Yesterday’s post about the Purple Bus Blog reminded me that perhaps I should remove the Blogroll link to the Southern Vectis Bus company blog which rarely had anything added to it. I clicked on the link one final time just to confirm that it was still moribund and discovered that it’s sprung into life again!
I found a charming post from 26 October which included, amongst other things, the revised Route 8 timetable being dedicated to Mrs Mary Ward of Bembridge ‘for continually nagging’ about its timing problems!
The most recent posting is about their new ERG TP5000 (I think I’ve mentioned those before !) ticket machines which are being introduced in 2 weeks time. Tellingly they wrote ‘The first phase has been a ‘re-zoning’ of our current bus stops which took place last week to create a manageable number of point to point (or rather zone to zone) fares for the new system.’ In order to reduce the number of key presses required to issue a ticket?
Quick, there’s a new post on the SV blog. Read it before it disappears again!
I’ve just looked at the SV blog, and the 26th October post is there, but not a recent one on ERG machines!
I’d read the October post before, and had assumed that it had been removed on purpose because it had offended someone (like the Council).
Looks like Bob is correct about vanishing posts.
The SV blog has a habit of the posts just completely disappearing for a while, and sometimes coming back, which makes it look like it hadn’t been updated for a while when often it has.
Southern Vectis offer through tickets from any two points, no matter how many changes of bus it takes. Therefore, I would guess that the ticket machines are currently programmed to have every fare stage on the whole island for each route – so yes, “zones” probably do help with the number of key presses!