Fare calculators and journey planners

Stevek101

Fare Calculator now live on the DB website. Problem solved, however, it's currently not working.

noelfirl

Stevek101 wrote: »

Fare Calculator now live on the DB website. Problem solved, however, it's currently not working.

Got it to work, and accurately, for some of the fares I know, however it seems to break quite easily, requiring a refresh of the page.

LeinsterDub

Stevek101 wrote: »

Fare Calculator now live on the DB website. Problem solved, however, it's currently not working.

Not really makes it easier yes but stages are still a terribly outdated means of calculating fare

bk

Good news on the new fare calculator, but it is only ok.

1) Firstly some routes, for instance the 16 don't seem to be working.

2) This should really also be part of the Journey Planner, as in the journey planner should also give you the cost of the journey returned.

3) The Journey Planner on the DB site is terribly designed, it only works from a particular bus stop to a particular bus stop.

So you can't just put in your home address and destination and have it find the best bus services. No instead you have to figure out what actual bus stop number you want to go from and which one you want to go to!!!

So instead of putting just City Center or even O'Connell St as your destination, you have to select from one of multiple bus stops on O'Connell St, which may or may not be served by a bus on your route.

In other words you have to be intimately aware of the Dublin Bus network to use the journey planner in the first place, which completely defeats the purpose!!

Complete madness, has to be the worst journey planner I've ever seen.

Hopefully this fare information is also available as a web service and will soon make an appearance on the vastly superior journey planners of hittheroad.ie and third party iPhone/Android apps.

BTW I wonder if there is any news of the promised Goggle Transit integration that we were previously promised?

Victor

Once the data is exported to other journey planner it should work better. The NTA journey planner has the advantage of aggregating nearby stops into one stop.

bk wrote: »

BTW I wonder if there is any news of the promised Goggle Transit integration that we were previously promised?

I get the impression it is progressing and looks good, using the same data that the NTA journey planner does.

bk

Victor wrote: »

Once the data is exported to other journey planner it should work better. the NTA journey planner has the advantage of aggregating nearby stops into one stop.

I hope that the data is made available to all. The NTA journey planner is only marginally better then the DB journey planner. Still very poor compared to hittheroad for the Dublin region.

Victor wrote: »

I get the impression it is progressing and looks good, using the same data that the NTA journey planner does.

That is fantastic news. Google Transit is by far the best journey planner in my experience. Any idea of roughly when it should be available?

devnull

Had this debate before, but Hit the Road isn't a journey planner since it misses out everything bar CIE and Luas services and a proper journey planner should cover all modes and operators as that is what journey planners should do, they should not favour any operator and plan journeys using all available modes.

The NTA one is the closest we've got to that so for me it is the best without doubt. If someone wants to look up a journey then Hit the Road may do them fine, but if I was a person who was directed to it and had to take three buses etc when there was a direct one that the so called journey planner didn't include. I'd be pretty miffed.

In an ideal world Dublin Bus, should be forced to use the NTA planner, but that will never happen. The Dublin Bus one is useless.

bk

devnull wrote: »

Had this debate before, but Hit the Road isn't a journey planner since it misses out everything bar CIE and Luas services and a proper journey planner should cover all modes and operators as that is what journey planners should do, they should not favour any operator and plan journeys using all available modes.

Actually hittheroad now includes Swords Express and has also recently added Irish Rail commuter services and the 747. So it isn't exclusively CIE/Luas and is adding new services.

It now covers probably 95% of all public transport services in Dublin. Aircoach is the only major service I can think of that it is missing from the Dublin city area.

I certainly don't think they favour any particular operator, I think it is more a case of them being a small group of private developers who have only limited resources and access to limited data, versus the NTA, who have access to all data and can spend big money on developing such an application.

IMO user interface is also extremely important and hittheroad is vastly superior to the NTA planner. IMO the NTA planner is all but unusable. Far too complicated, difficult and confusing to use.

For those living in Dublin, hittheroad is vastly superior.

Obviously the ideal would be a site that had the interface of hittheroad, with the breath of data of the NTA planner. I think we can both agree on that.

Hopefully Google Transit will give us that.

Victor

bk wrote: »

I certainly don't think they favour any particular operator, I think it is more a case of them being a small group of private developers who have only limited resources and access to limited data, versus the NTA, who have access to all data and can spend big money on developing such an application.

The journey planner software aside, I get the impression the NTA isn't actually spending all that much on it.

