Translink said in their annual report that they had 77 million passenger journeys.

I’m sending an FOI request into Translink to ask some questions that I think need answering.

Dear Translink,

I would appreciate some information about the operation of your services.

According to your 2010/11 Annual Report, on page 59, it seems to say that you have 1,469 buses and 34 trains.

• can you clarify if this is correct and whether I have interpreted the figures correctly?
• can you clarify the breakdown of vehicles between Metro, Ulsterbus, Enterprise and other services?

Can you clarify how many seats you have across all of your services:

• how many of these buses are single decker and how many are double decker?
• how many seats are there on each of these bus types?

According to your 2010/11 Annual Report, you claim 77 million passenger journeys. Can you clarify the following:

• can you provide a breakdown of the time of day for these journeys?
  • What percentage were before 9 am?
  • What percentage were between 9 am and 5 pm?
  • What percentage were between 9 am and 7 pm?
  • What percentage were after 7 pm?

• can you provide a customer profile for these journeys?
  • What percentage of these journeys were subsidised fares due to the traveller being pensioned, possessing an ELB pass other concessions due to low income, disability or unemployment?
  • What percentage of these journeys used monthly or annual ticket arrangements to reduce costs?
  • What percentage of these journeys paid full price?

• can you provide a regional profile for these journeys?
  • by county, how many of these journeys originated in each of the counties of Northern Ireland?
  • by county, what percentage of their journeys attracted a concessionary or subsidised fare (see above)?
  • by county, what was the approximate revenue obtained from each county?

• And with special reference to Derry~Londonderry, can you provide the following information?
  • by timetable, how many individual buses and trains service Derry~Londonderry?
  • by timetable, how many inbound and outbound journeys are there servicing Derry~Londonderry?
  • how many of the 77 million passenger journeys were attributed to the Derry~Londonderry region?
  • by occupancy, can you define the percentage usage of the buses and trains servicing Derry~Londonderry?

Many thanks for your patience.

As I said earlier, my aim is to piece information to create a business case for the following pilot -

• free buses and train transport in the North West from 1st Jan – 31st December 2013
• free buses and train transport for anyone outside the North West travelling TO Derry/Londonderry from 1st Jan – 31st December 2013

All of this in support of UK City of Culture 2013.
You have to start somewhere.

Andrew Leonard sent this link: Translink Annual Report 2010-2011

Much of the report is given up to Translink talking about new ways they have introduced to incrementally reduce the cost of transport including weekly, monthly and annual tickets, maintaining a network of 900 top-up points across the province and tax incentives. All of this expense and effort could be wiped out with FreePublicTransport.

They include this diagram on Page 7.

Meaningless stats

Without numbers and context, this is ultimately meaningless. If anyone can tell me the difference between “Will Be Delivered” and “A Little Behind Target But Likely To Be Delivered”, I’m all ears.

On page 10, we’re assaulted by some more statistics. First of all – CSAT numbers are meaningless for a government-subsidised monopoly. The people surveyed likely have no choice and they have nothing to compare it to.

Translink reports there were 77 million passenger journeys in 2010/11. This sounds like quite a lot. According to NISRA, of 686,644 working persons (aged 16-74) in Northern Ireland, only 47,719 took the bus or train to work. But they’re likely to have worked probably 250 days a year, maybe more, resulting in around 2.4 million journeys just for work assuming they only took one instance of public transport to work and one instance back. My mother in law, for instance, takes two buses to work and two to return home even though she lives and works in Belfast. Add to this schoolkids, unemployed persons, the retired (who get free transport) and you can see how this stacks up. Considering that Translink is only attracting less than 7% of the NI workforce speaks about the impact it is having on the economy.

Research on a sample of key corridors shows even with bus priority measures, over a ten year period (2001-11) bus speeds have reduced on average by 12%.

Considering that the average bus speeds are much lower than they need to be (see diagram above), Translink is not a viable option for most workers in the current form. This is going to be mostly due to road contention so the question is – how do you make buses run on time during rush hour? The easy answer? Less cars on the road. So how do you get 490,260 people who currently drive (or car pool) to work to consider using the public transport network? And that doesn’t include 16,011 people who use a taxi.

On page 56, we get into the meat of the report. The issue I have with the punctuality reports is that there is no context. Ulsterbus may have a 95% on-time record but that number is meaningless without context. You can expect all of the services which run between 10 am and 3 pm to run on time. And all of the services after 6:30 pm probably run on time. But the time critical services, during rush hour for work and school runs, are where the most major impact is seen. Why not strip those figures out? Because they’re bad?

