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.