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Post by greg on Mar 4, 2021 8:43:28 GMT
Is there a route that runs pretty close to a garage but because of restrictions it would make it very difficult to run from said garage? Maybe there's a banned left turn from the terminus to the garage or something like that. I can’t confirm on a route but I do see the low bridge at Old Oak Common being an issue especially when there are a lot of garages nearby (WJ, RP, PA/PV etc) so maybe the 7, 266, 295? They all still run out of the garages but dead runs might be a little longer
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Post by jrussa on Mar 4, 2021 9:11:40 GMT
In terms of "the driver has been instructed to wait here to regulate the service," it is not always the controller. On the i-bus and on their schedule card the driver can see if they are running early or late. If they are more than 2minutes and half (I think, please correct me) then the i-bus start bleeping. We cannot blame drivers for waiting at bus stops. Some choose to travel 15-20 mph throughout the whole route and other choose to drive 'normal, a.k.a to the conditions of the traffic and wait at an appropriate bus stop. As I mentioned either in this thread or another one in this part of the forum, there are quite a few routes timetable that are padded out. I assume most operators do that to ensure the buses are punctual and they want to meet the QSI and get those extra coins in their pocket. Bare in mind that years ago people were complaining when most buses were not coming to the schedule and they (passengers) had no idea when the bus is coming. Once we have a fully integrated technology that links buses to arrival at bus stops in terms of I-bus and now available on tfl website, people start complaining. Do you want a regulated punctual bus or the old times when drivers would not follow the timetable and just all bunch up? Choose one Maybe 5 years ago I was a massive complainer but I am resigned to the fact that the bus drivers cannot do much. I bet many drivers, if they had the chance would just continue driving without regulating until the end, but obviously they are not going to do that a potentially (most likely) lose their job. My only recommendation is that TFL allows buses to be 4-5 minutes earlier than timetabled instead of two minutes.
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Post by kmkcheng on Mar 4, 2021 9:59:31 GMT
Is there a route that runs pretty close to a garage but because of restrictions it would make it very difficult to run from said garage? Maybe there's a banned left turn from the terminus to the garage or something like that. BW immediately has a low bridge north of the garage but they seem to cope very well with it. Just hope a driver on the 8 doesn’t take a short cut back to the garage.
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Post by wirewiper on Mar 4, 2021 10:38:24 GMT
Is there a route that runs pretty close to a garage but because of restrictions it would make it very difficult to run from said garage? Maybe there's a banned left turn from the terminus to the garage or something like that. BW immediately has a low bridge north of the garage but they seem to cope very well with it. Just hope a driver on the 8 doesn’t take a short cut back to the garage. That's the advantage of operating to Bow Church in service - the drivers have the route firmly imprinted on their minds so would be extremely unlikely to take the short cut. Buses can curtail at Old Ford, but it is rarely operationally worthwhile as the normal line of route to BW would still need to be followed. A late-running bus would normally curtail at Roman Road/Grove Road and run light to BW via Grove Road, Mile End Road, Bow Road and Fairfield Road. One beef I have is the long distance between the stops in Parnell Road and those at Bow Church, especially for buses heading towards BW. An extra stop in Tredegar Road close to the junction with Pancras Way would have been useful for the new housing which has sprung up in the area and could have been put in when the road was reconstructed a few years back.
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Post by rugbyref on Mar 4, 2021 11:33:41 GMT
With the stop outside The Walnuts in Orpington High Street closed for many months now, it is unfortunate the stop outside McDonalds (the next on route) is also closed for a few days. Some may guess where their bus might stop while on diversion, but not the very old lady whom I had to direct this morning as she sat at the second closed stop.
