Thread by @AJ99500818

Interesting from a whole day of logging all the @GoWhippet X3 buses. As before the coloured bars are different drivers, the red are times when the location data is unchanged. White gaps are when no location data is uploaded.
@borofergie @CBGbusUsers @busopendata @CambsPboroCA

Any white gap of more than 5 minutes results in @CambsCC's VixConnect giving up on predictions and switching to scheduled bus times.

Looking at the data there appear to be some common gaps. To check this I've turned all the graphics gray and superimposed them.

Now this is interesting. The buses are individually somewhat unreliable at uploading data, each bus seems to have different reliability. As seen above each bus has gaps but these 5 common gaps are interesting...

These 5 gaps show the updates are failing for ALL buses at the same time. This probably suggests either the DfT server is down or some other common part of the bus technology is not working.

Any ideas what's failing?

So there are two layers of problem at work. Unreliability from the bus location uploads (white gaps on each individual bus graphic) and the occasional systemic failures which stops ALL location uploads.

All of these issues combine and lead to inaccurate, and sometimes simply wrong, information displayed to passengers on the bus stop signs, MyBusTrip and myTrip apps.

I'm only looking at X3 data as these are the buses that cause me to have to drive into Cambridge. All data from DfT open source datasets.

I wonder how other bus companies compare?