Ear­li­er this month Alan her­ald­ed the begin­ning of the roll-out of the Region­al Coun­cil’s new Real Time Pas­sen­ger Infor­ma­tion project. So far, though, I’m not hap­py. Just as numer­ous pieces of pub­lic­i­ty in local and com­mu­ni­ty news­pa­pers have failed to alle­vi­ate my sus­pi­cion that the sys­tem is not all it is cracked up to be, numer­ous bad expe­ri­ences have left me with lit­tle faith in the ser­vice it pur­ports to pro­vide.

Computer says "no" and bus says "sorry"
Com­put­er says “no” and bus says “sor­ry”

Once upon a time — let’s call that time “Pre-RTI” — I had no par­tic­u­lar faith in the bus time-tables: bus­es most­ly turned up on time, but fre­quent­lyreg­u­lar­ly were late, or failed to appear at all. Now, in the time we’ll log­i­cal­ly call “Dur­ing-RTI”, the fail­ure rate is more-or-less the same but the impli­ca­tions are far worse. Bus­es still run late, or fail to show up, but the RTI sys­tem does­n’t match what is hap­pen­ing in the field and leaves the cus­tomer with LESS trust in the time-table.

Some exam­ples:

  1. This morn­ing via the Metlink Live Depar­tures page for my smart-phone, I deter­mined I would catch the #18 Uni­ver­si­ty ser­vice which orig­i­nates at New­town Park/Zoo (stop #7923), depart­ing 8.29 am. I wait­ed at the stop from 8.24 until 8.40 at which time I caught the #10 Rail­way Stn ser­vice instead (more weird­ness: see 2, below). At some time before 8.29 the #18 entry in the Live Depar­tures list just dis­ap­peared. Where did my bus go?
  2. I was watch­ing and refresh­ing the Live Depar­tures list between 8.20 and 8.55 and the 8.40 #10 nev­er showed up in the list all — which was mild­ly dis­con­cert­ing con­sid­er­ing for a lot of that time I was sit­ting at the stop, look­ing at it and indeed rode it into town.
  3. Once the 8.29 #18 dis­ap­peared from the Live Depar­tures list, noth­ing else showed until the 9.22 #10 and #18 ser­vices were list­ed. Thus miss­ing also was the 8.55 #10 ser­vice, which I am informed DID appear on time and pro­vid­ed a very time­ly ser­vice to the Rail­way Sta­tion ter­mi­nus.
  4. Anoth­er morn­ing wait­ing in plen­ty of time at the Wal­lace St stop opp. Massey Uni­ver­si­ty (stop #7914) I watched via the smart-phone Live Depar­tures list­ings my #10 ser­vice get clos­er and clos­er, until it sailed past me at 8.49, a good six or sev­en min­utes ear­ly. Accord­ing to my col­league in bus malarkey mon­i­tor­ing who was rid­ing on it, it had left New­town Park/Zoo (stop #7923) on time but made unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly good time through New­town and hence was run­ning very ear­ly. Around 8.48 the Live Depar­tures page was list­ing it as 7 min away. Next moment it whizzed by, and short­ly after that it van­ished from the list alto­geth­er.
  5. I have pre­vi­ous­ly com­ment­ed about what hap­pened to my #10 which was meant to depart from Stop B at the down­town inter­change at 6.15 pm one night. From about 6.10 the dis­play read “10 New­town Park – Due: 8 min” and remained show­ing that for about 10 min­utes at which point the dis­play changed and the #10 entry just dis­ap­peared.

Don’t get the idea I’m only com­plain­ing about what hap­pened to me or that my mis­for­tune is par­tic­u­lar­ly bad or any­thing — I’m not, it’s not, and noth­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly unfor­tu­nate has result­ed. Many oth­er peo­ple have prob­a­bly had sim­i­lar expe­ri­ences though, and if you add all these expe­ri­ences togeth­er it becomes obvi­ous that the new sys­tem is not get­ting any­where near its imag­in­able suc­cess fac­tors.

It’s also clear that the algo­rithms behind the bus RTI sys­tem and not cop­ing with these extra­or­di­nary cir­cum­stances at all, and nor do they seem to be suf­fi­cient­ly tak­ing into regard any­thing more than instan­ta­neous user expe­ri­ence.  A bus sim­ply should­n’t dis­ap­pear from the list­ings — what, are they being vapor­ized by cos­mic rays? Indi­ca­tion MUST be giv­en when a ser­vice is can­celled, is com­ing through way ahead of sched­ule / has come through ahead of sched­ule, or any­thing else unusu­al.

If I’m being hon­est I have to admit that I’m actu­al­ly incred­u­lous, and frankly it’s tempt­ing to add that call­ing this sys­tem any­thing “Real Time” is a slur on the term and prob­a­bly upset­ting to any­one who is or has been involved with build­ing real-time infor­ma­tion sys­tems. With­out sig­nif­i­cant improve­ment, it’s hard to see how the new scheme can be relied-on to give accu­rate infor­ma­tion at all — and so you can’t trust the old timetable and you can’t trust the new “real time” sys­tem either. I’m just going to have to go back to cut­ting cards, or toss­ing blades of grass in the air, to work out when my bus is due.

[Epi­logue: what kills me the most, though, is that Auck­land have had a very accu­rate and com­pe­tent RTI bus sys­tem for at least fif­teen years — I remem­ber mar­vel­ling at it on Domin­ion Road in 1997. Now we final­ly have one too, after years of rumour and hints; I real­ly real­ly want this to work out and suc­ceed and every­thing. Hope­ful­ly this post can be seen at least in part as con­struc­tive crit­i­cism; I pray these glitch­es can be ironed out and our sys­tem kicks ass.]