Month: September 2012

Update to X8 campaign

The campaign to save the X8 service via Edenfield to Manchester seems to be gathering momentum. We now have over 120 signatures on the online petition. If you still haven’t “signed”, you can complete the petition below.

Last week I took a picture of fellow passengers as we waited to board the X8 at the Rostron’s Arms stop in Edenfield.

The picture and an accompanying story was published in the Rossendale Free Press.

Possible alternative to X8
A fellow passenger, Jenni Scott, suggested that perhaps Transdev could run the X44 service through Edenfield again if it terminated in Shudehill rather than Chorlton Street. If this were the case, the time lost travelling through Edenfield could be made up by avoiding congested Prestwich and Broughton as it travelled into Manchester.

X8 faster than current X43 service
This seemed like a sensible idea to me so I looked at the X8 and X43 timetables for rush-hour. After looking at the timetables for the current X43 and X8 services, I realised that the X8 takes an average of 45 minutes to get from Rawtenstall to Shudehill and the X43 takes 57 minutes to do a similar distance from Rawtenstall to Albert Square. This shows that the via Edenfield-Cheetham Hill route could potentially be faster than the conventional route via the Edenfield by-pass and Prestwich.

Email sent to Transdev
I sent an email to Russell Revill, the managing Director of Transdev plc and suggested that a regular X44 service on the new route could prove very popular for commuters, offering a faster journey time to Manchester and a terminus in the Northern Quarter of Manchester. I suggested that a service departing at regular, perhaps hourly, intervals would encourage greater passenger numbers and potentially offer Transdev two profitable routes into Manchester.

Mr Revill agreed to take this suggestion to his board meeting on Friday and let us know the outcome of this discussion. Whilst this isn’t (yet) great news, hopefully it shows that Transdev is prepared to listen. I for one would be delighted if this resulted in a better service for Edenfield and surrounding areas.

 [emailpetition id=”1″]

[signaturelist id=”1″]

 

Bristol Pound – a great concept but a flawed web launch

I was drawn to the Bristol Pound project by a tweet that I spotted at lunchtime today.

The concept is simple:

  • Launch a local currency to help support the local economy in Bristol.
  • Encourage people to support local businesses.
  • Boost local spending power and lock money into the Bristol economy.

This all sounds great, but I just went to their website at  https://bristolpound.org  and the page took more than 3 minutes to download. Now I’m not blessed with the world’s fastest Internet connection in the office, but that’s a lot longer than most people are prepared to wait.

I was reminded of a couple of StrangeLoop infographics:

The first one describes web user’s boredom thresholds and shows that people abandon slow sites quickly, many never return and even worse, they tell their friends about their bad experience. This can be very damaging for a brand that puts so much effort into their day 1 launch.

User boredom thresholds - infographic

The second infographic documents the increasing size of pages over time. I know that we all use high speed internet connections nowadays, but if a lot of people start to hit your site, you’re going to run out of bandwidth to serve the requests pretty quickly.

I think that the Bristol Pound website is suffering from “page bloat” and here’s why…

Using a Firefox browser with an empty cache and Firebug, I connected to http://bristolpound.org and saw that it took almost 3 minutes for the page to download completely. The page looks great and is graphically rich, but it doesn’t perform well for those first-time visitors hitting the site today.

The image below which is taken from the HAR (HTTP archive) file that I created shows a single image taking 2.33 (139 seconds) minutes to download. The large/slow image is called FINAL_Launch_POSTER_copy.jpg , and it is advertising tonight’s launch party for the Bristol Pound.

The main problem with this image is that somebody has uploaded the full size image to the website and rescaled it using HTML. The original image size is 3,508 x 4,966 pixels which is huge, but it is displayed at only 338 x 495 pixels. Serving a scaled-down image could save 1.8MB of bandwidth for each page request (a 99% size reduction). This would reduce the download time for this component from about 139 seconds to less than 2 seconds. This alone would significantly improve user’s first impressions of the site.

This screenshot shows the “offending image” highlighted in red.

There are other improvements that could be made, but to improve performance for now, I’d simply resize the image in an image editor (MSPAINT would do) and then keep my fingers crossed…..

Save Edenfield to Manchester buses

Once again, Transdev are proposing to cancel a much needed bus service through Edenfield. This time last year, users of the X44 bus service launched an online and written petition to save the commuter services into Manchester.

X8 busThe petition was successful and after a short interruption to service, Transdev announced that they would be providing a new service, the X8 from Burnley to Manchester.

Unfortunately it now seems that the X8 isn’t paying its way and Transdev are looking to cancel the service from 27th October. Despite the fact that the X8 offers a much faster service to Manchester than the X43 from Rawtenstall it seems to be underused.

[Image credit: “DSCN3567” by Clive A Brown on Flickr]

In my opinion, the failure of the X8 service is likely to be down to the fact that this service hasn’t been promoted or marketed other than via passenger word of mouth. Use of this service does seem to be growing and last week there were 22 passengers on the 0730 service to Manchester. On days that I don’t take the bus to Manchester, I have overtaken the X43 and seen fewer than half a dozen passengers on the lower deck.

Transdev often send their X43 buses through Edenfield when the A56 bypass is busy; in view of the fact that using the route through Edenfield would use less diesel, only take a few minutes longer than the bypass route and may generate some additional revenue it seems nonsensical that they are proposing to withdraw these services completely.

The signatories below would urge Transdev to maintain some form of commuter service for people living between Rawtenstall, Edenfield and Shuttleworth, and at the very least engage in some form of dialogue with their customers before making these decisions.

[emailpetition id=”1″]

[signaturelist id=”1″]