If you’ve needed to catch a bus in Copenhagen recently, you may have looked in vain for any information about where the bus is going and when.

All you can see now is the number of the bus and where it starts and terminates.

Back in December, the public transport company Movia took a decision to remove printed timetables from bus stops on the grounds that 70 percent of passengers surveyed wanted more digital information.

Tried and trusted is best
However, the ‘everybody nowadays has a smartphone’ argument did not go down at all well with the remaining 30 percent, with older passengers especially indicating that they prefer information on departure times on the spot.

Movia has come under fire from irate passengers, the elderly organisation Ældre Sagen, and the passenger division of the consumer organisation Tænk.

Going downhill
Readers of the newspaper BT called the decision ‘stupid’.

The paper reports that Niels E Bjerrum, a member of the board of Movia who also sits on Copenhagen’s technical and environmental committee, has admitted that “with hindsight, not everyone sees this as a service enhancement but as a deterioration in service levels, and that was never the intention”.

The upshot is that Movia’s board have agreed to discuss the matter at their next meeting.

“As the years go by, passengers will become more digital, but perhaps we’ve been too hasty to think people were ready for this now,” added Bjerrum.