CIÉ group websites

travist

no time to read posts

http://www.dublinbus.ie/en/Your-Journey1/Timetables/

why doesn't it work, why is everything broken in this city!

GerardKeating

travist wrote: »

no time to read posts

http://www.dublinbus.ie/en/Your-Journey1/Timetables/

why doesn't it work, why is everything broken in this city!

seems to work for me, apart from the colour scheme...

Victor

They usually do. However all the CIÉ websites have been acting up for the last week.

aphex™

GerardKeating wrote: »

seems to work for me, apart from the colour scheme...

If you try and go into a timetable it's broken.

Had this problem earlier OP! Had to take the car!

Nevyn

They are crap.
They look awful.
They are hard to navigate, have to many redundant mouse clicks, and some of the dublin bus time tables are wrong.

travist

yes,
sorry, was rushing out

the timetable page loads, but click on a route number, and no page displays.

my internet acting very weird seperate to this, but seems to be a stupid error on someone's behalf - take down the timetables the weekend U2 concerts are on.

aphex™

travist wrote: »

take down the timetables the weekend U2 concerts are on.

Classic CIE really.

probe

I have a number of (non-commercial) websites to promote Ireland, and have received 7 emails so far this weekend (up to 17h12 CET) from people trying to use CIE group websites to find them not working. Many of whom are trying to make urgent choices for travel in a few hours/tomorrow morning. One of the emails ended with the words “pretty shambolic”. All one can do is despair, and explain that one does not run Ireland, or CIE or have any other official connection with government or transport services.

Bus Éireann started using Hafas (the same software system as is used perfectly successfully by most other European public transport operators - http://www.hafas.de/hafas_e/ref.shtml). They made a total *alls of the interface, and seem to have ended up with a collection of links to .pdf files for timetables. Which only show point to point bus services. And even this bog simple system doesn’t work. The other parts of CIE group – eg Irish Rail use a completely different system (which was also down as far as I can see). No integration. A company run by incompetent hackers!

Ireland has a www.geodirectory.ie* with the grid reference of every building in the country. All Hafas needs is the grid reference of the origin and destination of a journey and can work out an integrated journey plan/timetable door to door. And less precise journey info requests such as from “Naas” to “Galway” can be dealt with by the same system.

While an Irish person might just want to know train timetables between Dublin and Waterford, a tourist will want to know how I can get from Dublin Airport to some hotel on public transport – ie put in the street address, building number, and town name – because they don’t know where they are going. Anymore than you might know after landing in Tokyo Narita Airport to get to the Novotel Garden Ginza Hotel

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&source=s_d&saddr=Tokyo+narita+airport&daddr=8-13-1+GinzaChuo-KuTokyo,+Japan+(Mitsui+Garden+Hotel+Ginza+Premier+Tokyo)&geocode=%3BCRIFa3dbKewwFdw8IAIdKZ5UCCHRS8Ei6Rc1_A&hl=en&mra=pe&mrcr=0&date=07%2F26%2F09&time=5:18pm&ttype=dep&noexp=0&noal=0&sort=time&tline=&sll=35.720358,140.075745&sspn=0.430923,1.056747&ie=UTF8&ll=35.705262,140.072937&spn=0.431005,1.056747&z=11&start=0

And it is not just Japan, or China – you might have the same problem in Los Angeles (if there was a public transport system there), or Cape Town or Sydney.....

*While the geodirectory seems to have relatively accurate info on the co-ordinates of each building in the country, the Irish postal address system is in need of serious simplification and updating. Most buildings don’t have a house number. There is no postcode. They still use county names in the address. Some addresses don’t have a town name! (eg the www.epa.ie) near Wexford town.

There is no reason why rural addresses couldn’t be assigned building numbers to identify them – eg 234 TownlandName. Preferably metric numbers so that one can tell that 1200 TownlandNameX is 1km down the road from 2200 TownlandNameX – as is the case in France and many other European countries. And if someone builds a house between the two, there is numbering space to identify its position. (rather than calling it 24A or 24B etc).

Keep things simple. Don’t require people to queue up on the phone or at a counter to find out how to get to their destination or to have to ask several people to find directions to a destination (like an Indian railway station in the 1950s). The rest of Europe works fine with simplified addresses, short simple numeric postcodes, hafas integrated public transport information. Works on the internet, iPhone, Nokia N**, on your PC and with ticketing machines etc.

If CIE Group, An Post, Geodirectory, and the other parties responsible can’t modernise their systems in a rational, reliable, simple way, they should be fired, without compensation. When I say this I am making allowances for systems going down. Even Google mail goes down now and again. But there seems to be a total neglect in terms of providing a modern informational infrastructure in Ireland. And that is not a server failure blip. Rather it is running public services like transport, post, etc with your head in the sand and utter contempt for the country and visitors to the country...