Category: General

X8 cancellation – further update

In my last update, I mentioned that I had written to Transdev urging them to reconsider the withdrawal of the Manchester commuter service for those people living between Rawtenstall and the Red Hall Hotel North of Bury. I felt that the recommendation that I had made would have given them the opportunity to develop a profitable service alongside the existing X43 service which bypasses our communities.

Unfortunately Transdev will not compromise and have written to me to insist that the service is not financially viable. They recommend catching a bus to Bury and then using the tram to get to Manchester.

I remain convinced that a well-advertised service from Rawtenstall (or even Burnley) traveling via Edenfield and then continuing along the current X8 route would be faster than the X43 and consequently would be popular.

I have sent copies of these two routes together with the notes that I have made showing that the X8 route is faster than the X44 to Rossendale Transport. Although we are unlikely to have a continuous service from when Transdev abandon the route, I remain hopeful that Rossendale Transport will look at this route favourably.

X8 route – Approx 45 minutes (Rawtenstall to Manchester) – http://goo.gl/maps/xZlOU
X43 route – Approx 55 minutes (Rawtenstall to Manchester) – http://goo.gl/maps/o23ta

Thank you to the 144 signatories to the petition. I’ll keep you informed by email and this blog when and if I hear more news or information from Rossendale Transport.

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″]

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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…..