real-time stop displays where I live.

Yes, sometimes buses run but don't track, or lose tracking mid-route, or there is a delay to the data, or the drivers resets the machine mid-route (or does a changeover) so it looks as though it stopped short but then there is another entry where it starts tracking again.

When running 'not in service' my main local bus does still track but I can tell it is 'NIS' because it will be off-route whizzing round the bypass or along the A50.

My other local route, which runs a couple of times per day and is run by a small operator, sometimes doesn't track at all. Today it only tracked leaving the depot and for the first 30 minutes or so in service, then it stopped. I've no doubt it ran in full I just don't know whether the driver had his meal break at the leisure centre or the industrial estate today!

40/38 out of 52 does seem very poor.

One thing to watch out for is how recent the data is. When looking at the map, you can click on a bus and it will say how many seconds/minutes ago the data was updated. If it says five minutes rather than one I will miss it because it is four minutes closer to my house than I thought!

If you click on region/operator/map you can see all of that operator's buses on every route.
If you click on region/operator/vehicles you can see all of that operator's vehicles and when they were last tracked.
If the timetable page says 'tracking four buses (or whatever) then you can click on that and track all of the buses on a particular route - so you would see if they were bunched up - depends how frequent a route is.

Technically, as the website says, it is ticket machines you are following rather than vehicles.