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!"
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