A day in the life of unintegrated travel

On a trip out with my son last Friday, we followed one of my rules for public transport and left with ‘a bus to spare’. If this bus didn’t show up, we’d still have time to get where we were going on the next. It’s tough in the bus industry at the moment as driver shortages make running a full timetable difficult. I’ll leave you to make up your own mind why many drivers, often from eastern Europe, are no longer driving buses in the UK…

It was a two-bus journey with the first leg going well and an eight-minute gap for our connection.  However, one of the other rules for public transport (at least in West Yorkshire) is ‘be very suspicious if no real time tracking is showing’. Real time information was a real game changer when it was introduced maybe fifteen years ago. Nowadays it is expected, and people purse their lips disapprovingly if the bus marked as ‘due’ spends an extra two or three minutes getting through the lights.

Back at the stop, the bus scheduled for 2.18pm was nowhere in sight and the 2.33pm also showing a scheduled (untracked) time. No worries, we’re transport geeks!

Clicking on the Local Authority website gave us a journey alternative of a train and a connecting bus and clicking though to the rail website gave us… ‘error 500!’ I didn’t know what that was but apparently, it’s google-speak for ‘it’s something to do with the server but I’m not sure what’.

Anyway geek move two was to check out local rail website directly which gave us a list of 14 possible pdf’s. Having limited time and download capacity, we set off walking towards the rail station whilst checking Trainline. Checking scheduled time, buying tickets and then going on ‘realtimetrains’ (for supergeeks) to check actual running whilst not crashing into fellow pedestrians kept my peripheral vision busy but we made it.

Tragedy!

The train was running two minutes late. Now strictly speaking that’s not really late if you’re talking franchise obligations. But if you’re a customer with a three-minute gap to a connection, it’s stressful. We asked the conductor where the bus stopped and he shrugged his shoulders, so again back to the internet where three different sites failed to show a diagram of onward journeys, even though I know it’s mandatory to have a poster of this at every station.

As the train pulled into our station, we could see the bus stop and thankfully still two minutes for the tracked bus.

‘Phew’ we gasped to the bus driver, ’is this bus planned to pick up from the train?’

‘Not really, he said, ‘we’re told not to wait for the train.’ Sigh.

The journey home was more straightforward information and timewise, but what about tickets?

Had all gone to plan, we could have made the whole journey on a single operator day ticket. As it was, we bought an extra train ticket each, an extra bus ticket, and we were about to let our homeward bus in Leeds go because it was run by a different operator until my son remembered that journeys were £1 after 7pm so we paid for that too. £4.70 each versus our actual £10.40 each*.

So ironically this tells me what integration should mean.

Simple, easy to find, consistent information without having to switch to multiple sites (and surely pdf downloads are now in the digital fossil record?).

Clear multi-operator ticket range.

And don’t assume customers can predict exactly the ticket product they are going to need at the beginning of the day particularly if plans change because of service failures. Charge them at the end what they should have paid for what was delivered to them.

It’s difficult for me to be sanguine about this having spent many years at Transport for the North trying to do exactly that, but with the national bus strategy – Bus Back Better – and the advent of Great British Railways, there is a challenge and an opportunity for all of us across the industry.

If it’s this hard for someone who knows every transport website and ticketing scheme inside out, how do we persuade normal people?!

* I checked later what the post-pay cost would have been. The answer I think is £13.70 for a family ticket as long as you can be ‘beamed up’ to a bus or rail station to buy one.