Return of the Super Stop

After experiencing the commute from hell on Tuesday night, I decided that things have got so bad with all the Marple buses that the only thing for it was to return to using the Super Stop.

Regular readers might recall me writing about Super Stops earlier in the year. For those of you who didn't read that post, a Super Stop is a bus stop that all of the buses I can use to get home stops at. 

To give you a flavour of why this seemed a good idea, let me give you an overview as to how it's gone with yo-yoing between bus stops and using the app over the past week or so versus the Super Stop app free experience.

Firstly, a typical experience with the app:

1) Leave work at 4pm

2) 10-15 minute walk to bus stop. Decision needs to be made at this point as to whether to put my money on the 385 or the 383, which go from different bus stops located 5 minutes apart.

3) Commit to 385 bus stop on the basis that the app says it's due at 4:35pm and the 383 at 4:25pm is often late anyway, and always packed.

4) Get to 4:30pm and check the app again. It now says that the 385 isn't coming until 4:45pm, but that's OK because the next 383 isn't until 4:43 anyway. 

5) Get to 4:40pm and check the app again. It now says that the 385 isn't coming until 4:50pm. Start to get worried.

6) Get to 4:45pm and check app again. 385 has now disappeared off app entirely and the only information available is for the 383, 384 or the 385 that's due at 5:37pm.

7) Decide to wait at stop anyway: The 385 has turned up after it's disappeared off the app previously.

8) 5pm. 385 turns up, nearly drives past me. Consider jumping in road to make it stop but instead wave arms frantically until it stops.

There is an alternate version where I opt for the 383 with similar results, but we'll skip that one.

The day the Bee Network can to Weatherfield

Instead, here is the Super Stop version of my commute:

1) Leave work at 4pm.

2) Walk 30 minutes to Super Stop.

3) 383 turns up at 3:35pm. Absolutely rammed. Opt not to get on as the 385 is timetabled to arrive anytime now and there's another (usually less busy) 383 at 4:50pm.

4) Wait. Check watch periodically.

5) It gets to 4:55pm: No other bus has arrived. Woman and child sharing bus stop with look worried.

6) 5pm. Clearly Stagecoach cannot be arsed running the 383 at 4:50pm tonight.

7) 5:09pm: The 385 arrives. Over 30 minutes late.

OK, the outcome is much the same in both cases, but... The Super Stop provides the security of giving me the option to get on the first bus that arrives (even though I didn't in this case) and saves me having to switch stops every time I think a bus isn't coming. It also stops me getting rain on my phone, leading to condensation in the morning when I head out again. 

So, things being as they are at the moment, it's a resounding win for the Super Stop over the app. 

The unexpected case for audio visual stop announcements

When audio visual stop announcements began to be introduced on Stagecoach buses ahead of Stockport joining the Bee Network, not everyone was impressed. Passengers could often be heard grumbling and taking the piss out of them and drivers would often not switch them on.

While the intention was always to make buses more accessible to those with visual and hearing impairments and other disabilities, I have stumbled across another reason for having them in recent weeks.

In short, they mean that I can figure out where the hell on Marple Road I am when travelling at night. 

Services such as the 358, 383 and 385 travel through some pretty remote, sparsely populated and landmark free areas that also tend to be very badly lit. When you're travelling in what looks out of the window to be complete darkness then one tree can look very like another and it can be nye on impossible to know which stop you've just gone past if there are no obvious landmarks visible to anchor it. Things like signs for the local cattery or the house with the dog statues outside tend to be meaningless after dark and you become increasingly thankful for things like petrol stations and curry houses with neon signage. 

How much of a relief is it then when you find yourself on a bus that actually tells you in real time where you are and which stop is coming up next.  

Sadly many of the buses are old and do not come with stop announcements. And sometimes, on the ones that do have it built in, the driver doesn't switch them on. 

Meaning that I am always, and increasingly, grateful whenever I encounter a bus that has them.

Everything Awful All At Once: When everything goes to shit, including the bloody app

Following on from my last post, I can see now that I was being overly optimistic about the powers of the Bee Network app.

The problem, as with all technology, is that it's only as good as the information you feed it. And, lately, it seems to be being fed the data equivalent of a highly processed burger and skinny fries with negligible percentage of potatoes.

The evening commute will start well enough: The app will say that one bus is running 10 minutes late, another is on time and will arrive 5 minutes after the late one. "Right" you think, "I'll wait for the one that is running 10 minutes late." 

You wait.

And wait.

And wait.

You check the app: The bus you are waiting at the stop for is now running 20 minutes late, but the other one is now running 15 minutes late so they'll probably arrive around the same time still. No need to change bus stops then.

Then, one or both of the buses disappears off the app entirely. And neither of them appear to have arrived.

I've been experiencing a lot of evening commutes like this over the past week or so. 

To provide some context, the 385 has been consistently running at least 20 minutes late pretty much every weekday evening for at least a fortnight now. Sometimes it's been over 30 minutes late. By which time it's disappeared off the app and you don't have a clue whether it's still coming or not.

It failed to arrive this morning as well, meaning that I was late for work because I had to get the 358 and double back on myself. 

To top it all, the 383 has also been running at least 10 minutes late most nights for at least a fortnight as well. And there's been similar problems tracking that on the app.

Other problems with the app include the following:

• It gets confused as to which side of the road you're on.
• If you're in a busy area with several bus stops (such as Stockport College) it gets confused about which stop you're at and floods you with too many stops and buses, making for a lot of scrolling before you can find the right info.
• If the bus you're waiting for is late, it doesn't show the late bus at the top of the page but the next one that's due on the timetable instead, meaning you have to scroll down to find it.

