Transport Direct
The Government's shiny new Transport Direct website is intended to give you a route by public transport from anywhere to anywhere else. So I thought I'd give the website a try, with a journey I make regularly, from my parent's house in Slough to my present home in Cheadle Hulme.
I'm not impressed. It begins by suggesting I get the No 43 bus to Windsor, then the train back to Slough! It gets the trunk haul section of the run right (one change at Oxford). But at the other end it's even worse. Instead of getting off the Rail Replacement Bus five minutes from my home, it proposes continuing to Stockport, getting a train to Hazel Grove, then the 303 and finally the 157 bus. A huge 'drunken walk' type journey just to get to a bus stop 50yd nearer than the rail station!
This is nonsense.
It's on a par with the 400 mile overnight round trip the Railtrack website used to give for the 50 mile journey from Ipswich to Cambridge if you entered a time just after the last direct train had left. It would get you to Cambridge a few minutes before the first train the next morning.
All I can say is, this system is not ready for prime time yet.
Posted by TimHall at July 30, 2004 10:59 PM | TrackBackThe most irritating thing about it is that it doesn't find a route to a destination given an arrival time but only to a departure time: rather silly since we usually want to get somewhere by a certain time! I found the map facility works but is tediously slow and doesn't understand post codes (well, not mine anyway). The bottom line is that we need better public transport facilities: a simple 1 hour car journey takes a complicated 3-5 hours by public transport (and that's if the connections work) plus the up-front cost of the latter is much greater.
Posted by: Richard on September 3, 2004 07:51 AM