Illogical

It may have been out four months already, but I picked up the July 2010 East Riding Public Transport Guide earlier in the week. Well done to East Riding of Yorkshire Council for publishing one timetable booklet for the whole county, but the biggest thing that struck me is how illogical it is.

The weirdest thing is how certain services are listed separately from other services they are meant to be co-ordinated with. Take for example the 60/60A/61/62/64 corridor between Hull, Setting Dyke and Cottingham. The idea is that they provide a 12 minute frequency Mon-Sat daytime between Hull and Priory Road. Yet the East Riding publication lists the 60/60A, 61/62 and 64 in separate timetables. And that isn't just madness for the main daytime service - it means the 2 return Sunday morning 61 journeys are separate from the Sunday 64 journeys. Not user friendly at all. Sometimes composite timetables can be confusing for complex corridors with multiple variations so the East Riding format may well be useful for residents of Cottingham Parkway, but for most users the format used in the East Riding guide is just confusing.

And the above corridor isn't the only example of this either.

Some other oddities include the 180/182 being included twice - once with some 61, 143 and 523 journeys serving Walkington and again later on their own (a similar thing happens with services 173-5) while the Humber Flyer timetable only covers te Hull-Humberside Airport section, not even mentioning the service continues to Cleethorpes.

Maybe the East Riding need to take a look at Derbyshire for how to do clear, user friendly bus timetables, since the East Riding effort is sadly rather poor.