In my 2021 year in review I mentioned that we were substantially able to maintain public transport service levels at a time where other cities globally had cut theirs. The reason was that our funding mechanism was more robust with the government, not transit agencies or operators, taking the revenue risk for low patronage.
Service cuts were however on the table in 2020 when the virus first hit. In March 2020 there was the possibility that services could be reduced to a Saturday timetable. I explored various options here. The biggest problem is that if we went to a Saturday bus timetable some bus routes would stop running completely since there are still a lot of suburban residential Monday - Friday only routes (and they are by no means all commuter express type routes that you might accept wouldn't run due to more working from home and alternative options). In other cases buses would only operate in the morning and not the afternoon as some buses (still) only have morning service on Saturdays.
Fortunately none of this came to pass and services continued on their regular timetable. With one notable exception. For much of 2020 we had a curfew with no one allowed out between 9pm and 5am. Public transport services were greatly scaled back with already long 30 minute evening headways lengthened to 60 or even 90 minute gaps. More on that here. Regular evening timetables were restored shortly after the curfew was lifted.
The situation is different now in 2022. People are mostly vaccinated now, reducing the chance that those contracting COVID have to go into intensive care. However case numbers have spiralled. Almost every Victorian would now know at least one person with COVID. So many people are in isolation and are unable to work at jobs that require their presence. Even getting a test to confirm your COVID status is a battle with rapid antigen tests difficult to find and/or very expensive due to federal government inaction.
Hence we have a labour shortage affecting industries such as food processing, distribution and transport. You can see the effects of shortages in almost every supermarket, notably the meat section. And, topical for this blog, the ability to run public transport timetables due to lack of drivers.
Thus, what we largely avoided in 2020 and 2021 we have in 2022. That is reduced timetables on our public transport. Not due to funding issues (as in other countries) but non-availability of drivers.
Of long-term interest is the information systems that advise passengers of changed schedules. To be more useful than a simple paper timetable on a wall they need the meet the 'three Rs'. That is:
1. Systems must be robust and reliable. That is even if there is a major disruption (or even a power failure) they should still work. This is a deficiency of the 'green button' system used on our railways which can sometimes get confused or not give a 'minutes to' indication. People depend on systems more when services are disrupted which is why it should be working then. If an information system only works when the service is operating smoothly then it is not worth having.
2. Systems must be right. Accuracy must be several orders of magnitude better than the reliability of the service they are giving information about. Eg if trains show up 99% of the time then an information system that is 95% accurate is worthless. Instead you need it to be like 99.99% right so that people can rely on it.
3. Thirdly you want the system to be responsive. If timetables have to be changed then you want to be able to upload them quickly (ie within 24 and preferably 12 hours) to get them out to passengers via website lookups and journey plans. Online ought to have made this easier. However apparently PTV has such convoluted data systems that the whole data set needs to be uploaded at once even if only a few timetables in it are changing. Uploading is not a trivial task and is only done once a week (on Fridays). If there's an error in the data (a risk magnified by the complex services we run, particularly for buses) it needs to wait until the following week's upload for the correct version to appear. It can take a long time to get information right, and in some cases, like Route 788's summer timetables, it hasn't happened at all. The data here drives the website timetables and journey planner so it needs to be right. Especially when PTV keeps referring people to its journey planner, especially during disruptions.
Once you've got the data issues and systems sorted there's a 4th R. This is real time information that you can spread out to more places. Arguably this is a sped up version of being responsive mentioned just above.
Data management is a major (though too rarely officially acknowledged) problem with the Department of Transport and its PTV website. This is particularly apparent when services need to be changed at short notice or there are disruptions that require people to go different ways.
In contrast with PTV's processes for timetable data, a bus operator can upload a simple pdf timetable to their website in moments. As indeed PTV sometimes resorts to when their systems break down.
As an example, this week Transdev Melbourne uploaded PDF timetables for those bus routes that have reduced timetables due to the driver shortage. PDFs aren't always good for viewing on mobile devices and you don't want to necessarily save everything you wish to just casually view (for that an HTM format might be easier). PTV is also hosting the Transdev PDFs here.
Hence you've got effectively multiple versions of timetables on the PTV website. The currently in force temporary timetable PDFs and the out of date regular version uploaded via the regular process. The latter is what you get if you look up a timetable on the PTV website in the usual way or use the journey planner (whose results will show trips that aren't running). Hence if you do a journey plan for a route whose timetable is cut back (eg the 280/282 with about half its trips removed) the options presented will include some trips that are known not to run (ie they don't appear in the pdf timetables).
To its credit there is a disruption warning with a link to the page that tells you about the reduced timetables if you do plan a journey or look up an online timetable. However we know that people hate footnotes and don't always read them. And having to put up temporary PDFs, though better than nothing, is not a substitute for proper systems that enable faster uploading so that website timetables and journey planner results can be trusted as being the most current.
Conclusion
Department of Transport managers and strategies go on a lot about 'simple connected journeys'. They don't always live up to this, at least for public transport.
They really need to put in systems and processes to ensure that the PTV website does not contain multiple versions of the same data, linked only by easy to miss footnotes. And that they have online timetables and journey planner results that can be trusted, backed by accurate data that can be easily revised and uploaded at least on a daily basis.
Read other Timetable Tuesday items here
1 comment:
Another annoying thing is that bus and tram timetables were removed from their respective operators' websites years ago, probably around the time Metlink became PTV or shortly after. These used to provide a redundancy where if the main site was down for whatever reason, you could still download timetables from the operator itself. No such luck now, Transdev, Ventura and Yarra Trams all divert you to the PTV website when you attempt to click on a timetable, making their sites almost pointless.
With trains however, you can just head off to the Metro or V/Line website and download a PDF timetable directly from the sites in under ten seconds without having to put up with PTV's painfully slow and JavaScript-heavy nonsense while dodging all the useless transport/government-related spam covering that site. PTV is How Not To Make A Website 101.
Metro gets it right. Click on the appropriate train line on the home page first, then click Timetable Search at the top and click the download link on the right. Three clicks and you get the entire list of PDF timetables for your line in a zip file for future offline viewing. Not to mention that even the live timetables load in an instant rather than taking forever on PTV.
There is only one complaint here, in that the timetables do not show trains on mostly-duplicative lines (e.g. Belgrave/Lilydale and Cranbourne/Pakenham), giving you the false impression that services between the city and where the trains branch off are a lot less frequent than they are e.g. the Belgrave timetable only shows full-distance Belgrave and Upper Ferntree Gully trains, ignoring the way the shuttle services work e.g. catching a down Lilydale from the city to Ringwood and changing to the Belgrave shuttle on the other platform. On top of that, Blackburn and Ringwood trains to/from the city (not shuttles) are not shown on the Belgrave timetable at all, only on the Lilydale one. In the old days, the Belgrave and Lilydale timetables were merged (with one line's branch being under the other), making it much easier to read, and I think even Alamein trains showed up on the timetable, vanishing where the trains branched off at Camberwell.
V/Line is a close second in speed with four clicks. Click on Timetables, Train & coach timetables, Browse all master V/Line timetables, click on appropriate PDF.
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