In uk.railway Colum Mylod wrote:
On Thu, 28 Nov 2019 18:22:03 +0000, Roland Perry
wrote:

A non TfL website has quite a lot of info here

http://www.londonbusroutes.net/details.htm

Click on the route number in the big list to bring up the timetable if
one is available. Note TfL no longer officially produce or publish
proper timetables - IMO it's shameful that a private individual is
left
to provide this sort of valuable info for one of the great world
cities.

Depending on how frequent a service then service performance may be
measured either on keeping buses running to the broad frequency (for
what TfL call high frequency routes) or to the scheduled timetable
(for low frequency routes)

More info here

http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/businessan...reports/#faqs2

If my bus service ran every 5 minutes and did so reliably then I really
wouldn't care about a timetable. However I object to being left to just
wander to a bus stop to wait up to 12 minutes just because TfL can't be
bothered to tell me the minutes past the hour a bus runs. Only when
frequencies reach every 15 minutes or less frequently do they put up the
minutes past the hour at the stop. It is also worth noting that many
bus frequencies are not that high early in the morning or late in the
evening even on trunk routes running from Central London.

I recognise things can go wrong and buses do diverge from the timetable
and that's fine if I have access to good information to allow me to make
more informed choices. As I cannot take any decent TfL produced
information with me I have to spend a load of time researching all
possible options before I leave and then scribble them down so if I am
making lots of journeys on unfamiliar services (as I did visiting some
gardens open under the National Garden Scheme the other Sunday). This is
a pain in the posterior - why can't I just pop to a travel info centre
and ask for the timetable leaflets or buy a timetable book? Strange
that even my least favourite commercial operators outside of London
can manage to do this relatively easily.

Overall I think the TfL bus network is pretty damn good but the whole
approach to passenger information I cannot stand.

Paul C

It's a generalized pattern in the communication departments of bus companies.

I had the same discussion with the customer services of Thames Travel
and Stagecoach in Oxfordshire about publishing bus stop timetables online.
In Oxfordshire you can have very complex timetables, where the bus takes
a different route and does not serve a stop every hour, and each hour comes
at a different time. On stagecoach they even forwarded my message to
somebody at a higher level, and they told me they were not going to do that.

They have all those timetables internally but they stubbornly refuse
to publish them online. Now I see that even working from the inside
like Paul it's impossible to get that done.

And he was also right about proofreading. On one ocasion they printed
thousand of leaflets with timetables that were wrong from beginning to
end and released them to the public.

Thames Travel and Stagecoach are private companies. We don't have
public buses in Oxfordshire, so corporate stupidity is not exclusive
of public companies like TfL.

PS: I didn't know about Paul since I came recently to these newsgroups.
I can realize about the loss of him passing away so early.