Annual St Patricks day Public Transport whinge

MrMorooka

Share your stories of yesterday here.

I'll start - I wanted to go to Blanchardstown Main St last evening, at 1830 I was at Leeson St intending to get a 39/38. From the research I had done, although they were operating from a northside terminus because of the parade, that diversion should have been lifted at 1700. a-b.ie had suggested the Leeson St option to me.

However, it became evident after 10-15 minutes that in fact the diversion must have still been in place, as any scheduled 37/38/39s on RTPI were disappearing as they switched off the timetable to live data. Took me a while to realise that was what was happening. Dublin Bus's twitter account had seemingly stopped for the day at 1700, and I couldn't see any way for me to know the diversion was still in place. Was I wrong? Was there some official way I could have figured things out?

In the end, I had the good sense to take a 46a to Doyle's Corner, then was able to get a 39 at Drumalee.

LXFlyer

If the twitter account wasn't still in operation after 17:00 (which to my mind is unacceptable given the day that was in it), then the only way would be to call the garage.

MrMorooka

lxflyer wrote: »

If the twitter account wasn't still in operation after 17:00 (which to my mind is unacceptable given the day that was in it)

Looking at their tweets, yes, that is the case. Looks like their last tweet yesterday was half 4.

thomasj

The 39 I got yesterday inbound (around 18.00) was only going as far as city centre

Also large gaps inbound while outbound was quite frequent

cdebru

MrMorooka wrote: »

Looking at their tweets, yes, that is the case. Looks like their last tweet yesterday was half 4.

Must have started the mad dash home, someone should make a video about it and put the heroes pictures up on the back of a bus, with some catchy nicknames like the terminator of traffic. :P

Carawaystick

It's gas the way semi state companies like DB and ESB will pay staff to answer phones to deal with service interruptions, but not to use twitter, where many passengers will get the same information

cdebru

Carawaystick wrote: »

It's gas the way semi state companies like DB and ESB will pay staff to answer phones to deal with service interruptions, but not to use twitter, where many passengers will get the same information

Who do you think answers the DB Twitter account ? Volunteers?

Jem72

I think the point is that a single tweet that takes 1 minute to compose could easily answer the queries of 50 people of whom 10 might make a 2 minute phone call. The other 40 will just give up and either walk or take a taxi.

The Twitter service from Irish Rail is extremely useful when in operation. It is just a pity it doesn't operate longer hours which would deliver a big improvement in customer service for very little money.

thomasj

Give someone the chance to work from home out of hours , im sure it would be taken up quicker than you could say network direct!

cdebru

Jem72 wrote: »

I think the point is that a single tweet that takes 1 minute to compose could easily answer the queries of 50 people of whom 10 might make a 2 minute phone call. The other 40 will just give up and either walk or take a taxi.

The Twitter service from Irish Rail is extremely useful when in operation. It is just a pity it doesn't operate longer hours which would deliver a big improvement in customer service for very little money.

DB twitter operates 7am to 7 pm Mon to Sat, arguably it should be available from first bus till last 7 days a week though.

Carawaystick

cdebru wrote: »

Who do you think answers the DB Twitter account ? Volunteers?

I'd have thought the same customer service staff who answer the phones.

cdebru

Carawaystick wrote: »

It's gas the way semi state companies like DB and ESB will pay staff to answer phones to deal with service interruptions, but not to use twitter, where many passengers will get the same information

Carawaystick wrote: »

I'd have thought the same customer service staff who answer the phones.

Sorry I'm confused here, your first post seems to suggest that DB don't pay people to use twitter to deal with service interruptions, when asked who do you think answers the Dublinbus twitter account, you now say the customer service staff who answer the phones.
I'm unsure of the point you are making, you seem to be suggesting that the staff are paid to answer the phone but then they answer twitter enquiries unpaid in a voluntary capacity is that your point ?


AFAIK DB have a social media staff, one of whom was featured in the " mad dash home" nonsense whose specific task is to answer twitter and facebook enquiries and give out service updates etc, it is actually part of the contract with the NTA that twitter enquiries must be answered within one hour between certain hours. AFAIK those staff are paid and are not acting in a voluntary capacity, but I'm open to correction.

LXFlyer

cdebru wrote: »

Sorry I'm confused here, your first post seems to suggest that DB don't pay people to use twitter to deal with service interruptions, when asked who do you think answers the Dublinbus twitter account, you now say the customer service staff who answer the phones.
I'm unsure of the point you are making, you seem to be suggesting that the staff are paid to answer the phone but then they answer twitter enquiries unpaid in a voluntary capacity is that your point ?