I am also amused that ‘On time’ for bus services defined as within 7 minutes of timetable; for rail services within 5 minutes (local)/10 minutes (long haul). So, even if the bus or train is late, it’s still on time.

It’s obvious that our public transport system is not busy. This indicates to me that Translink is facing a death spiral where costs will continually increase while passenger numbers dwindle (even while population increases). Translink is simply not cost effective when you take into account the relative inflexibility of public transport systems.

Translink also complains that due to the economic downturn, passenger numbers decreased. Is this not the exact opposite of what you should expect for a public transport system? I would assume that cars mean financial independence and security and that trying economic times would drive people away from the increasing costs of cars and into the welcome arms of public transport. But, it would seem, the opposite occurs.

This is quite encouraging, a small loss on a large revenue. Perfect. But that’s not the whole story.

So, Translink had turnover of £187.8 million pounds and then received an additional £130.4 million to keep the service running. Considering that government is currently paying for for 41% of Translink, it’s not a stretch to imagine that they could start to pay for 100%. Especially after they realise the reduced costs in no longer needing to collect cash, issue and advertise multiple redundant promotions to sell tickets and start to monetize the service through smarter ways. And yes, we have some ideas about that.

Turning the amount of advertising Translink puts out there to advertise it’s own services into opportunities to advertise third party products to their captive audiences and, at the same time, sell premium services, seems to me like a no-brainer.

The flexibility and convenience of a car cannot be matched by public transport. This is obvious. Even when you consider the rising costs of fuel and the recent rise in parking fees, cars remain extremely competitive in the face of our heavily subsidised public transport system. For a public transport system to be used by the general public,

I want to challenge the assumption that public transport competes with private transport. It’s a different thing entirely. But there must be a way to both increase usage of public transport and convince people to use their cars less.

The question being: has anyone in government investigated this? And if not, why not?

From CityOfTomorrow.org

From Wikipedia: Hasselt#Transport

Hasselt made Public transport by bus zero-fare from 1 July 1997 and bus use was said to be as much as “13 times higher” by 2006. The town lines (called H-lijn) have been free for everyone including tourists since Tuesday 1 July 1997. Other bus lines are free for the inhabitants of Hasselt while travelling in the territory of Hasselt.

The regional transport services, or so-called Red lines, are free for residents of Hasselt, who can travel without fare as long as they show their identity card to the driver of the bus. Red regional route bus stops are marked with signs indicating the beginning or end of the Hasselt bus network.

Non-residents of Hasselt pay the usual area tariff, except for children under 12 who have zero-fare travel. “Blue” regional lines incur a fare in the normal way.

The mobility policy in Hasselt developed into an example of cooperation between the bus line, the Flemish government and the city of Hasselt, under the motto “the city guarantees the right of mobility for everyone”.

Following the introduction of the new zero-fare policy, the usage of public transport immediately increased by 800-900% and has remained high, being currently more than 10-fold compared to the time of the old policy.

This is an email I sent out tonight to twenty people who work in the public sector (or are interested parties) in Northern Ireland:

Hi all,

Sorry for the anonymous email.

Thought this might be of interest considering the difficulties we have had getting route and timetable data out of Translink. Three years later and we’ve still not managed it.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/commute/2012/04/estonias-capital-pursues-free-public-transit/1883/

Considering the support Translink gets and the ever-increasing fares (coupled with increasingly empty buses), it seems reasonable to assume that full buses are more valuable to the economy than the poor system we have in place. It would be possible to monetise the service through advertising (we have tried to communicate options for this to Translink with, as usual, no response).

The benefits of free public transport would mean, inevitably, reduced congestion on the roads across the province. If anyone can provide me with information on the subvention or the numbers of actual passengers and/or tickets sold in conjunction with passenger and bus numbers out on the network, I’d be very appreciative.

It’s a real vision of the future to make transport across the province free of charge. A bit like making sure we have free WiFi at every tourist location (especially areas of the country like Donaghadee which is badly served by mobile carriers).

Please pass this on to interested colleagues or by confidentially suggesting other folk who may be interested.

At the very least, it would make a great gesture to make every bus in and around Derry free for the whole of 2013.

Matt

Peter Molyneux at Eurogamer:

What I love about cloud computing – and this hasn’t been explored yet – is that it allows for something that we as gamers haven’t had since the start of gaming, and that is persistence. We don’t have worlds or experiences that can continue and last for extended periods of time. We need to get rid of saved games.

I think game designers are afraid of persistence. You have to figure out the consequences of persistence or figure out a way to fudge it. You have to explain what is going to persist, why and what happens when the game is a year old.