The fact that it removes late buses that are actually still coming from the app is the worst though.

Over the past week there has been flooding and horrendous gridlock so it's not surprising that services have been running late. I also think that timetables need adjusting to account for the reality of gridlock on Marple Road, but I daresay that will never happen.

Friends travelling around other bits of Stockport have been experiencing similar issues with their own buses and also with the app, suggesting wider issues with the Bee Network itself. 

As for myself, I feel it is time for the return of the Super Stop.

Bus stop yo-yoing, or: How I learnt to love the Bee Network app

I wasn't a fan of the Bee Network app when I first encountered it back in January. To be fair, it had a mighty task ahead of it: I needed it to tell me where the hell the 385 had got to at half 4 on day one of tranche three being rolled out. A task it singularly failed at.

Fast forward ten months and I am getting used to the app. Enable your real time location and it can tell you your nearest bus stop and when the next bus is coming. The main glitch being when your bus is so late that it starts to slip down the list of expected buses, meaning the one at the top of the list is the next timetabled one, not the one that is disgustingly late but still might turn up. This has led to several heart stopping moments ("NOOOO! They've cancelled it!") followed by frantic scrolling to find that it's merely running twenty minutes late. Again. 

As regular readers may have worked out... I mainly use it on weekday late afternoons/evenings to find out how late the 385 is going to be.

I currently catch the 385 from a stop that is a five minute walk away from the 383 stop. The idea being that if I get stiffed by the 385, I haven't got far to go to catch a different bus.

A case in point of this would be yesterday when I checked the app at 16:29pm to see how late the 385 (due at 16:30pm) was going to be. The app told me that the 385 to Mellor would not now be coming until 16:58. Something of a record for the app that one. Clearly something had gone more wrong than usual then. 

As there was a 383 due at 16:43, I walked over to the 383 stop instead. 

Now, one of the reasons I resisted using the app for so long was that I just think you end up looking like a massive dick if you're standing at a bus stop looking at your phone the whole time. Then I realised how necessary it was to do this if you ever wanted to be in the position to be able to make an informed decision about which bus to catch.

Why? 

Because buses rarely run to timetable. Yesterday just happened to be an extreme example of this.

I could tell it was going to be a bad commute even before I got to the 385 stop. Sometimes you just have a feeling things aren't going to go well for you. In this case, the feeling of doom was generated by an incident at the pedestrian crossing when two cars went through the lights despite the pedestrian crossing being on green. After about a minute of gaping in disbelief alongside the crowd of other people trying to get across the road, I was filled with a sense of massive injustice and pure rage. This led me to walk out into the the road, determined that I was going to get across while the green man was still showing, and no other piss taking drivers were going to stop me. Which, fortunately, they didn't. Why did I do this? Because that crossing takes about ten minutes to cycle through all the different traffic combinations and I was fucked if I was going to stand there for another ten minutes, waiting to cross the road. 

When I reached the 383 stop I could see that it was about as busy as it would have been ahead of the 16:25 bus arriving, which strongly suggested that it, erm, hadn't. All of the people waiting were sixth form students from the college. All of them were staring at their phones. Some were clearly on the app.

I got my own phone out again.

The 383 was running late as well apparently. 

One of the more dispiriting aspects of using the app is when you think you've got a handle on how late a bus is going to be only for the time of expected arrival to start counting back up rather than down. This is what both the 383 and 385 expected arrival times were now doing: It didn't look as though the 385 would be arriving until at least 17:10 whereas, in the end, the 383 was a mere eight minutes late. 

As we filed onto a very full double decker, the sense of resigned weariness was palpable. Seats may have become available reasonably quickly, but it was still a trudge: The usual backlog of traffic on Marple Road being the main culprit. 

As the nights get darker earlier, the roadworks seem to become more numerous, as do the accidents. The buses get slower and slower, later and later to arrive to pick you up and to get to their destinations. And the weather gets worse of course as well. I did see a few ambulances yesterday (not unusual) and there is what feels like a constant delay for the 385 around Marple Train Station, so it's easy to speculate as to it's shocking lateness. 

As the girl getting off at the same stop of me said to her friend: "That was the worst bus ride ever!"

A decent bit of reporting on the TfGM workers strikes

There's actually been very little media coverage of the ongoing strikes by TfGM staff, but I spotted a very thorough piece on I heart Manchester which covers all sides of the argument, plus explains very well what the impact has been, and will continue to be, for bus users.

I saw the impact for myself on Thursday when I was meeting a friend in Stockport Town Centre. The information point at Stockport Interchange was shuttered and the usual Bee Network staff patrolling the interchange had been replaced by Stagecoach Bus Inspectors, representing a bit of a return to pre Bee Network conditions. I mean, they could have just been standing about waiting for something but, in the meantime, they were being mithered to death by people wanting to know which bus went from which stand etc and seemed happy enough to impart the information. 

I felt a wave of nostalgia actually on seeing so many Stagecoach Bus Inspectors: It's rare to encounter them in the wild these days. Pre Bee Network they used to be a ubiquitous and reassuring presence at the busiest of the 192 stops. There to maintain order, keep track of things and, on particularly bleak days of disruption and mayhem, sense when the crowd of disgruntled passengers were getting ready to form an angry mob and react accordingly. 

In other news, Metrolink drivers are now balloting for strike action as well.