AFAIK DB have a social media staff, one of whom was featured in the " mad dash home" nonsense whose specific task is to answer twitter and facebook enquiries and give out service updates etc, it is actually part of the contract with the NTA that twitter enquiries must be answered within one hour between certain hours. AFAIK those staff are paid and are not acting in a voluntary capacity, but I'm open to correction.

I think he meant that he would expect both companies to pay someone to keep twitter operational outside of normal office hours, given that the businesses operate all day long. In other words make sure it's operational from first to last bus to deal with queries/issues.

It would appear that the person manning the twitter feed finished up at 17:00 on St Patrick's Day despite the fact that diversions were still in place, and thereby making it very difficult for anyone to get live info. He is suggesting that DB should have paid someone to continue operating the twitter feed beyond 17:00, despite having (possibly) someone available to answer the customer service phone lines. Perhaps even the same person!

You're both ultimately making the same point - that is that the twitter feed should be manned from first to last bus.

Mrs OBumble

lxflyer wrote: »

He is suggesting that DB should have paid someone to continue operating the twitter feed beyond 17:00, despite having (possibly) someone available to answer the customer service phone lines. Perhaps even the same person!

You're both ultimately making the same point - that is that the twitter feed should be manned from first to last bus.

I agree that the Twitter feed should be staffed (not manned, we're not in the 1980s any more!) the same hours as the regular channels.

But one badly-worded tweet can cause wayyy more damage than one bad phone call. Worse case, it goes viral and is seen by hundreds of thousands. So the knowledge, skills and literacy needed to operate Twitter (or Facebook) successfully are a lot higher than those needed for phone based customer support.

I'm guessing this is why it operates shorter hours.

MrMorooka

Really, I'm not fussed about Twitter specifically. Actually, this is the kind of information that should be on the NTA's site, or associated with RTPI, or on Dublin Bus's site. Just some public place, that is easily updated, that would tell you if diversions are still in place, etc*. It's a simple concept. Ideally the RTPI would be smarter and wouldn't display phantom buses that will not actually appear because their terminus has been moved.

*for example : https://tfl.gov.uk/bus/status or https://twitter.com/TfLBusAlerts


But it's pointless, it will never happen here, public transport is just not something we do. Admittedly information is much better now than 10 years ago, so who knows..

LXFlyer

I think the point is that, particularly on a day such as St Patrick's Day, the website, social media and call centre should all be operational for the full day. And being honest about it, they should be every day.

RTPI is a bit harder though.

You have to bear in mind that how it works is that:
1) Every individual departure on each route has it's own timetable that the schedulers have prepared which has times for every single bus stop en route.
2) The GPS reads the location of the bus and then applies that timetable from the current location to come up with predictive times for the rest of the route.

To do that properly for St Patrick's Day would require drawing up a complete set of revised timetables in advance by the scheduler for every single departure on every route that serves the city centre and for every stop along those routes. That's a massive task, and all the more difficult given the difficulty of trying to estimate journey times in advance along the diverted sections of the routes when you have much heavier traffic than normal. I imagine that there were numerous curtailed services due to buses being held up in the traffic - that's pretty much impossible to predict.

cdebru

lxflyer wrote: »

I think he meant that he would expect both companies to pay someone to keep twitter operational outside of normal office hours, given that the businesses operate all day long. In other words make sure it's operational from first to last bus to deal with queries/issues.

It would appear that the person manning the twitter feed finished up at 17:00 on St Patrick's Day despite the fact that diversions were still in place, and thereby making it very difficult for anyone to get live info. He is suggesting that DB should have paid someone to continue operating the twitter feed beyond 17:00, despite having (possibly) someone available to answer the customer service phone lines. Perhaps even the same person!

You're both ultimately making the same point - that is that the twitter feed should be manned from first to last bus.

But that is nothing like what he said, and in actual fact customer service phone lines only operate from 8:30 to 18:00 Monday to Saturday and not at all on public holidays, social media operates 7am to 7pm and operate at particularly busy periods out of hours like they did on St Patrick's day.
So in actual fact DB did pay people ( well at least one person) to use Twitter while they didn't pay anyone to answer the phone apparently which is the exact opposite of the claim in the original post.
It reads to me as the poster was unaware that DB even had a twtter account or perhaps the post was just very poorly written.

