So, I’m standing at the bus stop waiting for a bus that never came, when I noticed this interesting poster where any sensible bus company would have put a timetable. It seems First Group, the incumbent incompetent service provider, are dabling with mobile tech. These are the geniuses that only let you buy tickets and not look at timetables on http://www.firstbus.co.uk/ and who hide timetables at least four clicks from the home page on their usability-challenged corporate site, so you can bet it’ll be good stuff.
Here’s how it works: every bus stop (I presume) has a poster containing a unique code which references that stop. By texting the code to their mobile number, you get a text message back with the times of the next buses. For example, at 17:51 this evening, I sent a text and got this back:
@ 18:00
Colney, Colney La John Innes Institute
25 to Costessey 18:00
25 to Norwich 18:03
4 to Swanton Morley 18:07
Thx 4 txting traveline
So far, so good, right?
Not for grumpy me! Here’s the problems with this scheme:
- The short code is horrific to have to type in – especially if you have predictive text enabled. Russ has expounded on the merits of short addresses, and he’s not wrong. For the code above, ‘nfoajmwm’, there’s 24 key presses if you have predictive text enabled. This could be a fiendishly clever ploy to get mobile phone users so engrossed in texting that they fail to note the passage of time, and are then delighted when a bus turns up unexpectedly. Or it could just be a really dumb-ass decision by the implementation team. How about using a location-based methodology, or numbers?
- The information sent back is presumably straight out of some static database – probably the same MySQL database that displays it’s knickers to the world if you pass invalid parameters to the flakey PHP web site. It’d be great to see something more useful, like:
@ 18:00
Colney, Colney La John Innes Institute
25 to Costessey 18:00 (due 18:25)
25 to Norwich 18:03 (cancelled)
4 to Swanton Morley 18:07 (replaced by donkeys)See? Already I’ve got warm fuzzy feelings about it. I’d know from this message that there’s no chance of a bus this side of Christmas, and I can get on and walk without waiting around feeling naive and stupid for 10 minutes first.
- Next on my list of gripes: cost. If you look closely at the picture, you’ll see the inevitable words: messages will be charged at 25p from 16 October 2004. Hold on a minute! These guys can’t be bothered to make timetables available either at bus stops or in the buses, they charge more to travel 10 minutes down the road than I’ve spent all day on buses in more clued-up countries, and now they want to charge premium rates to give me information that’s only adequate at best? I know you can bulk-purchase SMS messages for in the region of 2p a message, depending on volume. So that’s a markup of 23p to maintain a service – which, assuming they’re hooked up to the database they already use, should be a minimal cost at best. Factor in the savings of not having to put up timetables everywhere. And they want me to PAY to find out where my bloody bus is?
- The last problem of course is the less about quality and more about quantity. The window of information they give: 7 minutes. In the UK, it’s normal to wait for 45 minutes to an hour in the vague hope of seeing public transport. That should, in theory, be a lot more buses than these text messages are listing …
So come on First Group, sort it out. We’re not talking rocket science here – in Finland, you get tickets, timetables and route planners via mobile. And I bet the buses actually turn up.