RTPI system sometimes fabricates information about bus movements
9 January 2023

I have written before about phantom and stealth buses where the real time passenger information system either fails to show that a service has been cancelled, or it loses track of a late running bus.

Today, I encountered a new situation as follows. I was planning to catch the 10.40 a.m. no. 27 from Grampound to Truro. The RTPI display board at the bus stop was showing no live information, merely a message “Refer to timetables”. (I think that the Council RTPI system across the network was probably offline as, later in the day, I saw that the park and ride terminus at Tregurra had no information on its display about bus times.)

At the bus stop, I looked up my First Bus app and it showed the bus apparently approaching the stop on time with countdown times showing on the app. It even showed the number of empty seats on the bus and it had the label “Live” implying that it really was live information. However, at 10.41 a.m. just after the bus was due, it had not arrived and was no longer showing on the app. I then looked up the bustimes.org tracking web page and found that there was no sign of the bus approaching from St Austell. At 10.45 a.m., I assumed that the bus was not going to arrive and returned home (just a short distance away on Fore Street). At 10.50 a.m., I saw out of my front window what appeared to be the 27 sailing past my front door towards Truro. I jumped in my car and drove to Tresillian, getting ahead of the bus that went through Probus, waited there, and, sure enough, the wayward bus went past about 10 minutes late. It was still not showing on the bus tracking web page.

At 11.50 a.m. in Truro bus station, the same vehicle arrived on its return journey. Whilst in the bus station, maintenance personnel from First appeared with a ticket machine and replaced what was obviously a malfunctioning machine on the bus. This was clearly the reason why the bus had not been appearing on the bus tracking web page. I caught this bus back to Grampound and found that the bus with its new ticket machine was now being picked up by the tracking web page.

I fully accept that machines can malfunction from time to time and credit to First that they identified the problem with the machine and replaced it. However, what seems ridiculous is that the First Bus app had been showing what purported to be “live” real time information when it clearly wasn’t. Instead of just showing a timetable time for the bus at Grampound, or showing a message such as “no real time information available”, it just made up information about where the bus was and how many seats were free. This sort of behaviour calls into question the overall reliability of what should be real time information. Every time this sort of thing happens, it diminishes passengers’ confidence in buses and discourages them from using them.