Obviously the ideal would be a site that had the interface of hittheroad, with the breath of data of the NTA planner. I think we can both agree on that.

The base route and timetable data is / will be published for all to use - this is what Google will be using.

bk

Victor wrote: »

the base route and timetable data is / will be published for all to use - this is what Google will be using.

I assume it isn't being published yet, which is why the hittheroad folks are using what they have available to them.

It will be great when this data is widely published and Google transit starts up.

foggy_lad

Victor wrote: »

The journey planner software aside, I get the impression the NTA isn't actually spending all that much on it.

the base route and timetable data is / will be published for all to use - this is what Google will be using.

This information will be of little use to anyone if it is missing some popular and well used services like the JJ Kavanagh Tramore-Dublin Airport service which the NTA have deleted from their journey planner due to that particular service not being 100% compliant with the licence. Any jopurney planner is not much good if it does not include all services where the information is available.

Aard

I wouldn't go as far as saying it'd be "of little use to anyone", Foggy, just if there's a couple of routes missing. There's still the vast vast vast majority of routes available on it.

foggy_lad

Aard wrote: »

I wouldn't go as far as saying it'd be "of little use to anyone", Foggy, just if there's a couple of routes missing. There's still the vast vast vast majority of routes available on it.

Because this route is not on the planner just under half of all services(bus/rail) between Dublin and Carlow/Waterford are missing off the journey planner, In my opinion that makes the journey planner useless for anyone in the Carlow/Waterford/Dungarvan areas.

LXFlyer

Perhaps JJ Kavanagh should comply with the licence then?

Problem solved.

foggy_lad

lxflyer wrote: »

Perhaps JJ Kavanagh should comply with the licence then?

Problem solved.

Perhaps the NTA should produce a journey planner with all the information at their disposal and discuss any issues about licencing with Kavanagh's directly instead of blackmailing them.

AlekSmart

foggy_lad wrote: »

Perhaps the NTA should produce a journey planner with all the information at their disposal and discuss any issues about licencing with Kavanagh's directly instead of blackmailing them.

OOOhhh...that's a fairly serious allegation to be making against a legitimate regulatory agency Foggy. :eek:

I appreciate it's in keeping with your own personal attitudes towards the State Transport Sector in general,but I am equally confident that Kavanaghs are more than capable of dealing with the NTA directly,should they feel they are being treated in this manner....as a matter of interest have you contacted Kavanaghs to ascertain whether THEY consider themselves as being "Blackmailed" by the NTA ?

foggy_lad

AlekSmart wrote: »

OOOhhh...that's a fairly serious allegation to be making against a legitimate regulatory agency Foggy. :eek:

I appreciate it's in keeping with your own personal attitudes towards the State Transport Sector in general,but I am equally confident that Kavanaghs are more than capable of dealing with the NTA directly,should they feel they are being treated in this manner....as a matter of interest have you contacted Kavanaghs to ascertain whether THEY consider themselves as being "Blackmailed" by the NTA ?

I am looking at it more from the point of view of the NTA producing an incomplete journey planner despite all the information being available to them, it is cutting their nose off to spite their face! they should not be allowing whatever licencing issue they have with Kavanagh's interfere with the journey planner.

MOH

While "blackmail" might be a bit strong, at the end of the day Joe Public just wants to know what options are available to get from A to B. If the NTA want to include Kavanagh's with a big size 40 red font saying these guys have licence compliance issues then fine, but leaving them out altogether is doing the public a disservice, and only going to erode confidence in the system. Most people won't care about the politics of the situation, they'll just see a service they know well is omitted and wonder what else is missing.

Also, www.journeyplanner.transportforIreland.ie? Was surelyicancomeupwithanevenlongerurlforthis.ie already taken?

Victor

Thread split from "Leap" into the unknown: The feedback thread

Moderator

LXFlyer

MOH wrote: »

While "blackmail" might be a bit strong, at the end of the day Joe Public just wants to know what options are available to get from A to B. If the NTA want to include Kavanagh's with a big size 40 red font saying these guys have licence compliance issues then fine, but leaving them out altogether is doing the public a disservice, and only going to erode confidence in the system. Most people won't care about the politics of the situation, they'll just see a service they know well is omitted and wonder what else is missing.

Also, www.journeyplanner.transportforIreland.ie? Was surelyicancomeupwithanevenlongerurlforthis.ie already taken?

Why not use the far shorter www.a-b.ie that also takes you to the same site?

