The Scoop

TfL's April Fool joke on night bus users - switch off 'next bus' displays

Darryl Chamberlain | Monday 2 April, 2012 08:30

You can’t have failed to have seen the ads around London for TfL’s new service which allows you to get next bus times from your phone or desktop. Boris Johnson is certainly hoping they’ll help his re-election campaign.

If you’re a night bus user, you may well be a big fan of the system, which comes into its own when services are less frequent yet still prone to delays. Except in the early hours of Sunday morning, when TfL decided to take the whole system down…

Even the Countdown display boards at bus stops were showing nothing between midnight and 6am. If you’d had a late Saturday night out, tough.

With TfL rightly spending great sums of our money on campaigns persuading people not to get in dodgy geezers’ pretend minicabs, why on earth did it take down what’s a vital system in helping people decide what’s the safest way home?

It’s the latest in a series of Sunday shutdowns for the new service – picking the day when buses are less frequent and so next-bus information becomes more useful.

It might be better – and save a few stonking overtime payments – if TfL picks a Wednesday afternoon for its next spot of maintenance, when at least we’d be fairly sure the next bus is only a few minutes away, rather than the small hours of a Sunday when passengers aren’t sure if their bus will come at all.

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