Undesirable split in Arriva route 724

[tenbob]

Hi. I'm a big fan of bustimes.org and use it most days. I wonder if anything can be done to fix this rather annoying feature. I suspect it originates from the operator.

I often use Arriva Herts and Essex service 724, timetable here. This shows the route in two parts, which implies you have to get off one bus in St Albans and board a different one to continue the journey. This is not the case - the same bus does the whole journey. The artificial break is presumably something that Arriva have put into the BODS data.

Our local Registration Authority, Hertfordshire County Council have a much better timetable on their Intalink site which shows the journeys without a break. They also publish official TXC and GTFS data here.

Would switching to the data from Intalink fix this issue, do you think? The same thing happens with service 725.

[jclgoodwin]

Unfortunately here the AVL tracking is split too, so will be harder to match to the Intalink timetable data.

I'm really not sure why Arriva have done this – usually, when the registration is split for bureaucratic reasons/avoiding stricter driver hour rules, I can merge the split journeys almost elegantly. But apparently the 724 is registered as one service. I might be able to do something clever: looking at historical AVL data to confirm that the journeys are operated by the same vehicle, and merging them.