Great Western Coffee Shop

From The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/dec/15/local-buses-could-be-replaced-by-uber-style-services-says-grayling)

Like this? (http://www.slidebristol.com/)

I've never seen one of those.

It would be very interesting to know how Slide is going ... noting a Black Friday marketing promotion with a massive discount, might one gather they have more seats than bums to fit them?


Edit to reverse auto-correct ... it gave be "Nuns" for "Bums"

One wonders if they have given up without a whimple ..... ::)
A bit like English batsmen. Perhaps they should go into a nunnery when they return to England.

That is, or should be, the fundamental precept of every public transport system: redundancy. You have to have empty seats, and bus lanes should appear mostly empty, and inter-city rail routes should be duplicated so that you can divert when things go pear-shaped...

An Uber bus service would be very interesting ..

Would bus routes be flexible, and stops added/missed to existing routes or would routes be total dynamic.

Imagine an app, where you could book a bus from A->E for the cost of £1, then the balance would be paid by you, via app, on boarding the bus. The guaranteed revenue stream to drive the service would be interesting. I for one would be happy to use the service, currently haven given up on local bus (First Bristol 73|X73) for timetable failures and non appearance (frequently). The number of time Is got the bus stop for the sign to say 3 minutes->2->minutes then gone! No bus turns up, the system just reports timetable events until it tracks a bus. If no bus, false reports.

Much happier cycling a few miles and getting a train!

Would you also advocate having enough vehicles to have stand-ins when more than usual require repairing at the same time, and drivers and train managers as stand-ins when more that usual require training at the same time?

Building redundancy into the system doesn't mean you don't need to husband your resources efficiently.

There is lot of maths linking Availability, Reliability and Utilisation.

Quite often and Availability and Reliability diminish with increased Utilisation. The classic in the rail industry was Hull trains when they dropped one of their trains on the ground and they were left with 4 sets in place of 5 to run the service.

Utilisation went up but Availability and Reliability went down due to extra wear and tear on the remaining units.

I also remember doing calculations on seek times for disc drives. They tended to increase dramatically at above 60% of theoretical capacity.

It's all exponential.

Slide is still going. I've never used it nor do I know anyone who has, but I see their minibuses around Gloucester Road from time to time. I've never noticed more than a couple of passengers in them, but it's hard to tell.

Another excellent, well thought out suggestion from the mind of Chris Grayling? (cf Partial electrification of trunk railway routes).