TFI Live - potential new Transport Planner App

Plenty of quality single deckers in the continent. I suppose, there aren't many options for Ireland? Or do we just buy the cheapest options? Coincidentally, I've just a single GOI decker today and I can agree that the suspension is very hard and the bus is very shaky and making weird sounds. Haven't noticed the seats problem, but only took for 15 min. Some people are sitting with a backpack still on a back rather than taking it off - perhaps that's the issue? Bustimes.org is amazing - it's a huge, consistent and painful kick in the NTA's balls for them not managing to create something similar.

Everything just says "scheduled" on the app this morning. No live tracking at all it seems for any route.

Some buses now appear on bustimes, but some of them have no bus route number. It looks that BE data is also affected.

I wish they'd done the stops on the map in a better way. Now what you've got is "2" everywhere, then you have to zoom in pretty close, and then try to click the correct stop to get the stop times you need. If it's an area you don't know very well, you probably end up clicking on both stops to get the correct one.

It's worse in some places, if you have more than 2 stops - one example would be centre of Ashbourne. There's a pair of stops, but one side has no departures at all - the stop you actually want to click is further up the road.

I'm not an app designer, but I just wish they had just one stop to click in most places, and then they could list "towards city centre" or something like that. Or they could show routes on the map instead of having to play "guess the route/stop" to find out a bus you need. There is the "list" tab, but again unless you are actually at the stop (or you know the stop number), it's not very handy.

Also I'm not a fan of the "cancelled" buses info - often buses show as cancelled, but they still run - and sometimes buses shown as running are actually cancelled. It's just not reliable info, which would really be something that's needed with all the bus cancellations going on.

They need the controller to actually manually cancel them and that doesn’t always happen.

There are occasions though where a “scheduled” bus can appear - for example, where the GPS tracking equipment on the bus fails.

Lazy is probably the opposite of reality - it’s a very busy job and there's just so many cancelled services at the moment due to the driver shortages that I suspect some are falling through the gaps unfortunately.

What would the story be with a bus marked cancelled for half its route, and "scheduled" for the other half?? Is it going to run the second half of the route or not? C1 on app currently marked cancelled from Sandymount to Tara Street, and "scheduled" from Aston Quay to Adamstown. Who knows?

This current situation with the driver shortage is bad, but the issues with buses not tracking (listed scheduled but actually running) and the inability of DB to officially register all the cancelled buses as cancelled, is maddening.

It didn't operate unfortunately.

I've had a day of it - lots of cancellations, very few officially marked as cancelled. And the one "scheduled" bus I assumed was cancelled (so ended up heading home later than intended) actually did operate.

I can cope with the cancellations, but not the inconsistent communication.

So again, it's a bad management. No good decisions been made in time. Ie, hire more people instead of waiting for too long. No, I understand this is a public body and they have to deal with some paperwork and make arrangements before even publishing about the opening. But again, things can be foreseen and prevented. And the NTA looking to be like those headless chickens, but even those are better as they show energy and enthusiasm.

I don't bother with the ones that say scheduled. They nearly never run. I think they are ones that they don't have a driver for, are scrambling to find one, which they might get (say a driver doing an extra run) but not guaranteed.

The summer is a tricky time as drivers get their well earned two weeks leave at this time, so even more pressure on resources. We can only hope from September, things will start to bed down.

In my experience they are cancelled about 80% of the time, but buses failing to track is a growing problem.

Have people seen the Transit app? It seems to be a much improved interface compared to the NTA app.

Same data feeds presumably.

Anything that says "scheduled" within the next hour or so is usually cancelled (but not always).

But is there any way of knowing which live tracked buses have actually departed and are running on the route? My local stop is about 10 minutes from a terminus, and many of the live buses do not exist. As in, it might say "5 mins" for the next bus, but that bus will never arrive - the time jumps up and down or gets to "due", and then just disappears from the app.

And then there's the occasional stealth buses that are neither "scheduled" or live, but still run.

I think the system and the app need a lot of work.

I had two experiences of "scheduled" buses today that did operate. One was visible on the tracking map. The other wasn't but interestingly was appearing on the bus stop real time displays. Do these have a different source to the TFI app?