Change in the timetable – Sven misses the train every day

“And the bus home”

A change in Skånetrafiken’s timetable has led to confusion for Sven Hedberg.

Since mid-December, he spends a total of six hours every day on the move.

– It’s frustrating, of course, but I try to see the humor in it, says commuter Sven Hedberg.

For a year and a half, Sven Hedberg has commuted between Osby, Boalt and Malmö in Scania, where he is studying at the university to become a high school teacher. Although the journeys have been long, an hour and a half each way, they have gone without a hitch – the changes have been well planned. The bus from Boalt to Osby with a change to the train that takes him south towards Malmö has missed by less than ten minutes margin.

But Sven’s daily itinerary has been thrown out of whack, as Northern Scania previously reported on. In mid-December, Skånetrafiken changed its timetable and Sven now misses the crucial connection by a few minutes in both directions.

– It is cracking. The change means that the one-way journey now takes two and a half hours one way, he says.

Watching the train leave from the bus

Now the train leaves for Malmö just before Sven has reached Osby. Two minutes before the bus arrives, the train leaves the platform. He can see it leaving from the bus window.

– It’s frustrating, of course, but I try to see the humor in it.

Sven now waits for connections for two out of a total of six hours on his daily route. And the worst is when he has compulsory classroom exams in the afternoon, he says.

– If they finish around noon, I won’t come home and have to sleep over with someone in Malmö.

On the way home, it’s the same but in reverse. Then the bus leaves approximately ten minutes before the train arrives. When everything clicked, it went instead ten minutes later

– So I miss the train and the bus every day, says Sven.

“Can give up studies”

Sven contacted Skånetrafiken before the change and has contacted them after the change, but to no avail.

– They say that it is a group that is planning to get everything right, but when there is only one train and one bus back and forth per hour, it is not reasonable for Skånetrafiken to brag about developments to make other connections go faster.

– We are many commuters who are affected only here.

Can you adapt to the new times in any other way?

– No, since I don’t have a driver’s license, I can’t do much.

– I can give up my studies and try to do something else. But that doesn’t make much sense because more secondary school teachers are needed.

Skånetrafiken: “We really regret”

In an email to Aftonbladet, Skånetrafiken states that the change to the timetable occurs every year during so-called “timetable shifts”. And just this year, the timetables for trains have been adjusted a lot due to new tracks that have been connected between the Malmö-Lund and Helsingborg-Ängelholm routes.

They further write that the timetables must, in addition to bus traffic, match other train traffic, which Skånetrafiken is not responsible for and means that they “sometimes end up in situations where we cannot get optimal connections between all departures”.

The train connection for Sven’s line had to be deprioritised in favor of another.

“When it comes to buses to and from Osby station, the choice was to prioritize between line 545 and line 539. Then we chose to prioritize the train connection for line 545 because this line has a higher number of passengers both to and from Osby than line 539,” writes Linda Herkel , press communicator at Skånetrafiken.

“We are aware that the connection between bus and train was not good for line 539. We really regret that it turned out this way and that he and several other customers are affected. This is not good at all but unfortunately there is no simple solution to the problem”.

What are you doing to solve the connection problems that have arisen for commuters on bus route 539 going south towards Malmö?

“There is no simple solution to the problem of train passing on line 539. We are trying to find a temporary solution to the problem, but we have not yet found it,” writes Skånetrafiken.