They chose not to. All Scottish First opcos (operating companies) do this as they don't need to publicise this information.
At present they have stopped tracking altogether. It came back on a few weeks ago for a day but stopped again. I hope it eventually comes back.
Lots of operators have had a tracking outage before and came back, so probably will, but if it doesn't, it'll be a pain, as it's useful to see a day's alloctations @JumpinTrainz
Sad truth about the bigger bus groups (esp. First) who don't care about anything unless it'll raise its profits...
I see that as understandable to be fair especially in the current climate where money is a lot tighter than previous years. The irony is though that things being easier to understand and more accessible would make First gain more profit as more people would understand everything therefore actually use the buses.
They are mostly long gone. A large batch of these services (303/6/7/9/17/39/42/49/68/78 plus 817/54/58/63/70/73/74/76/77) was formally deregistered from 1 May 2021, but they had disappeared from the company's web site some time before that and are presumed withdrawn from an earlier date - I guess they may not have operated during all of the frequent Covid period changes to the mainline services.
Whilst First Glasgow is still not tracking or giving allocations on the vehicle page. I have just noticed that the stop departure lists gives vehicle ID. Screen shot below and I can confirm 64155 was on that 57a:
Yes, I used that in Aberdeen with First Aberdeen, I believe it's been around for quite a while.
As you say, yes, generally it has been around a while now across the country but I was surprised to see it still working for First Glasgow given in the vehicle list no turns are listed after 19 Apr.
True, I wonder how that's working since allocations have been down since mid-April!
I do wonder if it’ll ever update again. It did for a day but has been cut off since April. I’m not even sure how these things work or who updates them.
I had seen someone ask First's Twitter team about the possibility of open data and more advanced tracking and they received a response saying that it would be fed back to the relevant people but I don't expect much to come of it. It would benefit people so much if we had better tracking and a way of knowing what vehicle was coming when we were waiting on a bus.
I think 2 issues come from Bustimes.org though. One being the question of how many people actually know it exists and the other being the accuracy. I think there should be a 100% accurate system incorporated into the app but it would take funding for it to happen because I highly doubt First would do it otherwise.
Lets be honest, 98% of bus users probably don't care what bus is operating their service, let alone know what "64115" even means! In the current climate they just want it to turn up, and preferably not be overcrowded.
Vehicle type would help people who are new to an area, to be fair. I agree with you and that's also why I think there needs to be a new way of counting passengers off a bus. Drivers have enough to deal with as it is, so a lot of the time the number of seats free and how busy the bus actually is really doesn't match at all.
Probably all they had spare from withdrawn buses, better that than no screen working at all.
I’ll vote that it’ll remain like that.
There is still a fleetlist - https://bustimes.org/operators/first-glasgow/vehicles
Thank you for pointing this out. It wasn't there when I checked when I posted on here but it's showing fine now minus the tracking of course. Other than the testing of Yutongs, has anything else come in or out?
It was there, the fleetlist could always by accessed via the URL there just isn't the option to navigate directly to the "vehicles" page from the main "routes" page anymore; this will return once a vehicle tracks.
When I tried to click it earlier through the URL as I had it in my history, I just kept getting an error message whereas now it loaded fine. Hopefully it won't be too long before tracking starts again though.