There does seem to a view in some quarters that rather giving the public information that it may not understand, it is better to wrap it up in bland generalisations or not publish it at all.

Not only is this rather patronising; it diminishes trust between the public and the industry. It is generally the case that the more open a society or organisation is, the more successful it is.

I did add discuss onto my first post ... happy to go wider.


There is, I'm afraid, a natural fear and worry about providing too much information to people as it will lead to more questions, including questioning of what and how a job is done.   And that's going to be particularly the case with railway issues, where there are a lot of people enthusiastically interested.  So it's a needs brave, confident, assured people to break the mould and provide more information.   


Agreed.

Provided that "casual traveller" easy data is available at first access, the default should be thorough data availability.   But that's an important proviso.

I have stood at Swindon station and instructed a couple of young people who were clearly new to our services as to how to get on the train ("you need to open the door with the handle") and such front line stuff is and will remain vital - indeed with an improved TransWilts service we would have a preponderance of new travellers, and we should have EASY USE data available - such as http://atrebatia.info/using.html - for the things that we on the forum know about, but others may not.

This "easy use" is something of an issue when it comes to putting timetable sheets that everyone can understand together, as well as providing full connectional and fare information.

I was recently sent (forced) to go to some atoc meeting about PIDD^▸ (Passenger Information During Disruption). (Pax info during disruption). Needless to say it was a typical case of what we (atoc) says is gospel and sod anyone else!!

Things that came up were actually quite good from a railway industry point of view. Colour coding disruption Green | Yellow (delays up to 59mins) | Red (severe delays likely to last over 1 hour) | Black (Don't even think about travelling). Different TOCs^▸ (Train Operating Company) will have different thresholds.

Another thing was that passengers should be told more basic information about incidents according to a set down list of reasons.

the "internal information" should not be given to pax. Mainly because this is where operational stuff is disused. E.g. Driver hit pax and xyz is being cleaned up. Or wrong side failures.

Well there's absolutely no chance of that....its called Privatisation

There is now a lot more information out there (e.g. Real Train Times) I use that all the time to check disruption and late running of the services I use/am going to use.