While public transport authority Centro have said there are over 600 bus stops in Birmingham with Real Time Information (RTI) screens, information is not available on how many of them are functioning.
To find out more about the state of maintenance of these screens, recently Brum Transport tried out #phantombuses – a crowd sourced experiment at gathering real time data on bus stops in the city.
We liveblogged our observations from these four different locations in the city:
These included:
- Arrival times announced on the RTI screens
@daveharte @pupulchatterjee …every few minutes. it showed the next 45 coming in 5min for a while then the whole list changed.
— Neil (@nebolland) July 25, 2013
- Mysterious disappearances of the bus numbers from the screens
#phantombuses 66a double no-show at 0851 & 0852 – disappeared off app @brumtransport
— Paul Bradshaw (@paulbradshaw) July 25, 2013
#phantombuses @brumtransport number 1 priory road. From next bus 11 mins to due in 1 minute pic.twitter.com/OySGtoo8kR
— Simon Paul Felton (@Feltip1982) July 25, 2013
- Time when buses actually turned up at the stops
@Kagey_infohub from Priory Queensway: Lots of #phantombuses 74 turning up, a lot more than on timetable
— brumtransport (@brumtransport) July 25, 2013
- Faulty RTI screens at bus stops:
Lois Stanley from Broadstreet: difficult to monitor #phantombuses as RTI screens that work other days are not working today
— brumtransport (@brumtransport) July 25, 2013
While some of these bus stops had the RTI screens, other bus users relied on the Network West Midlands phone app, some others had only the paper timetable at the bus stops to refer to.
The data on the number of bus stops was revealed through a freedom of information (FOI) request filed earlier by Brum Transport.
(The FOI figures here referring to ‘Birmingham’ include the city centre and the wider Birmingham area.)
