Sue Nicholas wrote:Buses that don’t break down Bob
Sue, you will always have buses which break down, just as you have cars or trains which break down.
We should also have the ability to disseminate information about any hold-ups/cancellations/replacement services almost instantaneously to the customers so they can work around them with minimum inconvenience.
I remember when trying to teach Yr9 at a local Secondary School (NOT the Grammar) about the 24 hour timetable I took in a load of the small railway timetables you can pick up at the station. At the end of the lesson the idea of finding out which trains they would have to catch to get to an interview at Canterbury for 09.00 departing from Deal remained, and still I suspect remains, as impossible to do as Higher Calculus.
Not to worry. When exasperated I asked them how, since they can't read a timetable, they would get to an interview in Canterbury they told me they would just take their car so that's all right then.
SmartPhones are now fairly ubiquitous and the Apps easily navigable.
As Arthur C Clarke famously said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" and we are getting pretty damned close.