York bus service reliability stats published

The York Council has made a small step forward in publishing monthly reliability stats for local bus services.

In the past the authority had been heavily criticised for publishing only the minimum statistics required by central government. This was a “snap shot of services taken in November

Monthly  stats are now available on the iTravel website. Their availability has not been widely publicised.

The stats reveal that reliability has generally been good but that it suffered a setback in the Autumn.

We hope that the next step will be for route by route stats to be published.

The Council says that “the published measure is calculated using timings from every bus service in the York area for which real-time information is available. This currently comprises all local bus services operated by Arriva, EYMS, First and Transdev (excluding CitySightseeing).

The measure provides a picture of overall punctuality across all routes in York over the last 12 months”.

he reported punctuality figure for each month consists of the percentage of measure periods during that month where punctuality is:

  • Good – average schedule deviation less than 4 minutes.
  • Outstanding – average schedule deviation less than 2 minutes.

Bus services in York have generally been improving during the last couple of years. Customer satisfaction surveys, carried out by Councillors in the Westfield Ward earlier in 201,7 found that bus services were the highest rated public service in most neighbourhoods.

That is a major change round  compared to the results of similar surveys conducted 15 years ago.

Freedom of Information shock on York buses

Apparently the York Council has not asked bus companies to reveal service reliability stats.

bus-stop1

Despite claims to the contrary, a Freedom of Information request has revealed that the York Council has not apparently asked local bus operators to publish service reliability statistics.

The claims were made by politicians in 2012 as they tried to justify only publishing an annual reliability figure (which later turned out to be a one day sample).

The annual figure published on the DpT web site suggests that 1 in 5 buses in York are more than 5 minutes late.

In 2013, the Council claimed that a data sharing agreement (which has now been published) prevented them from revealing figures which would tell passengers what reliability levels were being achieved.

Rail users have had access to such information for over a decade.

More recently the Council has admitted that it does get these figures on a regular basis but aggregation would have to be done “manually” and to do so would be prohibitively expensive.

The Council claims that its data is supplied through a system supplied by Vix Acis.

This company publicly claims that their Horizon web based system does provide “management with the ability to mine historical data for service improvement and reporting against key performance indicators”.

So the suspicion remains that, for some reason, both the bus companies and the Council are desperate to hide just how reliable bus services in the City actually are.

Our view is that (at least) each month the number of buses running on time (within 5 minutes of the published timetable) on each route should be published on the web.