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.