Sunday, January 16, 2005

The British Government has just unleashed its new Transport Direct website onto the net after four years of development. The idea is a bit like route finding services offered by Multimap, RAC etc but with one vital difference: public transport. Tell the site where you are and where you want to get and it'll tell you how to get from A to B using buses, trains, coaches and walking. Well that's the idea. The only trouble is that Transport Direct doesn't seem to know how to get from A to B directly at all.

I gave it a go and asked it how to get from my house (in Leicester) to my parents' home in the Sussex countryside; a journey of 160 miles by road. As a student I made this journey several times a year using public transport so thought I had a pretty good idea of how to do it quickly. It appears I was wrong. If I was going to do this i'd get a bus into town, walk to Leicester Station, get a high-speed train to London, get the tube to Waterloo, get a fast train to Tunbridge Wells station and then get a bus to the village my parents live in (or get a taxi - it's only 10 miles away). The total journey time is roughly four hours, less if you use a cab at the other end.

According to Transport Direct i've been totally misguided all these years. The journey should actually take over eight hours and involve nine different public transport services and several bits of walking. It doesn't even cope with getting to Leicester's station easily. Every 15 minutes a bus passes the end of my road on its way to the City Centre, from where it is a five minute walk to the station.

Not so in the world of Transport Direct: it suggests I use three different buses and a train to get there. At one point of its suggested journey (after the second bus trip) I am within four minutes walk of the station yet it insists I take a bus out of the city centre to a nearby town only to wait half an hour and get a local train service back to Leicester station.

Something tells me Transport Direct needs "A little work".

Posted by Antz at 9:54 AM | Permalink | | |

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