BusConnects Dublin - Big changes to Bus Network

pclive

D14Rugby wrote: »

Probably more to do with the connection speed than the actual readers

They are not connected. they download info at night when they get back to the garage.

They are woefully SLOW!

AlmightyCushion

Sam Russell wrote: »

They are too slow.

Yes they are but they don't need to be replaced to do free transfers within 90 minutes as L1011 claimed.

D14Rugby

pclive wrote: »

They are not connected. they download info at night when they get back to the garage.

They are woefully SLOW!

Thats a weird way to do it.

Sam Russell

AlmightyCushion wrote: »

Yes they are but they don't need to be replaced to do free transfers within 90 minutes as L1011 claimed.

Well, they currently can hardly process the Leap card - taking an age to validate one.

Could they not just upgrade the memory and up the processor speed? They have thousands of them so it would be a worth someone's while to do it - keep everything the same, just upgrade memory and processor.

devnull

D14Rugby wrote: »

Probably more to do with the connection speed than the actual readers

The readers are an input/output device that is connected to the ticket machine, they cannot work without the ticket machine as they depend on the ticket machine for all of their functionality. The readers are not as sophisticated as you seem to think, they are a device that links to a ticket machine rather than one that acts on it's own.

elmoslats wrote: »

The machines don't need to store that information, it is stored on the card. That is how the leap 90 discount works. It reads the card to see when your last trip was and if it was within the last 90 minutes it gives you the discount.

Of course they need to store that information, because the upload of that information is how statistics are calculated by the operators and form the basis of deciding how the operators get paid and what revenue is allocated to what operator based on the usage of the LEAP Card.

You have to remember that when you purchase LEAP Credit it goes to a central pot and how that pot is divided up is based on the actual usage of LEAP cards.

Could they not just upgrade the memory and up the processor speed? They have thousands of them so it would be a worth someone's while to do it - keep everything the same, just upgrade memory and processor.

This isn't modern tech where you can just sling more memory in and upgrade the CPU easily. These ticket machines are based on RAM and processors from the early 1990s and the motherboards and hardware support list for these things is very much limited, they're nowhere near like today's ticket machines.

These machines are well life expired and should be consigned to the dustbin, they have already been pushed well beyond their means and design capacity, there is no financial sense at all in keeping them on, they should be consigned to history. They were good machines in the 90s and at the turn of the decade but their time is long gone now.

L1011

elmoslats wrote: »

The machines don't need to store that information, it is stored on the card.
That is how the leap 90 discount works. It reads the card to see when your last trip was and if it was within the last 90 minutes it gives you the discount.
I'm sure there is work needed to get it to work but I don't see why they would need to replace the readers on the buses.

The machines also have to store and upload the info as well.

The existing leap90 calculation is done on an subtly but importantly different basis and the same routines could not be used as is

AlmightyCushion

L1011 wrote: »

The machines also have to store and upload the info as well.

The existing leap90 calculation is done on an subtly but importantly different basis and the same routines could not be used as is

What is this difference? As far as I know the only difference is instead of discounting the fare by a euro, it just doesn't charge for it at all. That doesn't require a massive increase in storage or computational power to accomplish.

D14Rugby

devnull wrote: »

The readers are an input/output device that is connected to the ticket machine, they cannot work without the ticket machine as they depend on the ticket machine for all of their functionality. The readers are not as sophisticated as you seem to think, they are a device that links to a ticket machine rather than one that acts on it's own.

They aren't as they go about doing everything a weird way but they're still plenty sophisticated enough to cope with free 90 minute travel.

L1011 wrote: »

The machines also have to store and upload the info as well.

The existing leap90 calculation is done on an subtly but importantly different basis and the same routines could not be used as is

It really could be

L1011

AlmightyCushion wrote: »

What is this difference? As far as I know the only difference is instead of discounting the fare by a euro, it just doesn't charge for it at all. That doesn't require a massive increase in storage or computational power to accomplish.

The current one will continue discounting "forever"* if you keep transferring within 90mins. The new fare is 90mins first board to last board.

D14Rugby wrote: »

They aren't as they go about doing everything a weird way but they're still plenty sophisticated enough to cope with free 90 minute travel.

It really could be

Vast amount of assumptions from someone who doesn't know much to anything about how limited the platform is there.

The new ticketing is not a direct replacement for Leap90. The ticket machines have no ability to upload/download data during a journey nor can this be refitted. They are similar spec to home computers from 1992 with the addition of a 2mbit or so wireless card for data transfers in the depot.

The card readers are an interface - nothing else. All the computation is done by the Wayfarer; the card reader does the crypto and actual air interface alone.


