Hitting back at BJ's bus whingers

There’s something about travelling that really turns me on. It’s like the rate of change in your life goes on a fast-forward mechanism, accelerating the number of experiences that push through your already-overcrowded brain so that you end up over-dosing on reality.

I’m not just talking about jumping on a plane from one side of the world to another; even going on a subway train or a bus has a certain joy about it.

Ah, buses. Don’t you just love them! Yeah, they may be dirty, overcrowded and smelly, but they are invariably an experience – whether good or bad – that adds to your everyday living-life-to-the-fullest index.

I have to say that here in Beijing I use the buses a lot. And it always annoys me when Western friends of mine whine on about how complicated they are and that they only take the subway or taxis as they wouldn’t be able to cope with the city’s bus system.

What a load of moaning minnies!

Beijing’s bus system is actually quite well thought out, once you get the hang of it. Take the numbering system for instance: Bus routes 1-132 cover the inner city (inside the Third Ring Road that is) with 101-114 using trolleybuses. Lines 200-215 are night buses; 300-499 extend beyond the Third Ring Road to the inner suburbs; 500-799 run through both the urban core and suburbs; while 900-999 go to distant suburbs.

Unlike the subway system that charges ¥2.00 to go anywhere (apart from on the Airport Express), buses start at ¥0.40 for the first 10 km, and then go up by ¥0.40 for each additional 5 km – except for express buses that start at ¥0.80.

There are some 28,000 buses running on 882 bus lines and the easiest way to travel on them (as well as on the subway system) is to purchase a Yikatong - "one card pass" - similar to Hong Kong's Octopus card, Singapore's EZ-Link, or the Oyster Card used by TfL in London - that actually works out a lot cheaper than paying for one-off journeys.

Buses come in all shapes and sizes - double deckers, bendy-buses, trolley buses and ordinary single deckers, but every one seems different in some way.

Some you enter at the front and leave at the rear; some you enter at the middle and leave at the front or rear; some you pay or swipe your Yikatong at the drIver’s end; some you have to reswipe your card when you get off (to avoid being charged the fare for the entire trip). Some have a conductor who can accept cash payments, while others have a cash box placed next to the driver and all have one, two or three Yikatong swipe machines.

If you don’t speak Chinese, then life can be a bit problematic in working out the bus routes. But I have no sympathy for people who use that as an excuse.

Sure, the official bus map is about as much use as a dead herring and I have never, ever, seen anyone use one. (In fact I have never actually seen one for real except when talked about on the internet. Even zooming in to high res versions of it leaves one feeling totally confused.)

But those friendly managers at Beijing Public Transport Holdings Ltd have done their level best to help westerners cope with their transport system. Honest they have! OK, maybe their English language interactive bus map hasn’t actually worked in well over a year to my certain knowledge…

… but that is surely no reason to give up on the system!

So let me give a few helpful hints to show how easy it is to get from A to B...

First things first; there are plenty of places on the web where you can get lists of buses that pass the subway stations. Take Wikipedia for instance…

or travelchina.org, which is idiot-proof in that it also even tells you which exit to take from the station…

So, armed with this knowledge, find your destination on a map of Beijing and find the nearest subway station to it. Once you have this basic information you can check out the routes of each of the buses listed as going to that station by going to a really useful web site called http://www.bjbus.com/home/map_section.php. By doing a comparison of the non-working English language section with the fully working Chinese version, you can work out what each of the buttons means.

Say we have discovered that the 419 bus goes past the nearest station. By entering the bus number into the correct search box we can straight away see if that bus also goes to our destination.

A bit of trial and error is now in order. The 419 doesn’t go? OK try another bus from that same subway station until you find one that does. Now, if you click on the bus stop marked on the map at your destination you get given a whole load of useful information….

Yeah yeah, happy whingers – I know it is in Chinese, but now we turn to that ever-so-useful translation site of Mr Google.

And what do we find? The first line gives the name of the bus stop; the second confirms the bus number; and the third tells you the number of the bus stop on the route that this one is on. So far dead easy? OK. This is where the fun now starts!

If we do a copy and paste job of the bus stop name back into the http://www.bjbus.com/home/map_section.php site, up pops a list on the left of every bus that goes to that bus stop. Wow!

So now you can either paste that bus number into the bus-number-look-up section we went to earlier on, or be even more adventurous and paste in the name of your nearest bus stop and the destination bus stop into yet another look-up function on the site to be told in words of one syllable how to get from A to B.

