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Travel Update

Well the last week has been quite strange. Weather wise people are saying they don’t remember anything like it. It was enough to keep me off work for two days while the university was shut. Transport has been difficult in the Manchester area and for me it’s highlighted a few things.
So Manchester’s quite a big place, if you look at the number of local papers alone, lots of people are here and lots travel using the various methods of public transport. What surprised me was the lack of integration with technology. I won’t go into the intricacies of the city’s integrated transport woes, suffice to say that it was all run by one authority and then it got privatised and is a bit of a mess. Now i’m not a regular user of the system, it has always worked fine for me but I think we as a city look at London’s amazingly oiled machine TfL and wonder why we can’t have that as well?

Here was my specific gripe this past snowed out week:
Why should we have to resort to using something line the Manchester Evening News’ crowdsourced traffic news (which it has to be said, has been amazing – incredibly useful)?
Why don’t the transport operators update quicker? We want whatever information you can get your hands on as fast as possible. It’s no good for the commuter waiting out a remote bus stop in sub zero temperatures if they have to wait for 30 minutes on your website to hear that their service has been suspended.
Yes I understand there are many services but you shouldn’t be running more than you can handle, the detail about the why’s can come later.

A case in point has been the Metrolink. I like many people have about a 20 minute walk to a stop, now if the service is suspended like in the past week it can be over an hour before it is resumed. I would quite like to know what is going on before I leave the house.

I think they’ve got better at it since people have complained about them on the MEN’s Travel news. But even so, many of the official sources such as Manchester Airport on there are employing twitter feeds and proper information pages, so why can’t the Metrolink do the same?

So with their now more regularly updated status page I’m doing some screen scraping and having a twitter client periodically update during rush hours to inform people when Metrolink have updated their page. Not that they’d provide something like a useful RSS feed themselves.

It’s likely to be highly unreliable and nowhere near as good as GMPTE could build themselves in a few minutes if they bothered. But it’s better than nothing I think.

Manchester Metrolink on Twitter

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