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Post by Frenzie on Mar 4, 2021 16:22:26 GMT
In terms of "the driver has been instructed to wait here to regulate the service," it is not always the controller. On the i-bus and on their schedule card the driver can see if they are running early or late. If they are more than 2minutes and half (I think, please correct me) then the i-bus start bleeping. We cannot blame drivers for waiting at bus stops. Some choose to travel 15-20 mph throughout the whole route and other choose to drive 'normal, a.k.a to the conditions of the traffic and wait at an appropriate bus stop. As I mentioned either in this thread or another one in this part of the forum, there are quite a few routes timetable that are padded out. I assume most operators do that to ensure the buses are punctual and they want to meet the QSI and get those extra coins in their pocket. Bare in mind that years ago people were complaining when most buses were not coming to the schedule and they (passengers) had no idea when the bus is coming. Once we have a fully integrated technology that links buses to arrival at bus stops in terms of I-bus and now available on tfl website, people start complaining. Do you want a regulated punctual bus or the old times when drivers would not follow the timetable and just all bunch up? Choose one Maybe 5 years ago I was a massive complainer but I am resigned to the fact that the bus drivers cannot do much. I bet many drivers, if they had the chance would just continue driving without regulating until the end, but obviously they are not going to do that a potentially (most likely) lose their job. My only recommendation is that TFL allows buses to be 4-5 minutes earlier than timetabled instead of two minutes. I think TfL should only count a bus as on time if it *arrives* at a stop between 0-8 minutes late. It is wrong to allow buses to run early, especially on low frequency routes. The problem is the greedy operators running padded schedules. Buses also should be allowed to be held at stops, especially at night. I agree that most drivers would keep driving without regulating. A lot of the heavy footed night drivers these days depart between 5-10 minutes late just so they can floor it. Some depart on time but then hold at the second stop presumably because they’ve passed the first QSI checkpoint. Pre-COVID you only had a few drivers who did that.
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Post by SILENCED on Mar 4, 2021 16:47:20 GMT
In terms of "the driver has been instructed to wait here to regulate the service," it is not always the controller. On the i-bus and on their schedule card the driver can see if they are running early or late. If they are more than 2minutes and half (I think, please correct me) then the i-bus start bleeping. We cannot blame drivers for waiting at bus stops. Some choose to travel 15-20 mph throughout the whole route and other choose to drive 'normal, a.k.a to the conditions of the traffic and wait at an appropriate bus stop. As I mentioned either in this thread or another one in this part of the forum, there are quite a few routes timetable that are padded out. I assume most operators do that to ensure the buses are punctual and they want to meet the QSI and get those extra coins in their pocket. Bare in mind that years ago people were complaining when most buses were not coming to the schedule and they (passengers) had no idea when the bus is coming. Once we have a fully integrated technology that links buses to arrival at bus stops in terms of I-bus and now available on tfl website, people start complaining. Do you want a regulated punctual bus or the old times when drivers would not follow the timetable and just all bunch up? Choose one Maybe 5 years ago I was a massive complainer but I am resigned to the fact that the bus drivers cannot do much. I bet many drivers, if they had the chance would just continue driving without regulating until the end, but obviously they are not going to do that a potentially (most likely) lose their job. My only recommendation is that TFL allows buses to be 4-5 minutes earlier than timetabled instead of two minutes. I think TfL should only count a bus as on time if it *arrives* at a stop between 0-8 minutes late. It is wrong to allow buses to run early, especially on low frequency routes. The problem is the greedy operators running padded schedules. Buses also should be allowed to be held at stops, especially at night. I agree that most drivers would keep driving without regulating. A lot of the heavy footed night drivers these days depart between 5-10 minutes late just so they can floor it. Some depart on time but then hold at the second stop presumably because they’ve passed the first QSI checkpoint. Pre-COVID you only had a few drivers who did that. There is a national standard that defines a bus as on-time if it departs between 1 minute early and 5 minutes late. As I understand it most timing points are for departures, so don't see how the if it *arrives* can be measured. In London, the trouble we have is we do not use timetables we use headway, where all vehicles are reduced to the speed of the slowest bus on the route to keep headway even.
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Post by Frenzie on Mar 4, 2021 18:21:04 GMT
I think TfL should only count a bus as on time if it *arrives* at a stop between 0-8 minutes late. It is wrong to allow buses to run early, especially on low frequency routes. The problem is the greedy operators running padded schedules. Buses also should be allowed to be held at stops, especially at night. I agree that most drivers would keep driving without regulating. A lot of the heavy footed night drivers these days depart between 5-10 minutes late just so they can floor it. Some depart on time but then hold at the second stop presumably because they’ve passed the first QSI checkpoint. Pre-COVID you only had a few drivers who did that. There is a national standard that defines a bus as on-time if it departs between 1 minute early and 5 minutes late. As I understand it most timing points are for departures, so don't see how the if it *arrives* can be measured. In London, the trouble we have is we do not use timetables we use headway, where all vehicles are reduced to the speed of the slowest bus on the route to keep headway even. I understand what you mean, but it’s got to the point now where operators are implementing such padded schedules that TfL should do something drastic about it. With GPS tracking its not that hard to set up a checkpoint just before the bus stop cage that logs when a bus arrives. This would only be for low frequency routes. In terms of headway I truly believe it’s a broken system. Buses still have departure times and stand times that need to be adhered to and a controller will still likely instruct a driver to hold back if they are running early due to stand constraints. I don’t see why buses can’t run to a well planned schedule during the day and only move to headway if service intervention is required. What I’m trying to get at is they way buses are run in London is not in the interest of passengers, so unless TfL want to take on the running of the network, they need to find a way to force operators into ditching these padded schedules in favour of more realistic ones.
