After £10m investment, your next bus... has been cancelled

The YourNextBus service is supposed to give passengers accurate information on when a bus will be at a specific stop, either via a text message or through information screens installed in some locations.

But when heavy snow fell at the beginning of December, the system, introduced in 2005 at a cost of 10m, struggled to cope with the fact that many buses were forced off the road, or onto alternative routes.

YourNextBus operates in West and South Yorkshire and is a joint scheme run by the South Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive (SYPTE) and West Yorkshire's Metro.

The taxpayer-funded organisations received a grant of 2.5m from the Department for Transport for the YourNextBus system, but shared the rest of the costs and continue to split running costs.

Officers responsible have blamed a software problem and in a report to SYPTE its head of information and technology Tim Rivett admits: "When services are disrupted, from part of a journey being cancelled due to major disruption such as snow, the system loses much of its usefulness."

It is understood that the software provider ACIS has been told of the problems with YourNextBus and technology specialists are trying to work on a solution.

Calvin Payne, of Sheffield bus users pressure group We Want Our Buses Back, said: "I don't believe that it's not possible to keep passengers informed properly, not for 10m. This kind of thing does not encourage people to use buses, it puts them off."