Improving Things Worse

I'm not giving my usual run down on last weeks service registrations as I am working my way through the hundreds of timetables that I know about that have yet to hit my usual download. A big part of this process involves download the timetables from Traveline, which up until recently has been very reliable.

There is a phrase I have been hearing a lot recently in IT – “Improving things worse” Generally the art of announcing “improvements” to web services which end up taking things away that previously worked. More often than not these days its around giving us AI tools that you have not asked for and then increasing the cost to pay for these AI tools you wont use.

Traveline has “improved” its service, although thankfully AI is not involved so far at least.

It looks very different when you access the site:

From here you can plan your trip by entering start and end points which does work fairly well, but all I want is the full timetable for a service that I know is due to change in August. Its not immediately obvious from this page but as a regular user of these sites I know to use the ‘hamburger’ icon top left for more options

This then does give me more options including route timetable.

It is quick but straight away you see the main problem. This gives you all the services with this number. Previously you could restrict it to operators, or even just the individual counties across the south west. Dont try looking for service 1 as there are loads! you could try adding “stagecoach” but that didnt work. or even “13 stagecoach south west” that didnt work. So for now all you can do is scroll through the large list and then select the route option you need.

From there you can select the pdf button and get the old timetable pdf that you could before. OK so far its slightly less convenient but it does give me the timetable.

In the old days you could also see the service map, either as a download ‘diagram’ map which isnt the best, or display the map on the page. You can see the map to the right taking up half the screen. Ideal…

It even appears that you can select the options top right, sadly they do nothing!

I am hoping this is a work in progress as why have half the screen showing a map that at the moment doesn't add anything.

I still find Traveline really useful, and many operators just point you to the site as they cant be bothered to do their own timetables. I am hoping some of the old functionality will come back, like restricting searches to operator/ county etc which worked so well before. The route map actually displayed on the map page would also be great.