I don’t use buses very often, however when I do the problem is always the same.
No, I’m not talking about the twats with mobiles blasting out crap drum and bass or the smokers or crap weed. No, the problem that annoys me the most about the buses is timekeeping, or lack of it in Travel West Midlands case.
The 17 route (and I assume others are the same) has a vague time table. Some times are quite clear, peak times are listed as ‘every 2-8 minutes’. As I was foolish enough to attempt to catch a peak time bus (Friday 16:10) I should have expected the lack of bus. 2-8 minutes? Well that seemed to be the frequency of buses passing in the other direction.
Eventually the bus turned up around 30 minutes late, some 22 minutes past the stated time. I have explaination for this, centro/twm may blame traffic. But this happens everytime I catch the 17 service. I knew I should have walked up to the Coventry road as the 58/60/900 service seems to actually run in both directions.
So I missed half hour of the two hours at Jimmy Spices, still got a few courses in. But annoyed at the usual piss poor service. I’d write to complain, but frankly this blog post would have more effect (ie next to none). I got a lift home, a much more sensible idea.
One of the benefits of winning the lottery would be to more away from that bus route. It has to be the worst in Brum, hasn’t it?