New maps and bus tickets
Hot on the heels of ZoomIn: Google Maps (but not Google Earth) finally has Australian road data!
But alas, their search doesn’t work yet, and the data’s about five years old. Oh well.
In another mildly exciting development, Transperth have effectively announced that the SmartRider trial is officially over and they are now moving to Full Implementation ™ … at a staggered rate.
They have sent out SmartRiders to everyone who had a Seniors Card (my dad got his two days ago) and told them to start using it immediately. They’ve also stopped giving fare reimbursements to us guinea-pig types, and declared in an e-mail that “the level of system reliability continues to improve” and “we are most confident that the rollout will continue with full implementation to all users by the end of this year”.
I’m not sure they can claim that everything works just right — I still occasionally get told “Invalid, Wait for Stop” — but then if they don’t roll out now they probably never will.
Smartrider has worked absolutely flawlessly in the last two months for me. The only exception has been when the rear reader wasn’t working on a bus – which has only happened twice and that was over a month ago.
In fairness, you are right — even with the problems I’ve had it’s still been more reliable than paper MultiRiders. The doom-and-gloom predictions are more than likely wrong.
That said, the softly-softly approach they’ve taken to introducing SmartRider makes it seem (to me) that now is an odd time to roll it out — I mean, there doesn’t seem to be anything different now to when they originally meant to stop the control group in February.
The changes they made to the system at the end of March has improved the system a lot. Invalid wait for stops vs Present Smartrider. I also suspect that there is a lot going on behind the scenes with regard to coding that has now reached a ‘release’ phase. July 3rd is my pick for the general release.