Could it really be any easier?

Ah, I hear those self same whingers saying: how do we know where we are on the bus route if we have never been there, and no one on board the bus speaks a word of the Queen’s vernacular?

Again, not a problem as long as you are not blind. Firstly, every bus has a list of the bus stops displayed in both Chinese and Pinyin.

And every bus stop has its name in Chinese and Pinyin printed at the top (albeit that some are more difficult to read than others).

So what could be easier than finding out where you got on and counting the number of bus stops to where you want to get off. (All buses stop at all the stops. They don’t have an on-request stopping system as used in Europe.)

In addition, many buses even display the next stop in both Chinese and Pinyin on a rolling display together with a recorded announcement…

So, happy whingers – stop complaining and get on board one of BJ’s 28,000+ buses. And who knows, you might one day love them so much that you will want to download one of the many paper cut out models from the web!

Dubai’s RTA site needs a good kick up the *%^$#@*!, if you ask me

Regular readers of my blog will know that though I think that Dubai has made tremendous advances in its overall passenger transport system in the past couple of years, I am no fan of the Road Transport Authority which runs the service.

I am trying to put myself in the place of the hapless tourists who gullibly swallow the marketing hype of the publicity spinners and book their vacations in this city. How do they cope with getting around – apart from taking taxis to and from every possible location?

This line of thought is especially poignant for me now that I have had to sell my beloved car and travel with the masses using the aforementioned public transport. I decide to do some research to see just how easy it is to get from A to B – bearing in mind the RTA’s slogan of “Moving People” (gad – did someone get paid for thinking up that one; not to mention a subsequent stunner of a one-liner: “Get Around the City at your Convenience”?)

As I have a temporary base in a compound to the south of Ibn Battuta Mall (called Muntaza Compound) I think to myself it could be useful to know how often the local feeder bus route operates so that if I needed to get, say, to the airport, I could let the RTA move me! Ibn Battuta Mall metro station is a mere 18 minute walk away, but in the heat and humidity of Dubai, that is not something to be entertained lightly.

So I log onto the pride of the RTA site – a subsite called Wojhati, or Journey Planner. I tell it that I want to go from Muntaza to the airport. And in no time at all it tells me that I should take a number 99 bus going towards Jebel Ali to reach Ibn Battuta.

Oh dear; we have a problem already. The bus to Jebel Ali has come from Ibn Battuta already. What we actually need is a 99 going towards The Gardens, not Jebel Ali. Zero out of 10 so far! The site also helpfully mentions that the fare to the airport will be AED 4.10 (ie two tier zones). It isn’t. Due to the fact that the bus’s ‘Nol’ electronic fare system is fed by an inaccurately set up GPS system, the overall fare comes in at AED 5.80 – ie three tier zones, where it should only be two.

OK, so I am hardly going to complain at paying 5.80 instead of something approaching 100 in a taxi, but that RTA site still scores a hefty zero in my book. At least it gets the number of the bus right, even if it is going in the opposite direction!

I log on to Dubai Airport’s site – dubaiairportguide.com – and read with interest about the night buses serving the city at half hourly intervals throughout the night. Unfortunately there are no longer any night buses in Dubai – they were discontinued eons ago by the thoughtless bureaucrats who never, it would appear, use public transport themselves.

Those hapless travellers will also need to know that they have to buy “Nol” cards before using any public transport in the emirate. Where to get them though? That is the question faced daily by frustrated visitors. I look up the Dubai Airport site again. Ticket offices are located in the 10 open metro stations, it tells us.

Errrr…. Just a minute. A number of months have now passed since almost all the stations on the red line were (finally) opened – including Airport Terminals 1 and 3. So another zero out of 10 for useful information.

In frustration I eMail the web master of the site – which in fairness has asked for comments from its readers.  Within 16 hours I am sent a reply… “Thank you for contacting Dubai Airport Guide. We aim to reply to all questions or queries as soon as possible and usually within 24 hours. Kind Regards Dubai Airport Guide”

That was three weeks ago. I have stopped holding my breath!

Back to the RTA’s web site for more erudition… But their Dubai bus map is not only of such low resolution that it is almost impossible to read any of the bus routes, but worse, it is of July 2010 vintage – well before the majority of Dubai’s present bus routes were either introduced or changed. Once again zero out of ten.

