Re: How do TfL monitor bus routes?
- From: Paul Corfield <aooy65@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 02 Apr 2006 10:22:39 +0100
On Sun, 2 Apr 2006 09:19:57 +0100, Paul G <notion@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Request for information/experience here. I'm grateful for any
suggestions...
Do TfL get lots of information from the ticket machines and the manual
surveys they take. Do they bother asking for driver/bus garage feedback
as well?
And more specifically what are the criteria they use for assigning for
more buses to any particular route? Are people I should write to that
might help this process (apart from TfL Customer Service) or anything
else I can do?
Here's the detail :) [feel free to skip this part if you want!]
There's a reason I'm asking this. I'm particularly thinking of the
Number 5 bus route which has recently (last week) been extended from its
original Canning Town through Barking and on to Becontree Heath, and now
runs through to Romford Market (using the vehicles and drivers formerly
used for the 87s which used to run Barking to Romford Marking on this
route) so the new route is Canning Town -> Barking -> Becontree Heath ->
Romford Market [1].
Unfortunately the changeover means there is a less frequent service
Barking to Becontree Heath (total of buses running remain the same but
they run longer routes, so the frequency drops) [2]. It's meant that
the buses become fully loaded and run past many bus stops without
stopping as they are unable to accept new passengers. How long do TfL
take to notice this and are they likely to allocate more buses to the
route in the near future? Or do the unlucky passengers in this
experiment just have to wait for the next retendering?
Your post seems to cover a number of issues.
1) TfL Buses have teams of people monitoring the contractual
performance of the service. This will look at how frequently buses
arrive and what the "excess waiting time" and "long gaps" are on the
route. There will be very little data at this stage to know quite what
is happening with the service - i.e. less than one week which is not a
reliable sample size.
To be fair to Stagecoach who run the route it is extremely rare that a
new schedule will "bed down" within a week. It takes time to see if the
route runs as per the assumptions or whether there are issues that need
to be dealt with.
2) By your own statements the old service on the 5s and 87s was a
mess and "a cushy number" for the drivers. On the basis of your comments
of buses running empty it is possible that wrong assumptions have been
made about the required level of service on the combined service. The
new service on the 5 is more frequent than before but there is not a
full replacement of the capacity provided on the 87. Having looked at
the numbers there seems to be a pretty heavy cut in capacity (about 4½
buses per hour M-S) on a lengthy stretch of route. Despite the rhetoric
to the contrary TfL are imposing cuts in some parts of the network to
try to keep within budget.
3) TfL will get information from Oyster card and ticket machine
data but that simply shows who got on the bus and is not very accurate
as to where they got on and does not show where they got off. It cannot
show how many people are left standing at a stop unable to board. I
would expect that Stagecoach will know very quickly how the route is
performing from driver and inspector comments.
My advice would be write to TfL Buses Customer Services and outline the
problems you are seeing. You can say you know it is early days but make
the point that people are being left behind in large numbers over a
number of stops. It is possible that TfL may react quite quickly on
something like this as there is precedent on some changes that they have
quite simply got the capacity calculation wrong and have had to take
steps to change timetables very quickly - some of the bendy bus
conversions were the most high profile of these issues. The other people
to advise are the local council and your GLA member - they are all
contactable via the web and they are able to exert direct pressure
quickly.
--
Paul C
Admits to working for London Underground!
.
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