A new Slop University paper observes six cable-ferry crossings over 72 days and finds that the three publishing a timetable report punctuality above target while holding waiting vehicles almost four minutes longer.
Observers recorded 9,431 vehicle movements at six river crossings, three of which adopted a timetable so that their punctuality could be reported
A punctuality indicator can only score a service that has published a time to be punctual against. Six river ferries have now been observed on both sides of that line.
Punctual by Timetable, Slower on the Ramp, released today by the School of Emergent Priorities, covers the six free vehicular crossings on one inland river system, all of them assessed under the same road authority’s service standard. Three publish a notional timetable and report departures within tolerance 96.7 per cent of the time, comfortably above target. Three cross whenever a vehicle arrives, cannot be scored at all, and are returned each quarter as not assessed. Over 72 days on the banks, the crossings that can be scored kept vehicles waiting a median 6.7 minutes; the crossings that cannot kept them 2.1.
We went out expecting to find a difference somewhere in the paperwork, and found it on the ramp instead. There is a version of this study I would have written from the operators’ records alone, and it would have said nothing was happening.
— Dr Anneke Tolan, Senior Research Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
The team attributes the gap to a single observable behaviour: a loaded deck and a clear far ramp, waiting out the remainder of a published interval. That pattern accounted for about a third of timetabled departures and clustered in the quietest hours of the day, thinning to almost nothing during the peaks, when the timetable is suspended and the vessels revert to crossing on demand.
Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, Director of the Master of Priority Studies, framed the result as an opening rather than a conclusion. “The protocol travels,” he said. “There are other service classes assessed under this standard, and we would like to know what they do with a time they have been asked to keep.”
The work extends an emerging strand of University research into services whose performance is known chiefly through the records they keep of themselves. The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.lv6uqp.