The metro map is not much better. It may well list the stations on the red line, but calmly tells us that most of these have not yet been opened. Again zero out of ten.

So I turn to the RTA’s very own blog site. “Thank you for your interest in our website,” it purrs. “This page is dedicated to share our experiences related to Dubai bus [no mention of the metro I notice] where we can all share our experiences. Your comments will contribute to this blog’s success.”

I make my contribution, suggesting they update their site. But it turns out the so-called blog is moderated, and again, three weeks later there are no signs of my comments.

I turn to their picture sharing section where I am thrilled to see three pictures of Dubai buses.

 I turn to their video sharing section but as of now no one has thought to share their videos of Dubai’s buses. Shame!

Devastated not to be able to enjoy a video of a Dubai bus, I turn to the rules and regulations section and discover that under the rules of the Metro, one is not allowed to distract the driver while the train is in motion. An interesting thought indeed, given that Dubai is so proud of its driverless trains!

But friendly to the last, the site tells us that the following fines have been put in place to ensure you have a great experience on the metro. Try telling that to the very many tourists who are regularly hauled off the trains for such heinous crimes as drinking water from a bottle, or just chewing gum. I’m not sure they would really describe their experience as a great one.

But looking on the bright side, it also tells us that we must not throw any litter or spit through windows. So that comes as a great relief for all of us.
So, dear tourists – don’t say you have not been warned. Oh, and by the way, you will also most likely have read on numerous web sites that the UAE is famed for its Arab hospitality. But hey – who believes what one reads on the web anyway?

Sorry RTA – you still score zero in my book for your abysmal web and your even more abysmal ‘blog’. But think positive – at least we can all be assured that it can only get better from here on in!

Addendum

It appears that it is not only the RTA's web site that is in urgent need of attention, if the signs at Ibn Battuta Metro station are anything to go by. Want to buy a ticket during the rush hour? Too bad if you want to use the automatic machine...

It is "temporarily out of order". But never mind, we can always go to the ticket office...

Oh shucks... it is closed. But no matter - there are two ticket office booths:

Whoops. There is no one manning the ticket office during the rush hour. But hey, we can always queue up for 15 minutes to buy our tickets at the Information booth opposite.
Want to let your nearest and dearest know you are gonna be a little late due to lack of facilities at the station? Too bad if you haven't got a mobile phone...

But first you have to find any other booths with a working phone (sounds a bit like London's phone boxes doesn't it!). In Ibn Battuta, there are 11 phone stations with no installed phones!
Frustrated with the station facilities and just want to get out - perhaps across the road using the footbridge? Huh! Think again! The station has only been open for some eight months - hardly enough time for the powers that be to get their escalators working, surely?

So admit it! Now you are thoroughly pee'd off? Sorry again. The loo is closed for maintenance...

Else just in case you didn't get the message, your convenience is out of service. Sorry for the inconvenience! :))

Of course this is always assuming you can get INTO Ibn Battuta station in the first place!

Oh, and BTW - is there anyone out there who can explain to me why it costs 1.80 dirhams to go from Ibn Battuta to Muntaza, but 4.10 to go from Muntaza to Ibn Battuta?

Addendum 2

OK, so maybe the powers that be read this blog? Two days after it is posted, I go along to the bus stop at Muntaza and wait for the 99.... and wait.... and wait.... and let me tell you that waiting in 45 degrees for a bus that never comes is not the nicest experience.

Eventually I hail a passing taxi and take it to Ibn Battuta (10Dhs rather than the 4.10 I was complaining about).

I then ring up the RTA's "Help Line" to enquire what has happened to today's 99. Oh hello, Mr Brian, a girl called Sarah answers. Thinks: how does she know who I am? It must have been from when I last rang up the RTA some two years ago. Obviously at least one of their computers works in this place!

I am informed that the 99 bus has been withdrawn from circulation. No announcements on the bus; no notices on the bus stops; just withdrawn. One day it is there. The next day it is not.

I ask why no one in the RTA thinks it is important to let the passengers standing sweltering in the sun know that the bus they are waiting for no longer exists. Not surprisingly Sarah has no answer.

But actually the answer is perfectly clear. It is yet another example of RTA's philosophy of Fuck the Customer - We have a monopoly so see if we care!

Customer service? Oh please - don't make me weep!