Hacker News Reader

Comment by rrr_oh_man | Hacker News Reader

Unreliable? Seriously?

(I’m not from the UK, it sounds surprising.)

Sadly yes. Some bus companies are very reliable (traffic jams permitting), but there are definitely times when they aren't, and I've used rural routes where the hourly bus might just not turn up, which makes them completely infeasible for commuting or appointments.

To replace cars with buses for trips you really need them to be rock solid.

Yeah I think the most stressed I've ever been about punctuality was when I was dependent on a rural bus to get to work on time. I love rural Britain but if you can't drive for whatever reason, it's often not feasible to live there.

I am thinking about whether I can do without a car. I definitely could if busses were better. As it is I think I would end up using taxis a lot.

Jesus.

I thought Germany was bad with no A/C and unopenable windows for "security" (= cost savings).

At least the busses* are on time.

* definitely not the trains, though

> unopenable windows for "security"

Fenster zu! Es zieht!

https://www.thelocal.de/20190625/only-germans-believe-air-dr...

Outside of London, Manchester, Nottingham and a few selected other places, busses in England tend to be fairly dire, especially as you get out to smaller towns and villages.

Even if the routes are there, it's not uncommon for the actual busses to bare little resemblance to the published timetable.

In some places you'll get fancy live information screens which happily announce the arrival of a bus that doesn't exist, or more frequently, to simply state that the information isn't available, please check the paper boards.

Bus routes tend to be especially bad in rural towns and villages, but even in my fairly reasonably large town, it's quicker and more convenient for me to walk the 1.3 miles to the train station than try to get a bus.

If I plug in "bus" on google maps planner, it has me walk 20 minutes to a bus stop to sit on a bus for 7 minutes, versus a ~25 minute walk.

Alternatively, I could walk 5 minutes to a nearer stop, wait 30 minutes for the next bus, which itself then takes 26 minutes to get to the bus station, which is itself a 3-4 minute walk from the bus station to the train station itself.

And that's assuming the bus is on time running to schedule, and doesn't then hit traffic.

I'd also be paying £3 one-way for this privilege.

Once you're inside the TFL zone everything changes and busses are frequent, generally reliable, and cheaper.

The state of transport outside London, even just outside London, is so bad. I remember when London got the Siemens GPS trackers in each bus that enabled the live departure screens. Amy Winehouse was in the charts, that's how long ago it was.

That sounds absolutely terrible.

I've been to the Balkans, Central Asia, and rural Mexico for extended periods and they're all better than that (even if they might lack fancy digital screens, which is rapidly changing also).

Wtf, UK?

> Wtf, UK?

We can't even blame this one on the relative lack of infrastructure investment, because busses have never been any better as far as I can tell.

In fact, the only reason the bus fare is as "cheap" as £3 is because of a price cap, which is optional for the bus companies to follow, and has the effect of meaning that they no longer offer return tickets, so you get to choose between the price capped £3 single ticket or a "day saver" £7.

> In some places you'll get fancy live information screens which happily announce the arrival of a bus that doesn't exist

I worked on one of the systems for that many years ago, and one of the reasons TFL works better than many of the others is that TFL has (or at least had) extremely strict rules on what we were allowed to show.

E.g. if the display could not contact our servers, we were required to remove the buses after about a minute to prevent showing stale data (same freshness criteria applied to what our servers were allowed to forward to the frontend. We also needed to prove we handled clock drift correctly for the same reason. They put us through extensive testing to ensure no stale data before any displays went live.

If you see buses in London disappear from a display, those criteria will often be the reason - TFL considered it better that a bus was missing than that people would be incorrectly told it was close.

> If you see buses in London disappear from a display

Thanks for that explanation! Was an alternative considered—e.g. marking the bus as "lost" instead of removing it altogether? Discounted because of space constraints?

I don't know. We were a third party suppliers and were just handed the rules - we weren't party to the justifications beyond the basics.

Googles stuff is just bad for public transport and walking, it gives "made in California, so we only understand car journeys" vibes.

It depends where you are, some areas have very good bus services and other terrible ones. Almost everywhere has been forbidden from having a more centralised approach and so most places are a mash of random companies with very different approaches and reliabilities.

Rural and small town, often yes.

Varies with region. Some big cities (London, Manchester) seem to have good public transport although its been a while since I used a bus in either.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com