It’s been a while since we updated you on the progress of our next major project, FixMyTransport, but we’re still working hard behind the scenes. As you may recall, FixMyTransport will deal with public transport problems – delayed trains, vandalised stations, overcrowded buses, you name it. It’ll put problems in the public arena, while also reporting them directly to the relevant transport operator. Read more about the project here.
We will shortly be arriving at our final destination
Things are going to get exciting very soon. As launch date approaches, we’ll be starting a closed beta (mid July), rapidly followed by a full open public beta launch (end of July). During the closed beta we want to get as much feedback as possible from future users of the site, as well as pressure groups, transport operators, and anyone else who has anything valuable to contribute.
If you would like to be invited to beta test, and weren’t one of our alpha testers, please email us on team@fixmytransport.com. Alpha testers will, of course, be invited to test again.
Mind the (data) gaps
We got extremely useful feedback from our alpha testers, and a wealth of crowdsourced data from our community. Thanks to their efforts we now have contact details for the operators of about 50% of the routes in the UK. However, this leaves a lot of operators where we don’t know how to get in touch.
We really need your help to get them! If you can spare a few minutes, visit our spreadsheet and see if you can fill in any of the missing details.
The more contact details we can get hold of, the better experience FixMyTransport will offer to our users. As well as publishing passengers’ reports on the site, FixMyTransport sends them directly to the operators too, helping to get the issue fixed.
So, we especially need the email addresses for operators’ customer services departments. Finding these may be as simple as visiting the operators’ websites, or it may require a bit of sleuth-work on your part. If advanced Googling gets you nowhere, we’ve found that simply phoning head office can get results.
Incidentally, the main operators are near the top of the sheet – those are the ones that will benefit the most users, although obviously the nearer completion we get, the better.
You’ll notice that the spreadsheet now includes a non-obligatory column for your name: this is to offer a small incentive. If you want to, tag your entries and at the end we’ll be offering goodies to the top contributors. Depending on your preference, this might be one of our highly sought-after mySociety hooded tops (they’re snuggly!), or a chance to become more involved in the project.
Those who helped in the first iteration, please note that although this sheet looks different, your details have been retained and indeed have been extremely useful as we build the site. Also – if you have already been a major contributor during our previous rounds of testing and data collecting, please holler so that we can give you proper credit.
Hold tight, please
Not long now… we hope you’re as excited as we are.
Traveline south east, east midlands and east anglia have a comprehensive set of contact details which we are happy to provide to you in the form of a spreadsheet – can you make use of this and extract the details you want for all the operators we have knowledge of? If so, please e-mail me and tell me who I can send this information to. Our data covers about 900 operators – and ALL services which operate in those three regions of the country.
Roger