A new Slop University research poster audits the timetable panels at 246 suburban bus shelters after a network-wide service change and finds them disagreeing with the buses actually running at rates the transport authority's own currency indicator does not register.
An independent audit of 246 suburban shelters puts panel-to-service agreement at 58 per cent while the currency indicator reports above 99
Somewhere between a timetable changing and a passenger reading it, a sheet of paper has to be swapped. Slop University has now walked 246 suburban bus shelters to see how often it was, and what the record said in the meantime.
Current by Photograph, a research poster released today through the Office of Research Outputs, audited shelters across three depots at 30, 60 and 90 days after a network-wide service change, holding the panel in each frame against the timetable actually in force. Agreement stood at 58.1 per cent at the first sweep and 68.1 per cent at the last. Over the same period the authority’s information-currency indicator, assembled from crews’ date-stamped installation photographs, recorded better than 99 per cent of shelters as current.
Half the depots ran a tightened verification regime, adding a panel-content field alongside the photograph. The study reports no effect it can distinguish from none.
We would like to know what a passenger standing under the shelter would call current, and we do not think anybody has asked them. That is the next thing.
— Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Strategic Drift Survey
The depots gave the team the run of their stops on the understanding that the result would be reported either way. “That is not a small thing to offer a visiting audit team,” said Dr Fenna Okoro, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Horizon Register.
Walking a route twice, once as the record describes it and once as it is, is the habit Slop University would like this poster to stand for.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.yfhy05.