Oh, don't get me started on this. There are of course improvements for some people, but most of the changes are for worse IMO. Initial motivation was to save money (approx. 460 mln. CZK), but some experts stated that these changes can't achieve such savings.
The presented aim is to:
1) sacrifice some connections to strengthen more popular ones and
2) make the network easier to understand.
That's probably a noble idea, however the way the changes were actually made hardly achieves the first goal and in some cases goes downright against the second. Here's an example of
highly intelligible timetable of line 5 :crazy:, resulting from it's two different final stops in one direction.
Some of the changes are probably purely for entertainment of their inventors. Either that, or they've gone completely mad. Swapping some of the lines just for the fun of it etc.
This thing annoys me the most: two bus lines were connecting my neighbourhood to the nearest metro station. Both had 15 minute headways during weekends, nicely fitting into combined 7,5 minute headway, corresponding with headways of the underground. That's history. One of the lines was replaced by a different one, with double headways. That's not very nice, of course, because it breaks down the connection from every underground train to my home. You'd expect the headways now to be 7,5 - 7,5 - 15 minutes, leaving only two underground trains per hour without the following bus connection. But some brilliant mind knows better and made up the timetables with such ingenuity, that the resulting headways are 1 - 14 - 15 minutes. Yes, it's that stupid, effectively halving the number of connections. (And making us wait 10 minutes for a bus after every other metro train. Actually I won't wait, I'll walk, that'll be faster.)
"Metrobus" is basically just a buzzword, as in most cases no real change is actually achieved. It's like painting the fence red instead of blue and then start calling it "superfence". Also, to promote the "concept", the number of these buses is now displayed in a rectangle (see the video below), making it much less legible from a distance. :weird:
Video of another excellent improvement follows. Line 217 was cancelled and partially replaced by lines 143 and 191 (effectively splitting it in half). This is how the replacement lines actually work during weekends, greatly improving travel comfort for the passengers and amusing people all over the internet:
:doh: (
here's a link in case the embedding doesn't work)