*lack of services overnight would prevent that!

devnull

D14Rugby wrote: »

They aren't as they go about doing everything a weird way but they're still plenty sophisticated enough to cope with free 90 minute travel.

The readers are still limited to what is powering them, as they are essentially slave machines of the ticket machines. All of the data they log has to be written to the ticket machine and processed by it which is the bottleneck right now.

What is this difference? As far as I know the only difference is instead of discounting the fare by a euro, it just doesn't charge for it at all. That doesn't require a massive increase in storage or computational power to accomplish.

There is more calculations required, the existing programming simply looks at the last fare and f it's within 90 minutes on a supported mode. This is a very simple query, you'd need more conditionals and a more complex one for a 90 minute ticket since it would need to look at the first validation for the current journey.

D14Rugby

devnull wrote: »

The readers are still limited to what is powering them, as they are essentially slave machines of the ticket machines. All of the data they log has to be written to the ticket machine and processed by it which is the bottleneck right now.



There is more calculations required, the existing programming simply looks at the last fare and f it's within 90 minutes on a supported mode. This is a very simple query, you'd need more conditionals and a more complex one for a 90 minute ticket since it would need to look at the first validation for the current journey.

It's just 2 if statements compared to current one, hardly going to cause the thing to blow up.

p_haugh

https://www.lothianbuses.com/contactless/

On the topic of ticketing, Lothian have just made contactless available on all their city services.

L1011

D14Rugby wrote: »

It's just 2 if statements compared to current one, hardly going to cause the thing to blow up.

Again you fail to realise just how constrained the equipment is.

Its nearly 30 year old technology. It has extremely limited storage and RAM. The spec sheet isn't online anymore but I've some memory that the largest program ROM size available is 512k. There is 1MB of RAM available. Neither of these is upgradable.

You try write code the way a college kid writes code and you'll have trouble getting Hello World on screen. Adding control handling for a different calculation mechanism is not guaranteed to be possible seeing as they are really pushing the limits already.

devnull

D14Rugby wrote: »

It's just 2 if statements compared to current one, hardly going to cause the thing to blow up.

It's not just the extra queries, it is also going to have to read and write more data in order to carry them out. The ticket machines already struggle with their current workload, hardly surprising when they're based on a processing chip that has it's roots in the 1980s. (see here)

There's extra information to store because of it and the ticket machines can hold less information than a floppy disk can, you have to bear that in mind. This is extremely old tech, it was never designed for these kind of things, it's hundreds of times slower than even a budget PC these days.

devnull

p_haugh wrote: »

https://www.lothianbuses.com/contactless/

On the topic of ticketing, Lothian have just made contactless available on all their city services.

Aircoach have had it for about a year, they bought new machines for it and Dublin Bus will have to do the same.

Stephen15

devnull wrote: »

Aircoach have had it for about a year, they bought new machines for it and Dublin Bus will have to do the same.

Would that not be up to the NTA? As such a system would have to be rolled out on both DB and GAI buses aswell as probably BE aswell

elmoslats

L1011 wrote: »

The current one will continue discounting "forever"* if you keep transferring within 90mins. The new fare is 90mins first board to last board.


*lack of services overnight would prevent that!

Actually the daily cap would prevent that. Once you reach the daily cap they're capable of charging nothing.

L1011

elmoslats wrote: »

Actually the daily cap would prevent that. Once you reach the daily cap they're capable of charging nothing.

Hadn't thought of that - yes, that'll stop it after a few goes, but it could still be stretched to a stupid length of time.

elmoslats

L1011 wrote: »

Hadn't thought of that - yes, that'll stop it after a few goes, but it could still be stretched to a stupid length of time.

Well just 3/4 trips before the daily cap sets in.

I'm not going to pretend I know much about the hardware on the buses, but I'm not convinced that the 90 minute fare would be more complicated than the leap 90 discount.

The cards and machines are capable of dealing with leap 90, auto top up, daily/weekly caps etc.

I bet you all they'll implement the 90 minute fare without changing the card readers/ticket machines.

Hotblack Desiato

L1011 wrote: »

The spec sheet isn't online anymore but I've some memory that the largest program ROM size available is 512k. There is 1MB of RAM available. Neither of these is upgradable.

We put men on the moon with far less.

No reason to persist with these machines though, why aren't NTA replacing them?

CatInABox

Hotblack Desiato wrote: »

We put men on the moon with far less.

No reason to persist with these machines though, why aren't NTA replacing them?

