PT in the UK

I had to travel from Edinburgh to Nottingham for a conference. Got the train tickets and wanted to find out about the train and bus times in Nottingham. Didn't bother about the buses in Edinburgh because my shoes are always on time.

Easy, I thought. Consulted the train timetable under http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/. Entered the data and up came some trains. When I wanted to print out the train times, there was no print option. No option to get the train times mailed either. But a lot of clutter made the site not very nice to use and print. So I took good old pen and paper and copied the times. That was the easy part.

I then wanted to find out how to get from Nottingham City entre to the University campus. I found the rough location where I had to get off the bus. But then the difficult bit started. I found a website of an operator. Trent Barnton (http://www.trentbarton.co.uk/). After fiddling around 5 minutes on the website I gave up. They mean well but I guess they never consulted any users to find out whether they can use any of the information provided.

So I resorted to the great govt website http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/TravelAndTransport/DG_10036717 and entered the data for the leg within Nottingham. Again, no chance to get anywhere near where I wanted to go. But they have this great feature of a map. To look for the bus stop. So off I went. And hooray, I found some bus stops. When I clicked on one, nothing happened. The stop was not automatically inserted in the required field. So I noted (thanks to pen and paper again) the bus stop code down again and entered it in the field. Hooray again, after clicking and selecting options another couple of times, I finally got the destination bus stop and some buses.

Even Nottingham council have their bus times online (http://www.nctx.co.uk/). To their great credit, they have interactive maps that automatically fill in the required fields once a bus stop is clicked. But shame on them that they are not showing all bus services.

Easy. All in 30 minutes. No wonder the Brits are working such long times. The minority who still use PT must be spending incredible amounts of finding their connections if they dare to travel on buses in the UK.

And the politicians always wonder why nobody wants to use PT.

Finally, just to calm down again, I visited http://www.sbb.ch/en/index.htm and entered an address to address search. 20 seconds and I got all connections from bus, tram train and bus/tram again. But I can fully understand that no politician over here can make life of the citizens they represent easier when they are busy claiming taxpayers money back based on some absurd expenses.

But what a surprise and contrast from the website Trent Barton are fielding when I got on their bus. A friendly bus driver, even on a Sunday evening at 9. Bus information on the bus! A display with the name of the next bus stop and a friendly voice announcing it twice. Clean and modern interior! I never thought I would experience this on this island in my lifetime, but here we go. A great compliment to Trent Barton to make this effort.

And again shame to the politicians who fail to regulate PT properly in the UK. It can be done. Go visit the continent. There you can do a tour of gadgets in various cities. Try Barcelona, Munich, Dresden, Zürich, etc. Go visit the websites and check how information can be easily made available to the traveller. Without much clutter.

Virgin Media

Finally I quit them. Big saga and never ending phone calls. The troubles started when we moved from a cable to an non cable area. Here is a little chronology what happened:

• We moved house in December 2007. We notified Virgin well in advance that we would move
• After moving, the phone line was up and running ok, however, the internet was not working
• We got a letter stating that we have changed, but no other information was provided
• I started to phone Virgin regarding the internet connection, however finding the right contact number proved almost impossible. Since I had an account with their cable services and they have not yet figured out the joys of serious DB programming, I had to go to great lenghts to explain them who I was and what I wanted.
• On one of the phone calls, the operator literally confirmed to me that we are just stupid customers that they can milk.
• They could not explain to me why the services were not switched from the previous owner to ours. I had to ring BT, who provided the line. A competent technician from BT enlightenend me.
• They finally managed to send me a (useless) router, without any further information
• I had to ring them again regarding my passwords for connecting to the internet
• After about 40 hrs on the phone to them, I finally got connected to the internet
• I was able to check my bills online through ebilling, when suddenly access to the webpage stopped working and some message came up that it was their fault and they are working on it. That message was up for a about 2 months.
• I rang them up again and wanted to change the settings. They said all their servers were down and they could not do it. Apparently never heard of replication at Virgin.
• So I sent them an email where they promised they would get back to me within 48 hours. The mail was sent about 2 months ago. Clearly Virgin measure 48 hrs with a different time scale.
• So I started to look for a new provider and found one in TalkTalk
• I rang Virgin to tell them that I am leaving them. So the operator finally put me through to a technician who then said the Netgear router had a problem with the driver and that is why we got disconnected from the internet a zillion times per day. But they would not notify their customers that this is the case and ringing them up was a nonstarter for me after my 40hrs phone marathon. And he was very good in slagging off TalkTalk that they would not be able to provide the MAC switch for me in such a short time blablabla etc.
• My (hopefully) last call to Virgin was today, requesting a final bill. I rang their standard number and went through all the verification procedure only to find out that she had to connect me to another operator since she could only deal with cable customers. Which of course meant going through the whole verification blabla again. Maybe Virgin should really get some good DB and Webprogrammers to make their customer interaction frontend a bit more useful.
• All I wanted a paper bill but they said they could not provide me with a bill. And since my account was closed, I could not get access to it via ebilling either (which I could not since Feb this year anyway). But she was magnanimous enough to give me the number and the date of the final bill.
• If you want to complain to them, they make it really hard to contact them.
• And now for the funniest bit: I complained to OFCOM and here is the reply I got: Thank you for contacting Ofcom. We have identified an existing contact record in our system that matches the email address you specified in your complaint, but has different personal details. In order to ensure that we have accurate contact information for you, please could you reply by email providing the following information:
  