Look at Call of Duty. Are the wars persistent? What about the damage to buildings? And what about the dead? Eventually the bodies will start to smell. How you add persistence to an FPS will change the game. Who’s making the ammunition? We’ve bombed all the factories?

Look at Warcraft. Eventually you’ll have chopped down every tree and mined every mine. Eventually the Undead will likely take over by amassing huge shambling armies. Adding persistence means thinking about the long term consequences.

And what happens in persistent worlds with clues and traps? Do you come across the body of previous players? Or do you brave the terrors of the dungeons only to find the burial chamber contains only the burned out campfire of the guys who looted it before you?

But I don’t think Mr Molyneux is being particularly prophetic. Persistence is the Next Big Thing in games. The challenge will be in not making it awful.

Some companies will deal with it in terms of expansions. More new places to go. Others will use resets. Once a year, everything gets ‘reset’ after a fashion. Others still will place their game in a sandbox. New resources will be supply drops.

What I’m interested in is a game where the structures are built by people playing Sim City or Minecraft. They’re destroyed by people playing Call of Duty and Warcraft. Supplies are generated by people playing FarmVille and shops are staffed by people playing Dead Hungry Diner. Bystanders in the street are Sims, crossed with GTA.

They don’t have to be playing the same game. But what’s to stop a Sim shopkeeper (in real life, a lawyer from Seattle) playing out an interaction with a grizzled CoD veteran (in real life, a 35 year old video store clerk from Miami). The CoD player is playing his favourite FPS and from his point of view is trying to track down the whereabouts of a possible insurgent in the area. The Sim player is interacting via SMS messages and emotes on his mobile phone. He’s dialled up the realism so later that day, he’s interacting with a GTA mugger (in real life, a 17 year old college student on her summer holidays) and escaping with his life but not his wallet.

Isn’t that what Second Life should have been?

Heather Brooke on BBC News Channel, talking about proposed legislation that would allow the British government to legally monitor the phone calls, emails, texts and website visits of members of the public.

Why are we surprised? Considering the millions that have been spent on surveillance and biometrics by the Security Services via the Technology Strategy Board, it’s a matter of public procurement “value for money” that we actually start to use this stuff.

A quick search on the TSB web site brought up these SBRIs:

And, really, what do you think the Internet of Things is about other than the normalisation of data collection in everyday objects?

“If all objects of daily life were equipped with radio tags, they could be identified and inventoried by computers.”

“Mislaid and stolen items would be easily tracked and located, as would the people who use them.”

Notable that it doesn’t mention the privacy implications?

My Opinion: They’re Watching. Get Over It.

There’s a huge amount of data for them to sift through and they’re going to be spying on millions of Britons as well as millions of foreign nationals (regular, plain ol’ tourists). So, try not to do anything that causes them to turn their baleful eye your way. Try not to be “interesting” to them.

While Apple can do no wrong in software and hardware (other than be TOO POPULAR), they often fail in one area and that’s social. Find my friends is the third social attempt by Apple. They’ve failed to set the industry on fire with Ping (their music sharing social network) and Game Center (their game matching service) and now we have real world location with Find my friends.

Find My Friends is “better” for some values of “better” than the other attempts but it still highlights a lack of vision, a lack of “what could this do, where could this go”.

For instance: I’ve added a couple of people on Find My Friends.

Setting Status
Finding friends is one part of the equation but being found is another. Where is the option to set a status update so that people can see this. Even something as simple as “Busy” or “Available” will let people know if they should message you. This is even more important than selecting the “temporary” setting to be found.

Geofencing
Where is the alert that tells me my friends have entered within a mile of my location? Having a travelling GeoFence is an obvious feature for Find My Friends enabled smartphone users. And yes, it could be great for the untrustworthy or unfaithful but giving people an iota of credit, if there’s a ‘situation’ where location becomes an issue, the stupid will get caught.

Finding Friends Again. And again.
I have connections established by Ping and Game Center but Find My Friends wants to rifle through my address book to find people I can connect to? Really? In 2011, this is a solution? Why not give me a list of my Ping and Game Center connections and just ask me if I want to add them to my FMF list?

Time Alerts
Why can’t I set my non-existent status alert by the time of day or by the entries in my calendar? This stuff is all interconnected. Why doesn’t it just work? For that matter, why does my phone still ring when I’m plainly in a meeting! I don’t think Siri will help with that!

Group Messaging
Where’s the option to message all of my friends? Where’s the option to ping them with a “Anyone free for lunch” or to set a status change “Free for lunch”. Where does this actually work for friends? In the video, they say it’s good for when the family (obviously all toting iPhones) are at Disneyworld but seriously do we have to message each one individually?

