Future of the commuter blog

Mon 11 Feb 2008, 17:32

As the blog will be exactly one year old tomorrow ("Happy birthday to you..."), I would like to suggest making a few changes to it which I think will improve it.

The reasons for my proposed changes are as follows: (i) to increase the overall proportion of the chosen set of Cotswold Line trains that we report on (we have never managed to survey more than one-third of all CL trains in any given month; with the new system I'm proposing, we ought to be able to report on nearly two-thirds of all CL commuter trains); (ii) to make the blog a true Commuter Blog, i.e. a representative survey of the performance of weekday morning and evening peak-time services; and (iii) to make a little less work for the tireless number-crunching monkey who has to analyse all the data (that'll be me then!).

Firstly, I would suggest that no weekend trains should be reported from now on. There have never been enough reports at weekends for it to be worthwhile analysing them so it's perhaps best if we just drop them altogether. The same thing applies to offpeak trains; there are some correspondents (myself included) who diligently record all offpeak services that they travel on but overall we only manage to survey a small fraction of these trains.

If there are no dissenters to these proposals can I ask Richard, starting at the beginning of March, to remove the "Any Saturday train", "Any Sunday train" and "Other weekday train" options from the drop-down menu on the blog? I would also recommend that the 19.33 Oxford to Charlbury train be removed from the list because it is barely a commuter train in my opinion and is very scantily reported on (only three reports for the whole of January!), together with all the subsequent Oxford to Charlbury trains (20.39 etc.) which are hardly ever mentioned in the blog and are definitely offpeak services.

Other people's comments and suggestions are welcome of course. My aims are to make the blog more representative of the CL commuter's travel experience and to enable the production of data that will have more impact. As some of you will know already, we have been sending statistics extracted from the blog to FGW in recent months but as far as I know they have never responded. If we are able to survey two-thirds of all commuter services on the CL in future then hopefully even FGW will sit up and take notice when our reports land on their desks.