Victor

foggy_lad wrote: »

This information will be of little use to anyone if it is missing some popular and well used services like the JJ Kavanagh Tramore-Dublin Airport service which the NTA have deleted from their journey planner due to that particular service not being 100% compliant with the licence. Any jopurney planner is not much good if it does not include all services where the information is available.

In fairness, how are they to know what services are being run if their licence says X, but experience says Y?

There are 450 CIÉ routes, 750 licenced routes (less tours) and 2,000 rural transport routes programmed, with Northern Ireland routes to come. In the scale of that, JJ Kavanagh aren't all that important.

Victor

Sample image of the Google Transit product. "Train 7" is Irish Rail's timetable 7 (Dublin-Sligo), although it should show as timetable 14 (Dublin-Maynooth/M3 Parkway) as that trains tarts in Maynooth. Google Transit won't launch until certain data corrections have been made.

All the GTFS and bus route data is being shared on www.dublinked.com - Hittheroad and getthere are using that data. The NTA seem happy to share any information they have.

MOH

lxflyer wrote: »

Why not use the far shorter www.a-b.ie that also takes you to the same site?

Because I've absolutely no way of knowing that exists?

Why is it in a subdomain anyway? Everything else on the site - fares, real-time, taxi, leap card - is in a folder off the main site, the journey planner is inconsistently in a subdomain. They haven't even done basic stuff like redirect the non-www version. And from an accessibility point of view they haven't even labelled the input fields.

I'm sick of seeing state bodies waste money on websites that fail to do the basics in design, SEO, and/or accessibility.

Still, it's better than Bus Eireann's whensmybus.ie, which isn't even promoted on the BE site apart form a footer link.

Sorry, rant over.

bk

Fantastic news Victor, plus 100. I can't wait for this to launch.

If they need a beta tester let me know. I've lots of experience of using Google Transit around the world.

MOH, I agree, it is incredible to me that state websites are so badly designed and they can't get the basics right.

I think the issue is that the people who design these sites are software engineers with CS degrees (which I am myself), who are very good at building systems and programming, but they aren't User Experience Designers or Graphic Designers or Web Developers. A major customer facing website needs people like these from different disciplines to design a website.

Victor

foggy_lad wrote: »

blackmailing

I think 'blackmailing' is over-stating things.

I happened to be speaking to someone in the NTA today (not in bus licensing). I get the impression that there a number of operators are operating outside the licensing system - whether they have no licence at all, operating a substantially different timetable, not operating all services or not operating any services. Given the historical 'flexibility' (aka not giving a damn) in Irish society there are some issues, where while an operator is providing a competent service, it isn't fulfilling the licence, which may be down to something as simple as a data gap or erroneous data, e.g. bus stops recorded in the wrong place and the file not updated. We are moving from a position of lax regulation to reasonable regulation. We are moving from a situation where operators drove buses (Hi CIÉ!) to one where they are part of a proper transport system.

A line has to be drawn somewhere - some of services are at an unacceptably low standard or are interfering with other operators services.

Enforcement proceedings at whatever level may follow.

foggy_lad

I did suspect that a certain operator was falling foul of licencing because of the number of their services which run late but I don't see any of the things you mention as being reason to keep these technically unlicenced/licence voided services off the journey planner.

Could anyone say how many regular services are currently "not included"? Are bus eireann's x8 and x20 and x33 services left off the planner? They have serious timetable issues.

Victor

foggy_lad wrote: »

I did suspect that a certain operator was falling foul of licencing because of the number of their services which run late but I don't see any of the things you mention as being reason to keep these technically unlicenced/licence voided services off the journey planner.

Could anyone say how many regular services are currently "not included"? Are bus eireann's x8 and x20 and x33 services left off the planner? They have serious timetable issues.

Route X8 (possibly others) is subject to discussion with the operator with a view to rectifying this.

If a service doesn't have any licence at all, how could it be included?

foggy_lad

Victor wrote: »

Route X8 (possibly others) is subject to discussion with the operator with a view to rectifying this.

If a service doesn't have any licence at all, how could it be included?

How long are the nta going to be in discussions with bus eireann before taking action and telling them they are operating outside the terms of their licence on all those routes? There are several routes operating well outside their timetables but the nta appears ignorant of these yet can swoop mercilessly when a private operator falls foul of the licencing system on just one route.

nebel1

So when the NTA take action they are abused and when they don't they are abused ?

Same old same old.

expectationlost

just trying google maps directions and they didn't seem to recognise the dart or the luas as transit

ps

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yMFRWvoKBA