The Bus Chronicles: Tracking the buses

The founding of the Bee Network in 2023 also led to the creation of six Customer Commitments, specifically: 

Source: https://tfgm.com/customer-commitments

As part of Reliable, they do publish weekly Bus punctuality reports, which means that it is possible to get an idea of how the network is performing overall, and how the network is performing by the three different tranche's. While this is all very commendable, and certainly represents a massive step up compared to what we had before under deregulation, there are a number of problems with the reports as they stand at the moment.

The main problem being that TfGM appear to have insufficient data to be able to report on how the buses in tranche 3, ie the buses that joined the Bee Network on the 5th January 2025, are performing. 

Guys, it's nearly a month now! I'm limbering up to write my first complaint to you about how the 385 is performing (or not performing...) and you've not put together the data to see whether I'm right or not. 

In the meantime, if you want to see how tranches 1 and 2 were performing between the 19th and 25th January, knock yourselves out. 

Another problem with the Bus punctuality reports, and I'll admit it's probably a minor one for most people, is that you can't see how individual bus routes are performing within the data. Meaning that even if the data for tranche 3 was available, I wouldn't be able to use it to look at how the 385 was doing. Presumably someone working at TfGM would be able to, but not me.

You could say that it would be impossible to build a tool to show, in real time, the performance of every bus across the Bee Network. Certainly the Bee Network app, on the rare occasions I've used it, seems to struggle with the real time aspects of where my bus is, but... It is not impossible.

The reason I know it is not impossible is because my former editor at City Metric, Jonn Elledge, recently wrote in his newsletter about the wonder that is the M62 Corridor Bus Tracker. You can read his take on it here (and please do sign up for his newsletter).

I was going to attempt to explain how it came about and what it does, but I think the summary that Open Innovations provide on their website says it much better than I ever could:  

Source: https://open-innovations.org/blog/2025-01-15-tracking-the-buses?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Jonn, based in London, used the tool they'd created to track the real-time progress of the 192 between Stockport Town Centre and Manchester Piccadilly in September 2024 (there is only ten days of data to look at, and it's from September 2024).

I, in turn, have used it to track the real-time progress of the 385 (then run by D&G, not Diamond) between the Buxton Road/Nangreave Road stop and the Harvester on Bosden Farm Estate. 

The visual representation of the data isn't massively interesting for the 385, and Jonn's charts for the 192 were definitely more visually interesting, but the data tells a story nonetheless:

If you hover over specific journey times, it will pop up with an info graphic to show how the actual journey time performed against the actual journey time. On every single one I picked, it showed that the bus had arrived early.

Early.

Not on time, not late, but... Early.

Essentially, the 385 was arriving at it's destination on average between 4 and 1 minute early. Despite setting off at the prescribed time.

I've been thinking back to September 2024 to try and remember if there was anything radically different going on, traffic wise, between Heaviley and Bosden Farm Estate that might account for this massive difference in how the 385 was performing in September 2024, and how it's performing now, but I really can't think of anything. 

It would be great if the kind of detail Open Innovations are able to provide could be utilised by TfGM and the Bee Network to provide proper accountable real time data that travellers could see and use as well as TfGM, but I won't hold my breath. 

Incidentally, the stats Jonn found for the average reliability of the 192 in September 2024, and the wildly varying estimations of its journey time, rang very true.