Manual / Glossary

Glossary

Twelve words that appear on the screens of Kinetic Melbourne OCC — the tool built for Kinetic Melbourne's Operational Control Centre — and that mean something narrower here than they do in general conversation. Every entry says what the app means, where you meet the word, and the thing it is most often confused with.

They are in alphabetical order rather than in any order of importance. Shift and Run, and Headway and delay, are the two pairs most worth reading together.

Anchor

Where a diversion leaves the normal route, and where it rejoins it. Every diversion has two.

You place them on the map when planning a diversion. The app pulls each one onto the route line and remembers the stop next to it, so the anchor still means the same place after a newer timetable is loaded and the route has shifted slightly.

Everything downstream comes off them: which stops are missed, how far the detoured leg is, and what the driver instructions say.

Not: a stop. An anchor is a point on the route, and it usually sits between two stops rather than on one.

Block

The chain of journeys one bus works in sequence — the timetable's own way of saying "and then this bus does that".

The published Victorian feed does not contain it. So this app does not use the word on screen, and it cannot tell you from the timetable alone which journeys belong to the same bus. What it uses instead is the run, rebuilt from the driver roster.

Not: a run. A block is what the timetable would have said; a run is what the roster does say.

Dead run

A leg driven out of service. Depot to the first stop, between two routes, back to the depot at the end. Empty kilometres with nobody on board.

The Operations Analysis tab counts them: Dead-run legs in the depot table, and dead-run hours in its analytics.

Not: a break, and not a layover. A dead run is driving; the other two are not.

Depot

The base a shift signs on and off at. It is read off the roster and attached to every shift, which is what lets the Operations Analysis tab group anything by depot, and what the My depot setting picks a default for.

Not: the place a bus sleeps, necessarily. This is where the driver books on.

Headway

The gap between one bus and the next at a stop. Not the gap in the timetable — the gap actually happening.

The word is spelled three ways on screen, and they are all the same thing: the tile in the Layers panel says Frequency, the bar along the bottom of the map says Bus frequency, and the panel listing the pairs is headed Headway.

What it measures is the deviation — how far the live gap has drifted from the scheduled gap — with two bands of concern, watch and alarm, which you set yourself. It is measured at every stop along the route, not only at the terminus, because bunching that is invisible at the start of a route shows up further down it.

Not: punctuality. Two buses that are both twelve minutes late are running the gap they were supposed to run, so the headway deviates by nothing and nothing is raised. A service can be perfectly regular and entirely late. The overlay is blind to lateness on purpose — lateness is what the bus dots' colours are for.

Layover

The scheduled rest between finishing one service and starting the next at the same place.

The app treats five minutes as the common minimum. A same-place turnaround shorter than that, with no break in it, is counted as a tight turnaround — the column headed Tight t/a in the Operations Analysis tables — because a delay on the first service goes straight into the second with nothing to absorb it.

Not: a meal break, and not idle time at the depot. A layover is out on the road, between two services.

No-go area

A patch of the map a bus may never be routed through — the laneway with a low bridge, the block a twelve-metre vehicle cannot turn out of.

Drawn once, in the Diversions tab, and then handed to the routing engine on every request, so the engine stops offering the shortcut rather than a planner having to remember to refuse it. When one of them is why a route came out the way it did, the app says so rather than leaving you looking at a road that seems fine.

Areas are retired rather than deleted — that a rule used to apply is worth knowing.

Not: a closed road. A closure is an event with a start and an end, and it comes from the road authority. A no-go area is a standing rule of your own.

Run

One bus's day, from its first journey to its last, across however many drivers take it over.

Rebuilt from the roster, because the timetable does not publish it (see Block). It is the chain that matters when a delay is spreading, because a delay rides the bus, not the driver. The Runs (buses) table in Operations Analysis is the list of them.

Not: a shift. A driver changes bus mid-shift and a bus is handed between drivers, so the two chains cross rather than line up.

Service day

The day a journey belongs to, which is not the same as the date on the clock after midnight.

A last bus that leaves at ten past one in the morning belongs to the previous day's service. The timetable writes that time as 25:10; this app shows it as 01:10+1 — the real clock time, with a marker saying it falls after midnight but belongs to the day before. The service day rolls over in the small hours, not at midnight.

Not: the calendar date. Between midnight and the early-morning rollover, the app's "today" is still yesterday's service — which is correct, and is what a driver's roster page means too.

Shift

One driver's day: sign-on to sign-off, with every service leg, dead run, break and changeover in between. One page of the roster is one shift.

The Shifts (drivers) table in Operations Analysis is the list of them.

Not: a run. See Run, above; it is the single most common mix-up in this part of the app, and the two tables are named Shifts (drivers) and Runs (buses) precisely so the screen cannot be misread.

Span

How long a day is, first thing to last thing.

You will meet it as the Span column in the Runs (buses) table — the whole length of that bus's day — and as the sort option Longest day.

For a driver the same idea is called Spread, and it sits beside a separate column called Worked. They are different numbers: spread is sign-on to sign-off including the break in the middle; worked is the time inside it that counts as work.

Not: time worked, and not distance.

Variant

One of several patterns running under a single route number. The short working that turns back early, the school-day pattern, the express, the one that runs into the depot at the end of the day.

To a passenger they are all "the 402". To the timetable they are separate patterns, and the app treats them separately. A route with more than one gets a list on its route panel — All patterns, then Main pattern, Variant 1, Variant 2 and so on, each with the number of stops it serves — and you can draw one at a time.

Not: a direction. Outbound and inbound are a separate choice, and most variants exist in both.