I’ve just been planning a journey for next week, and have been struck by the difficulty of actually planning it online.  Bus companies produce timetables, and they have them online, right?

Well, the ones I was looking at were in my pet hate for this sort of thing: PDF.   Compared to a database based solution like the National Rail Enquiries website it’s unsearchable, unusable and just plain irritating.  Surely the data that was used to create these timetables can be loaded into a database somewhere and used to plan journeys?  You’d think so, wouldn’t you…

Eventually I had to phone up, and they obviously checked a database right then and there and told me the service I needed (which wasn’t in the slightest bit obvious from the website).  So it would seem to me that they have an application that already does that somewhere, don’t they?

So, if someone wants a really nice idea for a business, here you go: an online journey planner using public transport.  One that actually works.  Enter your start location and  end location, and it should look at bus, train and tram timetables to work out exactly what transport you should catch and when.

Of course, nobody is actually going to do this unless it’s government: there’s just not enough money in it.  So, sadly, unless governments across the world get their acts together (very unlikely), you’re never going to see this sort of thing happen, at least not in the near future.

Which is a pity, because if we’re going to do anything about the very scary prospects raised in the recent IPCC report on the subject, we need to be promoting public transport as not only an affordable alternative to using your car (which generally it isn’t, if you do the sums) as well as a cleaner alternative.