They've started the process to replace them, but it's a smaller part of a larger project. The NTA are moving to Account Based Ticketing, much like the Oyster set up in the UK, and the new machines are going to be part of that project.

Qrt

CatInABox wrote: »

They've started the process to replace them, but it's a smaller part of a larger project. The NTA are moving to Account Based Ticketing, much like the Oyster set up in the UK, and the new machines are going to be part of that project.

Have they issued any tenders?

LastStop

Qrt wrote: »

Have they issued any tenders?

Didn't a company called Cubic win the tender for the next generation of machines including contactless.

AlekSmart

LastStop wrote: »

Didn't a company called Cubic win the tender for the next generation of machines including contactless.

Interestingly,TfL is also having a bit of a think,or maybe Rethink on the issue of retiring the Oystercard.

https://londonist.com/london/transport/state-of-the-oyster-card

One stat caught my eye....

This might seem a minor issue considering that Londoners tend to hold onto one Oyster card for years at a time. However, this isn't true of everyone: TfL issues 700,000 new cards monthly.

WOW :eek:

Its equally noteworthy that simple elements can cause heads to be sctarched elsewhere too....

One thing that might've affected this is the new unlimited bus hopper fare. This article from 2016, shows that when the original bus hopper fare launched, there was already talk of an unlimited version. But the Oyster card's prehistoric (by 21st century standards) technology stood in the way; it's a much simpler task on contactless. TfL's tech team must have overcome this obstacle when they introduced the new fare, proof that there was still life in the Oyster card yet.

Work to be done yet in Dublin so....?

markpb

LastStop wrote: »

Didn't a company called Cubic win the tender for the next generation of machines including contactless.

They won a mobile ticketing tender for inter-city buses.

jd

cgcsb wrote: »

That's impressive work. I can confirm that's pretty accurate. I'll provide more info on locals and expresses when I get the chance.

Have you had a chance to collate the info on locals and expresses?

AlekSmart

cgcsb wrote: »

I had cause to cycle through Pearse st, College st, Westmoreland St and the south quays in the evening rush a few days ago. This would be an unusual journey for me. It was absolute chaos. Cars just driving around, for significant distance in the bus lanes, cars parked in cycle lanes, Left hand drive tour buses trying to pull out, cyclists weaving in and out of cars and going up on footpaths to get past and pedestrians getting fed up waiting and walking out on front of buses.
Cars driving from Pearse to College st are doing so illegally but they are numerous and they will beep at you if they think you aren't cycling fast enough, and they do this in full view of Pearse St Garda station.

This needs to be fixed, there are too many buses using this area, which Bus Connects will partially fix. Cars have completely lost the run of themselves, they drive and park wherever they like, no consequences. Pedestrians have to wait for long periods to walk a few metres and there is no provision for cycling.

At some point the enforcement issue will have to be addressed.

If,as it appears,the Gardaí do not have the resources,or choose to focus these elsewhere,then the entire City Centre Traffic Policing needs to be either reallocated or automated.

Garda Traffic Law enforcement appears to be focused upon two main areas,Speed Detection and large-scale Vehicle Check Points for tax,insurance,alcohol etc,leaving very little focus upon general driving law enforcement.

This is not Rocket Science,but most certainly,the level of increased risk inherent in walking,cycling or driving through An Lár, now makes some action inevitable,the only question being what level of disaster will prompt such action ? :mad:

is_that_so

Some way to go yet in the plan.

https://www.thejournal.ie/busconnects-nta-ministers-4734105-Jul2019

CatInABox

is_that_so wrote: »

Some way to go yet in the plan.

https://www.thejournal.ie/busconnects-nta-ministers-4734105-Jul2019

That's just the Journal doing yet another article on the results of a FOI request. I mean, it's grand, informative even, but there's nothing new there at all.

On the other hand, the Irish Times have an article about the BusConnects Core Corridors in Phibsborough. Looks like a vast improvement, and proves the NTA are not just taking on board the criticism around the projects, but are willing to make major changes. A cycleway tunnel under the NCR? That's an impressive solution.

CatInABox

BusConnects has released an update on the Core Corridors. They've included the designs that they're currently showing off to the local groups.

https://twitter.com/BusConnects/status/1156207335251107841

Released designs are:
Phibsborough
Kimmage
Inchicore
Stoneybatter
Templeogue

Interestingly, Aughrim St looks like it'll be one way. The N2 must be rerouted in the next phase of the network redesign.

The Kimmage one looks like an utter disaster. I mean, why even include it in BusConnects if it's not going to have any benefit for buses at all? The only option that improves things is the original proposal, the three other options are shared Car/Bus/Cycle lanes. Facepalm.