Manual / Reading the numbers

What the timetable does not know about the road

The published timetable carries a drawn line for every route, and some of those lines are not roads. This is the app's oldest honest failure to hide something, and this page is what it does about it and what you should read into a caption.

What is actually wrong

The state's published bus timetable contains a small number of route shapes that no bus could drive. One traces the highway to Sydney. Another runs its real route, fabricates about ninety kilometres north through the city and out the other side, then closes the loop with a single straight line sixty kilometres across Port Phillip Bay before resuming.

Today it is twelve shapes across six routes, all in metropolitan Melbourne, and none of them a Kinetic Melbourne route. That is worth saying and does not make it ignorable: the diversion planner will happily be pointed at any operator's route, and a controller looking at the network is looking at all of it.

Nothing about this is the app failing to read the file. The files are internally consistent and every structural check on them passes. What is wrong is physics.

What the app does about it

Every route shape is graded when a timetable is loaded, and three things follow.

A bad shape is never the one drawn. Where a route has a sound alternative shape, that is what you see. The map is not showing you the fabricated line.

Distances the app cannot believe are blanked. The publisher works out how far along the route each stop is from the corrupt geometry, so the fabricated kilometres land in the distance figures too. Where a distance between two stops is implausible against the straight line between them, the app stores no distance at all rather than a wrong one — which is why you will sometimes see a dash where you expected a number. That is the app being careful, not the app being broken. See When a number is missing.

Each direction carries its own grade, and the app captions it. Grading is per route direction, because that is the grain of the defect — a route's outbound shape can be fabricated while its inbound is perfectly sound, and saying so is the difference between a usable warning and a useless one.

What a caption looks like

On the route panel in the Map Explorer:

The published feed's geometry for outbound is not usable: the shape leaves the corridor of its own stops. The line drawn here is the best available and its distances are approximate.

Or, where the shape has been reconstructed rather than rejected:

Geometry for outbound was reconstructed from a corrupt shape in the published feed — it is drawn for reference and distances are approximate.

The Timetable tab says the same thing in its own words on the views that depend on distance, ending "Stop positions and distances on this view are approximate."

The line is still drawn. A planner who searches for a route and finds nothing is worse off than one shown a line with a warning attached.

Where the app refuses rather than warns

The diversion planner does not merely caption a bad direction — it will not plan on one. The sentence it gives is written for whoever runs the app as much as for you, so here it is in full, and then which part concerns you:

the published feed's geometry for this route direction is not usable — it leaves the corridor of its own stops, so an anchor placed on it would not mean anything

That last clause is the part that concerns you. A diversion's anchors are points on the route line: where the bus leaves, and where it rejoins. If the line is fabricated, a point on it is a point on nothing, and every figure downstream — which stops are missed, how far the detour is, what the driver instructions say — is derived from it.

A reconstructed shape is refused too, for a different reason, and the app says so:

this route direction's geometry was reconstructed from a corrupt feed shape. It is drawn for reference but is not a basis for a diversion a driver would act on

There is a third form of the refusal, and it means the schedule loaded on this deployment grades everything except this one route direction:

this route direction has no geometry grade in a schedule database that grades the rest, so it cannot be planned on until the next rebuild explains why

A warning someone reads and a projection a driver acts on are not the same stakes. That is the whole reason the map captions where the planner refuses.

What they do not mean

A drawn route line is not a promise about the road. It is the timetable's picture of the route. Even a sound one is drawn from a published shape, not surveyed, and it says nothing about what the road is doing today — closures, clearances and congestion are separate overlays with separate sources.

No caption is not a guarantee. A route direction whose shape this app has no grade for stays silent on the map, because captioning every route on an older schedule would teach everyone to ignore captions. The planner still refuses it. So "no warning" means "nothing known to be wrong", not "checked and sound".

"Approximate distances" is not a small correction. Where the feed is corrupt, the distance figures it produced can be wrong by several orders of magnitude, not by a few per cent. That is exactly why the app blanks them rather than shading them.

A quarantined shape is not a quarantined route. The route runs. Its timetable, its stops and its live buses are all unaffected — the stops come from a different part of the feed and are sound throughout. It is the drawn line and the distances along it that are in question.

This is not something an administrator can fix. It is wrong upstream, in the state's published data. What a newer timetable can do is contain fewer of them, and the app reports how many it found each time one is loaded.