  • Your full name
  • Any previous name and postal address details that you may have used when contacting Ofcom
  
  *** Please do not reply to this email. This email address is only used for acknowledging receipt of consumer experiences *** ---- Hilarious. Please reply by email and please do not reply to this email. The UK at its best!!!!! Sorry, been to many countries that the UK looks down upon. They definitely run their services better than this.

Now we are with TalkTalk. It is like heaven. They sent us a welcome pack. They sent us a set up CD and a router that is working. I could log into my ebilling services in no time. They spelt my first name wrong and got it corrected within 24hrs of sending an online request to them. We can work from home again. Everything is transparent and easy and despite the Virgin technician warning me that the internet would not work, we could connect on the day TalkTalk promised we would go online.

Conclusions:

Keep your fingers off Virgin at any costs. If I would charge Virgin for the time I spent on the phone with them I would still be phoning and surfing for free. I have had bad internet services before, but Virgin beat the competition easily. It is like a nightmare over after leaving them. So, do not even think about using Virgin for any services. The experience will undoubtedly be bad.

As for OFCOM. They are probably paid by Virgin...

Day zero

Travelling from Edinburgh to Fort William. Which seems to be quite straight forward, tickets in hand and Lothian buses with a good reputation. But hey, this is not Zürich where they let every passenger in the remotest PT stop know that there is a Marathon on in the City Centre and the buses were not running on time. So, even though we hiked down to the bus stop well before the departure of our train in Haymarket, we were only just able to make it with -1 minutes spare, thanks to other people being delayed and jamming onto the train. Doing that with a blind person was even more remarkable.

So that was us dieseling towards Glasgow. Incomprehensible that the most used line in Scotland is just about to be electrified, but here we go. Close your eyes and the noise makes you think you're travelling at 320 km/h... Guess on this island they will never get there on timetabled trains.

Change in Glasgow Queen Street into an even older train. Again incomprehensible that on one of the most scenic trainjourneys in the world, they jam walkers, hikers, tourists and the odd locals into outdated rolling stock. It's like telling everyone, hey, we got some of the nicest scenery on offer but we make you suffer for it.  But we loved the journey and the beer was still cold from the trolley. At least at the beginning. The vast- and emptiness of the countryside is staggering and my mind already started to slow down and take in all the colours, the odd snow capped mountain and the beautiful sunshine.

Once we arrived in Fort William, a heatwave struck us to the platform floor and we just managed to get a taxi that took us to our B&B (56°48'26.1", 005°07'38.5"). This was run by a lovely and resolute South African woman. We got some dinner at a Chinese restaurant which was sort of OK and saw the rare occurence of the Waverley, which does not stop very often in Fort William as you may find out from the link. So considering that, we were very lucky people. We then strolled back to the B&B, where I discussed various important topics with the landlandy before falling into bed for a good night's sleep, for day one would bring some more physical action than the day that was just about to disappear, but not really since the combination of latitude and season means that the stars are barely visible at night.