LXFlyer

cdebru wrote: »

But that is nothing like what he said, and in actual fact customer service phone lines only operate from 8:30 to 18:00 Monday to Saturday and not at all on public holidays, social media operates 7am to 7pm and operate at particularly busy periods out of hours like they did on St Patrick's day.
So in actual fact DB did pay people ( well at least one person) to use Twitter while they didn't pay anyone to answer the phone apparently which is the exact opposite of the claim in the original post.
It reads to me as the poster was unaware that DB even had a twtter account or perhaps the post was just very poorly written.

Well you can still phone the depots outside those hours, so telephone is an option.

I suspect that the latter half of your final sentence is correct, but I was trying to be polite!

DB need to have live info online (including social media) from first to last bus. That should be a given nowadays.

cdebru

lxflyer wrote: »

I think the point is that, particularly on a day such as St Patrick's Day, the website, social media and call centre should all be operational for the full day. And being honest about it, they should be every day.

RTPI is a bit harder though.

You have to bear in mind that how it works is that:
1) Every individual departure on each route has it's own timetable that the schedulers have prepared which has times for every single bus stop en route.
2) The GPS reads the location of the bus and then applies that timetable from the current location to come up with predictive times for the rest of the route.

To do that for properly for St Patrick's Day would require drawing up a complete set of revised timetables for every single departure on every route that serves the city centre and for every stop along those routes. That's a massive task, and all the more difficult given the difficulty of trying to estimate journey times in advance along the diverted sections of the routes when you have much heavier traffic than normal. I imagine that there were numerous curtailed services due to buses being held up in the traffic - that's pretty much impossible to predict.

The problem is that the NTA/DB hide too much information that would be useful to customers, for example a map showing where exactly buses are, which direction they are heading in, in service, out of service, possibly even if they are full, it would also show when buses are diverted and what route they are taking.

All that information is available but for some reason they insist on only showing a predicted time for an arrival at a particular point.

LXFlyer

cdebru wrote: »

The problem is that the NTA/DB hide too much information that would be useful to customers, for example a map showing where exactly buses are, which direction they are heading in, in service, out of service, possibly even if they are full, it would also show when buses are diverted and what route they are taking.

All that information is available but for some reason they insist on only showing a predicted time for an arrival at a particular point.

There's been a vast improvement in the information available, but there is still a long way to go yet.

cdebru

lxflyer wrote: »

Well you can still phone the depots outside those hours, so telephone is an option.
.

In theory anyway

cdebru

lxflyer wrote: »

There's been a vast improvement in the information available, but there is still a long way to go yet.

Agreed I have no idea why bus location is treated as if it was a matter of national security, an awful lot of the questions asked on Twitter could be answered by just providing the information that is available to the person monitoring the Twitter feed.

mickmmc

Mark Paul, business journalist with the Irish Times, has been monitoring the Dublin Bus twitter account.

He wrote a very critical article about customer service in Dublin Bus 2 weeks ago.The NTA also received a lash for not dealing with customer service problems in DB.

He quoted the following tweet in the article posted on DB's twitter account: "Would the designer of the Dublin Bus app attend my funeral to let me down one last time"?

The article appeared at a very bad time for Dublin Bus with the NTA about to award a tender for 10% of the DB routes.

Boulevardier

I do not have twitter on my phone, but here is what happened to me yesterday (Sunday 20th) and which I have sent to DB:

A very unsatisfactory situation arose yesterday morning (Sunday 20th March) at the Appian Way/Upper Leeson St bus stop (which I think is stop 2795). The real-time display showed buses arriving in the normal way at the stop, for example a 46A due in 8 minutes and a 145 due in 10 minutes, etc. However, I soon noticed that these buses vanished from the display without any actual buses arriving.

Only by good luck did I notice that those buses were in fact not calling at my stop, but were coming down Waterloo road and thence into Morehampton Road. Stop 2795 had no indication whatever that buses were bypassing it. There was no notice affixed to the pole and as I have said the real-time screen was showing normal arrivals. The screen mentioned possible diversions due to (I think) a race, but gave no indication that that stop was affected.

Could you please ensure, in future similar situations, that when a bus stop is being bypassed, this situation is made abundantly clear both on real-time display and by means of a notice affixed to the pole or shelter?

ProudDUB

lxflyer wrote: »

Well you can still phone the depots outside those hours, so telephone is an option.

I suspect that the latter half of your final sentence is correct, but I was trying to be polite!

DB need to have live info online (including social media) from first to last bus. That should be a given nowadays.

Phoning the depot in this day and age? God Almighty. What if you don't know what depot your bus runs out of, or their phone number, or they aren't answering the phone? Or you are a visiting tourist and you don't even know such an option exists.

