Tuesday 14 February 2012

A Lotta Hassle for Little Houghton [3]

You Know, Unipart ...
... which fbb thought sold all those ludicrously expensive floggle-toggles to mend a motor car. But, actually, it is a huge group including ...
... which means it collects, delivers and stores stuff for other companies. Now fbb is thrilled to tell our excitable blog readers that Unipart has one of these:-
A Global Fulfilment Centre (spelt wrongly by Unipart : two "l"s not three according to the Oxford English Dictionary : write out your corrections 100 times!), whatever one of those is. And here it is in all its globally fulfilling glory.
Its a big shed and some offices built on land that was once part of Houghton Main Colliery. And it's got a bus service. There are shift pattern journeys on services 35 and 36 ...
... some of which are called 35B by Travel South Yorkshire, but they are exactly the same as 35s which is what Stagecoach calls them. Note also that TSY calls it "Great Houghton Unipart".

And service 33 provides at least an hourly bus seven days a week. Oh, and according to Traveline, the shed is located at Park Spring Road, Little Houghton. This is a new road following disused railway lines and linking Grimethorpe etc. with a whole range of "brown field" regeneration sites.

Here is the Option 2 of possible journey plan between Barnsley and Buttercross Drive. See A Lotta Hassle for Little Houghton [1] (read again).
Maybe not an attractive option with an 18 minute walk. Perhaps worth avoiding like the proverbial plague when you see what that "walk" involves. The warehouse is the large pink block top left.
The bus stop for Unipart is here ...
... with footpaths provided to get you safely into the compound (suitably protected by a high security fence); but leading to nowhere else. You could, of course, dice with death on the pavement-less and bus stop-less road and walk over half a mile south to the Ings Lane bridge ...
... clamber up the bank...
looking back from Ings Lane bridge
to Unipart in the misty distance

... do an SAS style vault over the bridge parapet and/or more high chain link fencing (remember?) ...
... and yomp defiantly down the Middlecliffe Road to No 8 Buttercross Drive Little Houghton.

fbb told you it was farcical. And all because the Lady loves Milk Tray?
No; all because Travel South Yorkshire has an irresistible desire to give everywhere a "district" name, even if it's potty. Then the journey planner, a typically thicko confuser, gives daft results.

And a finally, a technical question.

If Unipart were a suitable alighting point for Little Houghton, which it clearly isn't, then what is wrong with offering fbb a journey on the service 33 at 1140?

Option 6 : service 33, no changes and an 18 minute walk
Total journey time : 45 minutes

 Next Blog : due Wednesday February 15th 

2 comments:

  1. A few comments, as usual !

    1) “No; all because Travel South Yorkshire has an irresistible desire to give everywhere a "district" name, even if it's potty. Then the journey planner, a typically thicko confuser, gives daft results.”

    The reason that all stops are given a “district” or “locality” name is because that is what is required in the NAPTAN specification, as published by the Department of Transport – as per your blog of 4th January. So I feel you’re being a tad unfair saying TSY have an “irresistible desire” to assign district names – they are only doing what they are told by DfT ! (Having said that, if the names are rather potty, it is entirely down to TSY.)

    However, strange as it may seem, the locality names assigned to bus stops have NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER on the journey planner. For example, your Option 3 from Monday’s blog suggests alighting at “Middlecliffe, Rotherham Road/Middlecliff Lane, 55108”. This demonstrates that the planner is quite happy to use a stop in a different locality from the destination – in the case of Unipart Logistics, it would still suggest using that stop regardless of whether it was in Little Houghton, Great Houghton, Middlecliffe or any other location you care to name ! (The reason for giving stops a locality is so that the journey plans and timetables actually mean something to users. I, for one, would find the example journey plans from Monday’s blog almost incomprehensible if all the locality names were removed from the stop names.)

    In this example, the journey planner suggests using the Unipart stop because of a problem with the mapping, which seems to think that Ings Road and Park Spring Road meet at a cross-roads rather than an overbridge – as implied by the map for the walk leg from Park Spring Road to Buttercross Drive.

    2) “And finally, a technical question. If Unipart were a suitable alighting point for Little Houghton, which it clearly isn't, then what is wrong with offering fbb a journey on the service 33 at 1140?”

    As you say, using service 33 would take 45 minutes and arrive at 1225. However, your option 4 involving changing at Darfield (in fact anywhere between Nanny Marr Road/Illsley Road and DONCASTER ROAD/Fitzwilliam Road) also leaves at 1140 but arrives at 1223. Traveline Yorkshire works on the ‘keep it simple’ approach and always shows the fastest option, regardless of whether there are other options with fewer changes which take even only slightly longer. So the answer to your question is “because its slower than changing at Darfield !”

    Transport Direct uses the same approach of only showing the fastest journeys once you have selected your preferences using the ‘Advanced Options’ button. So if you select ‘Journeys with no changes’ you are offered three journeys per hour – at 25 and 55 past the hour using 219 to Middlecliffe Lane and at 40 past the hour using 33 to Unipart Logistics. All of these involve walks of either 13 or 18 minutes (including the scramble up the bank). If you don’t want to walk that far, you can limit it further by specifying ‘Maximum time I would be prepared to walk’ as 10 minutes. This results in hourly options at 05 past the hour using the 67, as you would expect.

    Other Traveline systems use a slightly different approach. The SE/EM/EA/SW system, for example, will give you the choice of both a slower option (with no changes) or a faster one (with some changes). However, some people might find this confusing, particularly for journey plans with numerous options available, and so would prefer Traveline Yorkshire’s ‘Keep it Simple’ approach.

    Well, you did ask !

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  2. But real people (and very few of those use Traveline or Transport Defunct) want simple simple answers (repetition intentional). Real people are simply not prepared to wrestle with multiple options.

    The fbb mantra is intoned yet again ...

    You can either be comprehensible or comprehensive, NEVER both!

    If Traveline Yorkshire is "simple" I dread to think what nonsense would be delivered by a complicated system.

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