“Dry Post” January

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Hasn’t it been nice and quiet recently! I know, I have not posted for an entire month and after the Christmas flurry I thought I would give you a break from the droning on about very little in the local bus world. Looking back over the years January has often been “little to talk about” but I have been busy and trying out new things to try and bring more to this little blog.

What have I been up to

So I have been experimenting.

Those of you who used to follow the Southampton Bus Update might have noticed that they tried an AI generated post about Stagecoach South’s service 46 out of Winchester. If you missed it then you can still see it on the Southampton Bus Update’s blogspot and I thought that if it was entirely generated by AI from a prompt then it was pretty okay.

Finding

It did get me thinking about how I can offer more or improvement using a bit of background help. In the past I have had a system in place to alert me if a bus article appeared in some of the local press, so I have build on that and tried to install it on a small home server that I have. A bit of Python later and it now populates a spreadsheet based on keywords from various local and national sources – or at least it is meant to – so that I can see what is going on.

It has clearly not working as I had hoped yet as it missed a number of articles. It’s fine this time though as I am still manually reading news sites.

Summerising

While the finding has not been working the way I wanted it to, that also means that I have not been able to try out summarising. I also have a small script which will take the articles once a week and build them into a 5 minute quick read that I can then edit and push to the website each weekend.

Don’t Worry!

I am not just going to allow it to post some rubbish AI slop to the blog without me seeing it first!

Failing

What isn’t working though, is the fact that I badly coded the logic of the keywords that I was using, and so it was not finding any articles at all! So articles that were not found, were not summarised.

It’s like a little pet project. Learning Python, doing a bit of vibe coding to get it looking right, and other bits of brain frizzle.

A Sort of News and Service Summary

So there is some news to talk about as well as some upcoming service changes in February. Hopefully I will soon get a flag within 12 hours of the new timetables being uploaded to the national system, that is another automation I am playing with to serve me PDF timetables as soon as they appear on the Bus Open Data Service. I set this system up after February’s changes were sent to the BODS system.

Going from Blue to Breezer

From Today you might see some re-branded buses operating through the New Forest as morebus rebrand some of their services.

Lymington-based services X1 and X2, along with Bluestar 6 are being re-branded to New Forest Breezer routes along with five new buses planned to join the fleet later in the year. On the morebus news page the bus launching the re-brand appears to be ex-Bluestar 1647 which was last seen (at least according to BusTimes) back in November.

1647 is out and about as I write this on Monday morning on the X2 service in Bournemouth, so the press release was right. New Forest Tour 1823 is also out on the X1.

Funding for Hampshire Buses

This comes on the back of the news at the start of the year that Hampshire County Council have secured £52 million for improving bus services across the county. The money will be fed into the budget over four years to “improve” bus priority lanes, frequency of services and rural bus shelters.

No mention though, of anything to fund the now discontinued service 61 between Winchester and Eastleigh, or to route service 69 back through Twyford. This has caused a number of articles and letters in places like the Hampshire Chronicle.

Southampton Park & Ride to Continue

The Adanac Park weekend Park & Ride service is set to continue until further notice and remain at the £3 fare according to the Daily Echo. The figures do not sound good at the moment with a quote of about 1000 people using the scheme in December, but you would hope that is simply because it is a new service.

NEW: morebus 119 Funding Discussion

Thanks to Tim for the heads up that New Milton Town Council are discussing today whether they will continue their part in funding service 119 to Lymington. The Advertiser & Times quotes the Mayor, Cllr Alvin Reid as saying “There’s no way we can find a few thousand pounds to help take people out of New Milton to do their shopping in Lymington,” although it is also locked behind a subscribers paywall so you will either have to believe me, or use archive.today.

Service Changes

So these are a quick summary of the service changes that are coming up:

morebus (and UniBus) 22rd February

• Service U1 – Bournemouth to University – Minor changes to running times
• Service U2 – Poole to Bournemouth University – Service is reduced to hourly

Bluestar 22nd February

• Service 5 – the 1605 schooldays service from Eastleigh to Salisbury will now terminate at Romsey
  • I assume there is a connecting bus for the rest of the trip, as the morning runs from Salisbury will continue!

There are also changes to some Brockenhurst College services but most of these appear to be minor variations to evening routes. As you know, I don’t usually comment on changes to these as the education settings should make students aware(!)

So Apologies

… if you wake up one morning and find the blog infiltrated with some kind of garbage that passes as an AI taking over the world.

While I am writing this I am also watching my third screen chatting away to itself. I have Claude error checking the automations for me as I think it missed the Bluestar and morebus timetable changes. I am likely to have put a typo in there or something!