The daft thing is that group messaging is excellently supported in Messages (via iMessage) but not in Find My Friends. Dumb.

So, in my opinion, Find My Friends, just like Ping and Game Center, is a pretty half-assed solution. Apple can still tie this all together and make it just work and maybe they will – maybe this is all part of the plan. Maybe the NEXT MAJOR RELEASE will tie all of these loose ends together? But I doubt it.

Following a couple of nights of civil unrest, I exercise my white, middle-class, male privilege to think about what’s going wrong in Northern Ireland:

In the aftermath: how disenfranchised and disengaged with the status quo must you be if rioting is more attractive than any other activity?

Steven replied:

@cimota Lower east, seems to still be reeling from loss of shipyard/shorts, real lack of something to aspire to.

My reply:

@playfordrants Yeah, of course I think that building leisure yachts would be a good solution.

Stevens last reply:

@cimota whether its wind turbines or whatever something needs done we have ceased to be a society that actually seems to make anything?

While I may focus on the “digital media” microcosm and it gets a decent amount of attention because it is seen as an easy win for global reach and income generation, it’s sobering to remember that we remain the minority.

We used to have a thriving linen industry. During the 18th Century, a fifth of the worlds linen was shipped from Belfast. We used to make ships and planes. In 1912, Harland and Wolff was the largest shipyard in the world and Shorts was the first aircraft manufacturing company in the world.

Since the 1970s, more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost from Belfast – a situation made worse by the escalation of “The Troubles”.

And no, I wasn’t joking about building leisure yachts. We used to be good at this stuff (East Belfast Sailing Club is still renowned as somewhere to build ferrocement hulls).

So, how would we get back into the swing of things? How do we move upwards in the value chain?

My friend George runs a little manufacturing company in County Down. He’s a craftsman himself:

So far I have resisted the temptation to invest in ‘lean manufacturing’ techniques (which include extensive use of computer controlled machines) and have instead, built a team of real craftsmen who build Lowden guitars by hand using Japanese chisels, planes, knives and spokeshaves. It would have been much more economical to make our guitars with assembly workers and machines, but our choice is to build skills and understanding of wood, and in so doing the guitars feel and sound like individual ‘works of art’”.

So why can’t we do this in other areas? I’m not sure we can create 100,000 new craftsman jobs in the three years that we’d be allotted under an official work programme but we need to have that vision. It’s not about creating low end jobs or even really high value jobs – it’s about the middle ground. How do we raise the level of the lower end jobs – and to my reckoning, it’s about skills.

I had a debate with my co-worker about how to achieve some of this. He says I’m a top down thinker and he’s a bottom up thinker. Whereas I want to start programmes, he reckons I need to raise aspirations and allow them to think for themselves. My response is simple: if it were that easy, it wouldn’t be needed. We need to give people something to aspire to. Spread the story of master craftsmen like George and his team. Bring in existing master craftsmen across multiple industries and engage them in doing stuff. We have all of this empty space in Titanic Quarter and beside it on the old Sirocco works site – just beside where the unrest happened. I do not believe this to be coincidence.

And if it was me, I’d want to be involved in building boats.

Read the full article here at CultOfMac

Letting kids use or own iPads is controversial. Parents, teachers and others aren’t so sure about letting kids get sucked into yet another electronic diversion. Pilot programs at a few schools around the country to experiment with iPad-based learning tools are often met with criticism by parents and teachers alike.
…
The right question is this: Is the iPad a healthy *replacement* for TV? And I believe the answer is a resounding yes.
…
The iPad is scary because it’s new. But most parents have already accepted a gigantic role for something truly in the lives of their children: television. The content kids see on their TV sets is mostly mind-numbing, soul-deadening, formulaic consumerist crap, punctuated by sophisticated ad campaigns designed to transform children into mindless consumers.
…
The bottom line is that TV is a massive, negative, toxic, unhealthy influence in the lives of American children. I think parents already know this.
…
From a parent’s perspective, the iPad is superior to a TV in every significant way.
…
My advice to parents: Unplug that TV and run, don’t walk, to Toys R Us and buy each of your kids an iPad 2 — before TV turns them into “average Americans.”

If you want to read about a real-world implementation of this, check out Fraser Speirs blog. Frasers story has been inspiring though I’m well aware that there would be no progressive programmes like this in Northern Ireland.

We have some cool edu-tech companies here in Northern Ireland. Some of them are focused on the iPod touch and iPad as delivery devices and I think this is a great development for the region – even if the technology is not adopted locally.

These are some of the links which I’ve emailed myself (my version of ReadItLater or Instapaper – though I’m leaning towards the latter). for the most part, they’re too good to miss.