PAT RUSSELL explains how The Bus Archive has been able to use information gathered over the past few months to show future historians how the pandemic has had a major impact on scheduled services
The Bus Archive is as keen to preserve the timetables of 2020 as those of 1920. That has been a challenge as they have changed so rapidly and as paper timetables disappeared completely, electronic versions had to be captured in the moment.
Our volunteers have logged over 25,000 changes announced by operators and local authorities in the six months from mid-March to September, as well as downloading the weekly Traveline National Dataset (TNDS). This valuable resource will become more important for future researchers as the Covid pandemic recedes into history.
As an electronic repository, it also lends itself to analysis and comparison. What better way to demonstrate the richness of this data than in graphs of how bus services changed during the lockdown?
The first of these shows the number of journeys each week across West Yorkshire, with weekday services taking on a profile much closer to Saturdays, stabilising at around 50% of journeys at the peak of the lockdown.
