Part bus stop beauty competition AND an important snapshot survey of the state of Rural East Lothian Bus Stops.
Why are we doing this?
Poor information about bus services is one of the barriers to people using them more. Your experience of using a bus starts and sometimes stops here.
For existing users it causes more than just frustration, if you miss a scheduled service because no one told you it had changed. We’re not sure what tourists think, but we can guess.
Important information should be at the stop. That’s why we are starting here, to get a better picture of the condition and currency of timetables at rural stops.
How will it work?
Basically, we have some volunteers who will be going around sampling the delights of rural bus services, hopping off, filling in a short questionnaire, taking a few pics, and hopping back on.
Want to volunteer? Contact us
Can we participate?
Sure. Get in touch. Or if your stop is nearby, simply head over there and take notes. When you are done, come back to this site and enter your notes as Comments to the stop in questions.
How do I find a stop?
You can use the tools of this site, a) search by text or b) by map or c) by locality. There is quite a lot of detail associated with a stop but the map, the direction of travel / bearing and the street name and indicator (e.g. opp/at) should help you work out the stop in question. Note that some stops are unmarked, so we don’t expect you to evaluate these, they are on the list for completeness. We also know where most of them are, but if we are missing some drop us a line.
Can I add pictures?
If you have a digital camera, see if you can take some good shots. They should give a good impression of the condition and support your notes. Use a decent camera if you have one, as a blurry impressionistic pic with flash reflection isn’t going to help much. You’ll be limited to 3 uploads, but take a few more as they’ll look worse when you get back to base (well, mine do).
What are you going to do with the information?
We’ll use this, along with information we are gathering to make some recommendations about improving rural bus services, in part through better provision of information and, particularly that available at bus stops.
We’ll use it to encourage East Lothian Council and the operators to collaborate more on providing higher quality and better connecting services.