Do you need a Twitter account...
... to catch a Stagecoach bus?
Stagecoach East Scotland make their most urgent announcements on Twitter.
Here is an example of some messages associated with recent flooding on the 95 route:
As you can see, the first announcement came at 09:50. Further clarification followed at 10:11. A more extensive diversion was announced at 11:39 and repeated at 13:55. The return to normal was announced at 15:14.
It’s clear that watching Stagecoach East Scotland’s Twitter feed is the quickest way to find out about any problems with their buses.
You used to be able to read the latest messages on Twitter without needing an account - you just went to Stagecoach East Scotland’s profile page at: https://twitter.com/StagecoachEScot
But since Elon Musk got involved with Twitter such public pages now show some historical sample messages rather than the latest ones - and if you want to delve more deeply you need to sign up for a Twitter account.
I recently needed to have access to Twitter on a new computer that hadn’t used Twitter before, and wasn’t going to need Twitter much. It was a fairly painless process - the machine already had a separate Google account and I just clicked on “Sign Up With Google” and worked my way through the sign-up steps. The only complicated step was picking someone to “follow” from Twitter’s suggestions. My first step after signing up was to go to my new Profile page and click on “following” and “Unfollow” the account I hadn’t wanted to follow in the first place - and add the accounts I wanted to follow, like “StagecoachEScot” and “95Crail”.
I was relieved to note that I didn’t need to enter my mobile phone number and end up receiving unwanted messages.
I like to use Twitter through a browser rather than on the “App” as you can use an “Ad-blocker” to limit the rubbish that otherwise appears.
You will also notice on Twitter that nowadays you need to keep (at least once every 24 hours) clicking on a “Following” tab on your “Home” page to ensure that your display feed stays on track and mostly displays the accounts you have directly expressed an interest in…
One thing to beware with Twitter compared to Facebook, for example, is that it’s generally not possible for posts to be edited. So if someone makes a typing mistake in a Twitter post the only way they can correct it is to send out a new post. And one of the main problems when writing posts is that of “spellcheckers” getting in the way and “correcting” what they see as spelling mistakes in placenames, for example. Another common correction is if “not” is hurriedly mistyped it can get corrected to “now” which may well have the opposite meaning to what was intended.
So, if you read a Twitter post and the placenames don’t make sense or there’s a “now” when it was probably more likely someone meant “not” - then you probably need to try to think about what the sender might really have been trying to type… and what, if anything, you need to do about it?
What about rivals to Twitter?
Well, that’s the problem - as long as Stagecoach continue to use Twitter as their main communication channel there are no rivals.
If we were to advise Stagecoach on what alternative to use if they ever decide to stop using Twitter, what would we say?
Facebook - posts don’t show up in users’ feeds for quite some time after they are written - sometimes never - so it’s not really suitable for time critical messages
Instagram, Tik-tok and the like - are mostly concerned with the visual image so they need good data connections, which you may not have when travelling by bus
Substack - we quite like it as you can choose to receive messages by email as well - and the public feed is visible without needing an account
Dedicated website blog - is probably ideal - it could probably even be incorporated into the Stagecoach App so you could search by route number or area - but it would probably cost Stagecoach more to run?
Conclusion
We hope that we have reassured you that it’s not too difficult or painful to setup your own Twitter account to read the latest posts from Stagecoach and that doing so can help to find out when there are problems with buses…
95 Crail Bus