There were over half a million people in town on Paddys Day. It is the biggest day of the year for traffic & bus disruptions. God forbid there could be a system in place, over and above the normal day to day operations, where customers are kept better informed. :rolleyes:

LXFlyer

ProudDUB wrote: »

Phoning the depot in this day and age? God Almighty. What if you don't know what depot your bus runs out of, or their phone number, or they aren't answering the phone? Or you are a visiting tourist and you don't even know such an option exists.

There were over half a million people in town on Paddys Day. It is the biggest day of the year for traffic & bus disruptions. God forbid there could be a system in place, over and above the normal day to day operations, where customers are kept better informed. :rolleyes:

I'm not disagreeing with any of that - I've made that point quite clear several times in this thread.

Victor

lxflyer wrote: »

Well you can still phone the depots outside those hours, so telephone is an option.

Only if you have the foresight to have another 6 phone numbers ...

Boulevardier wrote: »

I do not have twitter on my phone, but here is what happened to me yesterday (Sunday 20th) and which I have sent to DB:

A very unsatisfactory situation arose yesterday morning (Sunday 20th March) at the Appian Way/Upper Leeson St bus stop (which I think is stop 2795). The real-time display showed buses arriving in the normal way at the stop, for example a 46A due in 8 minutes and a 145 due in 10 minutes, etc. However, I soon noticed that these buses vanished from the display without any actual buses arriving.

Only by good luck did I notice that those buses were in fact not calling at my stop, but were coming down Waterloo road and thence into Morehampton Road. Stop 2795 had no indication whatever that buses were bypassing it. There was no notice affixed to the pole and as I have said the real-time screen was showing normal arrivals. The screen mentioned possible diversions due to (I think) a race, but gave no indication that that stop was affected.

Could you please ensure, in future similar situations, that when a bus stop is being bypassed, this situation is made abundantly clear both on real-time display and by means of a notice affixed to the pole or shelter?

I had a similar experience at Leeson Street Bridge about a year ago. After no bus for 10-15 minutes, a passerby mentioned that the Garda had closed the road (north of Appian Way) after a collision. I phoned Dublin Bus, they knew nothing in the call centre. I asked them to put a message on the RTPI sign / remove the buses due. I waited a further 5-10 minutes and they removed the 46a / 145 form the RTPI, but left the 11 up. No message added. Aircoach were diverting via Leeson Park minimizing disruption, but Dublin Bus were diverting via Waterloo Road.

I walked to Leeson Street Lower and the diverted buses were still showing, even though they would never serve that stop.

dfx-

where on earth does the thinking come from that social media should only be monitored in 'office hours'? It's not just DB...

Same with revenue protection. The santry/beaumont/airport corridor has been crawling with teams of inspectors between 12-4pm, then nothing on the entire network beyond 5pm. Buses are still crammed at 6-7pm and I usually use evening services, I don't think I've ever seen a ticket check beyond 4pm. Are they not interested in revenue protection outside of 9-5?

LXFlyer

Victor wrote: »

Only if you have the foresight to have another 6 phone numbers ...

I had a similar experience at Leeson Street Bridge about a year ago. After no bus for 10-15 minutes, a passerby mentioned that the Garda had closed the road (north of Appian Way) after a collision. I phoned Dublin Bus, they knew nothing in the call centre. I asked them to put a message on the RTPI sign / remove the buses due. I waited a further 5-10 minutes and they removed the 46a / 145 form the RTPI, but left the 11 up. No message added. Aircoach were diverting via Leeson Park minimizing disruption, but Dublin Bus were diverting via Waterloo Road.

I walked to Leeson Street Lower and the diverted buses were still showing, even though they would never serve that stop.

To be fair Victor all of the garage numbers are on the "contact us" part of the DB website - if you call any of them they'll put you through to central control.

cdebru

dfx- wrote: »

where on earth does the thinking come from that social media should only be monitored in 'office hours'? It's not just DB...

Same with revenue protection. The santry/beaumont/airport corridor has been crawling with teams of inspectors between 12-4pm, then nothing on the entire network beyond 5pm. Buses are still crammed at 6-7pm and I usually use evening services, I don't think I've ever seen a ticket check beyond 4pm. Are they not interested in revenue protection outside of 9-5?

No, it's all for show at the end of the year they can say we did x amount of revenue checks, but they won't say where and when.

wench

dfx- wrote: »

Are they not interested in revenue protection outside of 9-5?

On the Camden St/Rathmines corridor they do check outside of office hours.
I've been checked at 7am a few times, and two weeks ago they were there at 6pm.