Manual / Reading the numbers
Reading the numbers honestly
- For
- anyone about to make a decision on a figure this app has shown them
- Status
- current
- Covers
- every number in Kinetic Melbourne OCC — where it comes from, and what it cannot tell you
- Last checked against the app
6f7727e(2026-08-19)
Kinetic Melbourne OCC — the tool built for Kinetic Melbourne's Operational Control Centre — puts a great many numbers on screen. Almost none of them is a measurement. This section is the one place that says so plainly, in one voice, because a tooltip has room to say what a number is and never room to say what it is not.
It is short on purpose. Each page here is one habit worth having.
The pages here
| Page | The habit |
|---|---|
| Every diversion figure is an estimate | Read the ~. It is on every figure this tool worked out, and off every figure it counted |
| No prediction is not the same as on time | A grey bus, a blank chip and an absent pill are all nobody said, never it is fine |
| What the timetable does not know about the road | Some published route shapes are physically impossible, and the app says which |
| When a number is missing | A dash is a state, not a fault. Which kind of missing you are looking at, and what to do |
Four questions that cover most of it
Ask these of any figure on any screen, and the app has an answer for each.
1. Did this app measure it, or work it out? Almost nothing here is measured by
this app. Bus positions and how late each bus is running are the road authority's
own live feed, passed on as received. Road congestion is the road authority's own
index. The timetable is the published one. What the app derives — kilometres
skipped, drive times, service-km not operated — carries a leading ~ to say so.
2. As at when? Every live surface says its own age. The line under the sidebar heading carries the bus feed's own clock; each overlay's bar along the bottom of the map carries its own; a bulletin's row carries its publication time. "Live" means last published, never this instant.
3. Over what? A count counts something particular. Stops not served is per direction and per plan, not per day. Punctuality observations are observations, not days. The headway deviation is one pair of buses at one stop, not a route.
4. What does a blank mean here? This app draws a dash rather than a zero wherever it does not know, and grey rather than green wherever nobody has told it. That is the app being careful, and it is the single most valuable thing on these pages.
Where the rest of it lives
The pages here are the general rules. What each individual screen's numbers mean — the delay bands, the headway watch and alarm lines, the road severity bands, the clearance bands, the punctuality views, the diversion register's own figures — is on that screen's own page, in the section headed What they do not mean. Every page in this manual has one.
Two are worth reading next, once those sections have landed: the map section's page on the live bus colours, and the operations section's page on punctuality. Both answer a question a controller asks daily, and both have an answer that is easy to misread.
What this section is not
It is not a reason to distrust the app. An estimate marked as an estimate is more useful than a measurement that is quietly wrong, and every one of the behaviours described here exists because somebody decided a careful blank beats a confident number. The app is not hedging; it is reporting what it has.
And it is not a performance record. Nothing in this app is contract-reportable data. No figure it produces is designed to be quoted in a performance regime, and the diversion figures are explicitly excluded from that by decision.