The transport that never makes a timetable

A planner like ours is built on timetables. An operator publishes departures, we read them, and a search returns a list of times. That works for a train. It says nothing about the shared Sumo that leaves Shillong when its last seat is sold, the Åland ferry that only calls at your island if you rang the office by eight the night before, or the pontoon across the Essequibo that crosses when enough trucks have lined up on the bank. None of those has a departure time. Each has a rule, and the rule is knowable. Of the 1,661 transport options in our local-transport data, 237 open their frequency with the words on demand and another 92 say some version of when full. This is what the rules look like.

The most common rule in the world is the simplest. In Shillong the shared Sumos to Sohra wait on the upper floor of the multi-storey car park in Bara Bazar, which is not obvious from the street, and go when every seat is taken. There is no timetable, the wait is long outside the morning, and the last one of the day is not documented anywhere.1 The fare we have is ₹150 a seat, seen in March 2023, and we say so rather than pretend it is current.

The same rule runs the V-hire vans out of Dao terminal in Tagbilaran, which leave when the van fills and in practice go every twenty to forty minutes through the middle of the day, beat the bus by an hour and cost about ₱200 to Anda against ₱160–185 on the bus.2 It runs Georgetown, where a bus is a fifteen-seat minibus on a numbered route out of the parks around Stabroek Market: a conductor calls the destination out of the door and the bus leaves when it is full rather than when it is due, and you ask for the number, not the place.3 In Gori the overflow when the marshrutkas are full is a taxi van that leaves once three to five people have paid 5 GEL each.4 On Siargao the shared motorelas at Dapa fill and go roughly every twenty to thirty minutes.5

Where a source gives a practical headway we record it next to the rule, because roughly every half hour when full is a different proposition from whenever.

In the Åland and Turku archipelagos a printed timetable can be almost entirely fiction unless you read the footnotes. The small boat between Kumlinge and Brändö, m/s Bogoy, has a footnote on nearly every departure: 1) means it only runs if booked to Ålandstrafiken between 09:30 and 18:30, 2) means booked at least two hours before it leaves its first harbour. You do not stand on the pier at Asterholma and wait for a boat. You telephone, and then the boat comes. It is free if you are walking or cycling.6 The Enklinge shuttle next door shows about twelve crossings a day, which looks generous until you notice that during school holidays every single one runs only against a booking.7 The Keistiö ferry in Iniö is a ten-car vessel on a 1,600-metre crossing whose first two runs of the day must be ordered by 22:00 the evening before, and the rest thirty minutes ahead.8

Scotland does the same thing with buses. On South Uist the W19D minibus reaches the crofting townships east of the spine road on Tuesdays and Thursdays only if someone has phoned 01870 603197 by 18:00 the day before, and the driver moves the departure to suit whoever booked, so the printed 10:00 is approximate.9 In Shetland's North Isles the runs marked DAR on the timetable are Dial-a-Ride, booked by 16:00 the previous day, or by Friday for a Monday.10 On Jura the 456 makes its timetabled runs to meet the Feolin ferry and other runs on request, by phone the previous day.11 In the Faroes route 66 to Skúvoy has one scheduled sailing a day and the rest go by telephone request hours ahead.12

Our schema has a rule for this. A connection ship that only sails if you phone is still a ferry; a dial-a-ride is still a bus. The vehicle keeps its kind, the words on demand go at the front of the frequency so it reads correctly in a list, and the phone number and the cut-off go in the booking field, because that is the fact a reader will act on. On a lot of Nordic and Scottish routes, it is on the timetable but does not exist unless ordered is the single most important thing on the page.

Some crossings are not a service at all. The cable ferry to Seglinge in Åland prints departure times from the Seglinge side only, roughly twice an hour from 06:00 to 22:00, and from the other ramp you leave about seven minutes later. Between 22:20 and 05:40 the sheet says traffic on demand, meaning the skipper sails when somebody turns up; and if nobody is standing at either ramp at a listed time, the crossing does not happen.13 The Skagen cable ferry in Iniö carries no timetable at all and runs when needed, except that it is deliberately timed to leave fifteen and thirty minutes before the big ferry leaves Kannvik, so you work backwards from that.8

On the road from Georgetown to Lethem every vehicle crosses the Essequibo at Kurupukari on a pontoon. It runs in daylight, as vehicles accumulate; the crossing is short but the wait is not, which is why arrival times on that road are quoted so loosely, and no tariff is published anywhere we could reach.14 The Bruny Island ferry in Tasmania sails every twenty minutes at peak, but travel is by order of arrival in the lane: no booking, the school bus and visiting doctors go first, and a booking system written into the 2018 terminal contract has never been switched on.15 The Inskip Point barge to K'gari runs continuously from 06:00 to 17:00 every day of the year, cut back on king tides, and a 4WD pays AUD 140 return.16

We file the first two as cable_ferry, a kind we added because ferry overstates them. They are moving road.

Where no passenger service exists, the supply run often does the job. From Pier 52 in Sihanoukville a slow supply boat leaves for Koh Rong once a day at 14:00 and sells a seat for US$5.17 The Aran Islands passenger ferries carry no cars and no freight, so everything that cannot be hand-carried goes on Lasta Mara's cargo boat out of Galway Docks three days a week; it is not a passenger service, there is no public timetable, and the fare is quoted on enquiry by phone.18 The lake taxis from Kasenyi to the smaller Ssese islands are unscheduled, roughly daily to the inhabited ones and more often when there is cargo.19 The inter-island ships through Aitutaki's wharf sail weeks apart, driven by fuel and cargo demand, and the neighbouring Atiu article on Wikivoyage warns that they take passengers but that this is not recommended.20

On the roads of Ladakh a truck driver usually expects about half the bus fare, and it can be haggled down.21 In Penobscot Bay the reason a small airline exists at all is its contracted mail run for the post office, FedEx and UPS, which is the winter lifeline when the Vinalhaven ferry is iced in.22

None of this will ever arrive in a GTFS feed. Strandfaraskip Landsins, which runs every bus, ferry and subsidised helicopter seat in the Faroe Islands, publishes no feed at all, and its bus fares exist only as two images on the Faroese-language page.

So we do not put these in the departure board. A board that shows a 10:00 for the W19D would be lying, because the 10:00 moves. Instead they live on each place page, under how locals move, with the rule written in the frequency field, the phone number in the booking field, the fare with the year we saw it, and a confidence level we chose ourselves. The numbers in the margin of this page are those entries. Follow one and you are looking at the source.