It is an emotional and consumer blow that an exceptionally sensible website with a simple empowering concept is closing down. The "Fix my transport" site www.fixmytransport.com.
It's all because of site hosting and maintaining. The way that shifts as projects diversify and their time commitments shift. The web still has this infuriating flaw, that to be good democratic and user-empowering does not bed a site in to the certainty of lasting.
Using that site helped me in motivating the council to take the supported bus route 63 (Gyle to South Queensferry) away from Horsburgh, whose shoddy standards included simply cancelling buses without rep-placement if they broke down. On an hourly service, and there was a case where they visibly used another bus to deliver staff from their depot to deal with the breakdown but not put the bus actually onto the service for the folks who had been waiting an hour.
When Lothian buses took over, they reinstated the Sunday service that Horsburgh had found unviable and dropped years before - and it seems that just by running it better they have found it viable enough now to increase the evening service, on all 7 days, as well as the day frequency during the week.
It shows the positive public empowerment at stake having a facility like "fix my transport", and now it's going. Credit also Queensferry Community Council, for its local response to the issue, but they did not make it publicly findable knowledge, it was Fix My Transport which served for that. We need to bother to organise a similar sort of consumer info, for spectrum folks, through ANS. An idea that has been raised before and has not yet taken off, as it needs starter contributions, like this 63 bus item could have been one, to get it going.
Maurice Frank
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