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Post by kmkcheng on Mar 5, 2021 18:17:51 GMT
Hope I’m not repeating this as I don’t recall this ever being mentioned, but according to this post on FB, there’s a change to the hopper fare where the 10 minute buffer time has been reduced to 2 minutes
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Post by Dillon95 on Mar 5, 2021 19:22:23 GMT
With the stop outside The Walnuts in Orpington High Street closed for many months now, it is unfortunate the stop outside McDonalds (the next on route) is also closed for a few days. Some may guess where their bus might stop while on diversion, but not the very old lady whom I had to direct this morning as she sat at the second closed stop. It would be common sense to take away the potted plants from The Walnuts stop and open it back up again.
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Post by SILENCED on Mar 5, 2021 19:27:17 GMT
With the stop outside The Walnuts in Orpington High Street closed for many months now, it is unfortunate the stop outside McDonalds (the next on route) is also closed for a few days. Some may guess where their bus might stop while on diversion, but not the very old lady whom I had to direct this morning as she sat at the second closed stop. It would be common sense to take away the potted plants from The Walnuts stop and open it back up again. Councils are severely lacking in the common sense department!
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Post by vjaska on Mar 5, 2021 21:22:58 GMT
With the stop outside The Walnuts in Orpington High Street closed for many months now, it is unfortunate the stop outside McDonalds (the next on route) is also closed for a few days. Some may guess where their bus might stop while on diversion, but not the very old lady whom I had to direct this morning as she sat at the second closed stop. It would be common sense to take away the potted plants from The Walnuts stop and open it back up again. Likewise here in Brixton where it would be common sense to stop forcing people to break social distancing by making the 2, 415 & 432 not stop at Brixton Station and instead stop at St Matthews Church where that stop is located on a narrow section of pavement. This is a particular problem for the 432 where people are obviously not going to make the longer walk to the first stop located just past the Police Station as the walk is much longer from the station than it is to St Matthews Church and so a large crowd gathers mainly for the 432 with little room to distance and not much room for people not even wanting the bus to just walk past.
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Post by Busboy105 on Mar 5, 2021 23:08:21 GMT
Hope I’m not repeating this as I don’t recall this ever being mentioned, but according to this post on FB, there’s a change to the hopper fare where the 10 minute buffer time has been reduced to 2 minutes Why have they done that then?
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Post by Deleted on Mar 5, 2021 23:14:47 GMT
Hope I’m not repeating this as I don’t recall this ever being mentioned, but according to this post on FB, there’s a change to the hopper fare where the 10 minute buffer time has been reduced to 2 minutes Why have they done that then? Buses magazine reports it being changed because it was there to address synchronisation concerns of bus reader clocks which I assume has been resolved. It will generate an estimated extra 1.4 million in revenue.
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Post by Eastlondoner62 on Mar 5, 2021 23:19:35 GMT
Hope I’m not repeating this as I don’t recall this ever being mentioned, but according to this post on FB, there’s a change to the hopper fare where the 10 minute buffer time has been reduced to 2 minutes Why have they done that then? Probably realised there's a bit more money to be made here, many people probably squeeze out thousands of extra journeys this way. Initially the buffer was introduced to prevent arguments on the bus. With the rise of contactless this is likely to happen far less now. Contactless works in slightly a different way to Oyster where it doesn't charge per tap but rather in a clump near the end of the day. For example I've attached what my Google Pay app provided for my trip yesterday. You can see there's not a separate charge for each transaction but they're all clumped together and charged at once. Attachment DeletedWhat effectively happens is all the time stamps are recorded in the TfL system and totalled around the evening at around midnight when it tends to charge you. Oyster works differently and someone is probably far more likely to realise they got charged more because the system charges on a "per tap" basis and the ETM displays remaining balance. As this number is now lower than contactless, any arguments are likely to be reduced while you only realise how much you got charged on a bank card that night and depending on how they paid. If they even use Google Pay at least (not too sure whether Apple are as advanced with the information they give on the app) all the tap ins come with time stamps which you can't really dispute with an innocent driver.
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