Monday 13 July 2020

;Departure Lists : The Challenge (1)

Once you have a "populated" database of bus timetables, all you have to do (All???) is dive into the bits and bytes, pull out what you need and glue it together to form a neat, tidy and understandable departure list.

Such a system was operated by Northampton Corporation Transport back in the halcyon pre-technology days of fbb's childhood. Mavis typed the departures on to a pre-printed heading and the page was then reduced for the timetable book ...
... and increased for the bus stop frames. Maybe the council had spent a huge wad of fivers on onef of those new-fangled Xerox machines; although, knowing Northampton's small c conservative "management", it might have been a Roneo or a Getstetner, then photographic enlargement/reduction.

But the results were easy to produce, easy to understand and neat.N Northampton'sr were all simple, short straightforward end-to-end services with no "odd" diversions from normality.

Seemples!

Just like the 51 table from Sheffield ...
... spewed out by the first "draft" from the GoTimetable data. Ignore the actual style, typeface etc, in the above (and all tables in this blog). They are assembled in HTML (that's internet technology) using a readily available bit of software to create the file for the printout.

Adding "style" comes MUCH later.

But the table was wrong. One of those journeys did not run all the way to Charnock, it stopped "short" and snook into  the nearby depot.
Cleverly our technologist arranged to "read" the last stop and turn it into a string of initial letters.
Add to this the need to 'read" column head notes for, say, schoolday or non-schoolday variations and eventually you get something like this:-
(The notes a fake, by the way, just added to test the system.) It is getting very cluttered!

The man of the moment came up with a helpful acronym to explain his modest skill. At first, he called his program the Amazing Note Understanding System; but subsequently felt the name might be inappropriate. fbb cannot see why!

The next idea involves changing the timetables themselves.
Now a short working (to Chesterfield Cavendish Street) uses a single letter, as do the other column head notes. On a normal "proper" timetable, you would not need a note for the short working,  but adding one will reinforce the "oddity" if the oddness.

Perhaps fbb should spell Eckington correctly?

But where IS Chesterfield Cavendish Street?

So we add a route description ...
... which helps.

Then there was the horrendous table shown a day or two ago, where two routes (75 & 76) join, run together cross city, then bifurcate. Ideally the "together" section should show the joint frequency, but, if you show route numbers alongside times, you get confusion and clutter.
As the phrase goes, "too much information"! (apologies for a poor screenshot).

So there is much to consider when deriving departure lists from anybody's database.

Remember, all these departure lists have been "created" directly from the tables stored in GoTimetable; fbb's techy lad hasn't been busily typing, like Northampton's Mavis in the "good old days".

If blog readers have any suggestions, please let fbb know. To avoid cluttering the comments system on this blog, please email directly to:

fbb@xephos.com

All advice will be considered and is appreciated.

Meanwhile, fbb is going to take a close look at a set of timetables that contain almost every problem encountered above - and some more.

Welcome to the dubious delights of services 27, 29 and 29a from Rotherham. fbb will explore more tomorrow, but, for the time being, enjoy an fbb map. (click on the map to enlarge it)
27  : Monday to Saturday daytime - First Bus
29  : Monday to Saturday daytime - First Bus
29a : Early morning, evening and Sunday - T M Travel

Simple? We shall see.

Snippets
York
York Sightseeing is now operating - every 30 minutes.

Malton
Coastliner dealing with social distancing and certain busy journeys ...
... with recently acquired double length articulated double deckers.

York Again
Some Twitterers were uneasy about the focus of the re-opening.
God in our cathedrals?

What a stranger idea!

HS2 And The Threat to Wildlife
This wildlife was chirruping happily very close to the West Coast main line and a busy main road.
He seemed unbothered by the excesses of human activity.

Mr Tubbles Under Pressure
Such was the tension in the feline duties yesterday that his short morning nap ...
... in the office/loft/spare spare room was curtailed early at 1600 after a prompt start at 0830.

Mrs fbb's Sunflowers
Those in the extnsve grnds f & r are doing very well with one nearly 9 feet tall.
The three in the "parking lot" are equally magnificent but not so big.
Out front, the bud is about to burst forth.
Of course we all know that the flower heads consist of two interlocking spirals of seeds, the count in each spiral being numbers in the Fibonacci series. (That's 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377 and so on - each number being formed by adding the previous two together).

Weird but truly wonderful.

Good to see that a creator God was also a skilled mathematician, a skill which formed part of his creative almightiness - even if he used "evolution" to help things on their way. Happy with that.

 Next technology blog : Tuesday 14th July 

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