London Banter - View Single Post - Bunching and the Dublin bus radio experiment?

Richard · September 2nd 03, 01:44 AM posted to uk.transport.london

On Mon, 01 Sep 2003 22:01:59 GMT, (Neil
Williams) wrote:
Because...

1) Off-bus ticketing, the majority holding passes, boarding at the
back while people pay at the front etc. are more or less unknown in
this country - and are only just appearing in London. This is what
causes the extensive delays at stops, day in, day out, which causes
day-to-day bunching - and is in particular what causes bunching to get
so bad after what seems to be a minor delay to start with.

2) Privatised bus companies are in it for the money, and produce
unrealistic, too-tight timetables which will always lead to bunching.
Admittedly this has only been the case since the mid-1980s, but it is
very relevant.

There is extensive off-bus ticketing in Dublin, using validators near
(a bit too near perhaps) the front doors. On the second point, Dublin
Bus is not private!

Dublin does, however, have very bad traffic a lot of the time, and I
don't think we can expect that to have little effect on bus
timetables, whatever is done about timetable planning or dwell time at
the stops.

A recent article in "Buses" talks of how mobile radio is used in
Dublin, and as well as for regulation of a particular route it is also
apparently used to assign drivers from a special pool to any route as
and when necessary, which is more or less what you suggest below...

The unforeseen bunching can be helped, as well - you'll likely not get
the offending bus back on time, but if you've got enough spare
vehicles in the correct places and a decent overall control setup
(again, these cost), an extra could be dropped in so that bus could
run more or less non-stop to its destination without delaying those in
front as was being suggested.

There are also a number of express routes that are IIRC peak-hours
only, this must make controlling it all interesting to say the least.

I'm sure radio is also useful for security.

I'm not sure how much of their radio use can be considered an
experiment any more. You'd expect any major - and in this case
capital - city to be able to communicate with its buses, wouldn't you?

Richard.