A Scheduer is the poor guy who has to take the bare bones of a time table and try and fit all the drivers and all the buses in to it. He has to make sure that every bus is where it should be when a drivers gets to his break or the end of his shift and make sure there is an other driver to take over the bus. He has to make sure that he does this and make sure that each driver is within his driving hours and gets at least 30 minutes break. The legal minimum. He has to make sure that every trip that is on the time table is covered and that there aren't too many bus for drivers or drivers for buses in any one place. He also has to make sure that he is using as few drivers as possible or the accountants will want to know why. I am sure there are lots more things he has to do and I know Scheduer is not a job I could do. For one thing I wouldn't know where to start. For an other I am not sure I could stand the strain that must go with the first day of new timetables. Like; Will it work?
Well to day was the first day of a new timetable and for me everything worked. A bus arrived to take me to work, the right bus arrived for me to take over. When I got to Paignton for my break there was a driver standing there expecting me. After my break the bus arrived for me to take over and when I finished my shift there was a driver standing on the Newton Road waiting for me. I did hear there was a slight problem in Paignton but it was soon sorted and no loss of service.
Years ago, back in the Dark Ages, when I was a teacher in a secondary school somebody made a slight mistake. Well to say a slight mistake was like calling a puddle of water the Pacific Ocean. On the first day the bell went and I made my way to the class room. My room was down a corridor that had 5 class rooms. On this morning it also had about 500 children. In the bus trade we do the same things every week day. So if it works on Monday it will work on Tuesday. Not so in a school, each day is different. It took a week to sort the mess out and the lady who did the time table never did it again. Come to think of it she didn't do much for a few weeks until the medication kicked in.
We have two major time table changes each year, one in May when summer season start and one in September when we go back to winter times. I wonder what the scheduer does the reat of the year.
6 comments:
Can't speak for "big city" schedulers, but in middle England (or is it Little Britain?) most schedulers will look after a number of depots, usually with rather more than just the two service changes each a year. They will usually also be responsible for some or all of the planning for new services, and maybe also with mileages, statistical work, fares, timetables, publicity, destination screens or all the other 1001 jobs that go towards a succesful service pattern...I'd hazard a guess that on the quiet most schedulers work considerably longer hours than drivers!
We used to have schedulers on my job. Now we have a computer program called "HASTUS". If HASTUS says it will work, then all of that pesky real world business is of no concern whatsoever to the schedulers. Thanks to HASTUS I have had duties that included, riding a scheduled bus for 1 hour and 15 minutes to a relief point, relieving a driver, driving his bus for 10 minutes to the end of the line, driving it for 10 minutes back to the relief point, being relieved and riding a scheduled bus for 1 hour and 15 minutes back to my starting point. Today, I had to drive a car from my relief point to the division for my break. Unfortunately there is no place to get food at my division, so I had to ride a schedule back to the relief point because there was no car shuttle scheduled during my break. I bought a sandwich to go at the relief point. Then I had to ride a schedule back to the division to get the car, so that I could drive it back to the relief point. I had no passengers during either of my car trips. At one point I dared to mention to the dispatcher that I didn't see much point in all of this and he shouted at me that I would drive the car or he would mark me down as a no show and send me home without pay. I was at work today from 12;30 PM until 11:30 PM. That's about a week's worth of work for one of our schedulers. The head of the scheduling department leaves the building by a side door and parks his car off the property so that he will not have to see any bus drivers. That's right, he takes his car because there's no way he would trust his own schedules to get him to "work" on time. Obviously, you have touched a sore point.
I just remembered another one. At one point, HASTUS wrote a schedule where a driver was relieved in the middle of the night, in the wintertime, in a residential neighborhood without any more shelter than a bus shelter with no walls. There was no place to eat and no restroom available. The driver was left sitting there for 3 hours. That was his lunch break; half of it unpaid. The wonders of technology. The head of the scheduling department is a college boy. He has no prior experience in any aspect of the transportation industry, but he's really awfully interested in computers.
Here in Aberdeen, one might suspect that the schedulers live in their own little world. A world without school holidays or rush hour traffic or any journey time altering factors at all.
It's annoying as a commuter, but I feel very sorry for the drivers.
I'm sure Dave doesn't want his site used as a venue for other peoples griefs and battles, but in reply to Jon it has to be said that the agreed locations for his break reliefs must surely be down to his union agrement - if certain points are unsuitable (and it certainly sounds like it) then his local need to renegotiate.
Hastus and various other (mostly North American scheduling) packages are only just starting to make any impact in the UK and I think its fair to say that they are making ground only slowly. This is because scheduling conditions are apparently (with some exceptions) far more complex in the UK and have until recently been far more suited to manual compilation.
Even so, sometimes a seemingly silly solution to a problem can be the only legal one...
I fail to see though how one can schedule efficiently without talking to staff...I travel regularly on our buses and the gossip I exchange with our staff is more than helpful in many respects... and this applies even more to the planning/timetabling functions, which Sarah appears to be confusing with scheduling (which is the efficient allocation of vehicles to timetables and drivers to vehicles).
I have to say (without any knowledge of Aberdeen) that I find what she's saying amazing - even in leafy rural england we have cases where running times vary by up to 50% extra in the school peaks, and 25% is mot uncommon...
anyway, enough...sorry Dave for hijacking your space!
In reply to Sarah, here in Torquay I have been using the 200 to go to and from Totnes for over a year now. The new (started Monday) timetables have removed buses in the afternoon for school trips. This means I will have to use First Bus and pay again to get back to Torquay. Thank you Stagecoach.
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