Passengers spared bus cuts (From Swindon Advertiser)

QUOTE
Ian Manning, the managing director of Stagecoach West, said: “After spending 20 years developing these tendered service routes we could not let them fall by the wayside due to Government spending cuts
UNQUOTE
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I don't wish to be rude and perhaps I am missing something, but if Stagecoach have been spending 20 years trying to develop a route and it is still not comercially viable, then maybe it should be allowed to fail.
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Neither the government, the council or Stagecoach are a charity. They are spending our money here.

The Real Librarian is obviously not a bus user, who relies on the buses to get home from work. The bus company should be congratulated in trying to keep the buses running, even without money from the council.

Well done to Stagecoach for keeping them running......for now. I use the No7 from Highworth quite a bit and during shopping hours on Sunday they are well used. How dare politicians lecture us on our carbon footprints and tell us to use public transport more when they are cutting it left right and centre, greedy incompetant hypocrites the lots of them.

They want less cars poluting the roads,, the way thamesdowns bus fares are rising ,30p on top for a day rider it will be cheaper to run a car rather than use the bus all week

Dazz27 wrote:
They want less cars poluting the roads,, the way thamesdowns bus fares are rising ,30p on top for a day rider it will be cheaper to run a car rather than use the bus all week

Well if you're using a bus ALL week then you can get a weekly travel pass for £13 (£1.85 per day), which is unaffected by any rises and gives you unlimited travel. Get monthly or three monthly and it's even cheaper.

So could you please tell me what car you have which has maintenance, insurance, depreciation and petrol costs which work out at less than £2 per day for unlimited journeys in Swindon? Also what petrol station do you go to which hasn't increased fuel prices for the last 2.5 years (when there was last a fare rise)?

So, this is another case of horrible, nasty and mean 'cuts' that actually aren't happening at all?
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Seems to be something of a frequent scenario, this.

Dare I say this could just be about political affiliations once again.

Well ,if they have any under-used buses next year then they should consider sending them up to London to ferry all the IOC delegates and hangers-on , Sep Blatter et al. , around the Olympic sites instead of using chauffeur-driven gas guzzlers !!!

Phantom Poster wrote:

Dazz27 wrote:
They want less cars poluting the roads,, the way thamesdowns bus fares are rising ,30p on top for a day rider it will be cheaper to run a car rather than use the bus all week

Well if you're using a bus ALL week then you can get a weekly travel pass for £13 (£1.85 per day), which is unaffected by any rises and gives you unlimited travel. Get monthly or three monthly and it's even cheaper.

So could you please tell me what car you have which has maintenance, insurance, depreciation and petrol costs which work out at less than £2 per day for unlimited journeys in Swindon? Also what petrol station do you go to which hasn't increased fuel prices for the last 2.5 years (when there was last a fare rise)?

Oh, I also forgot road tax and parking charges!

Let's face it, if bus fares were just 20p per day for unlimited travel and they put them up by 1p, then you'd still get people on here complaining!

Quite right, Phantom Poster

If the bus has enough demand it's obviously sensible to run it. If not, it's not. Neither Stagecoach nor Thamesdown employ Rocket Scientists simply because the obvious is obvious. Running empty or almost empty buses is not sensible from either an economical or environmetal viewpoint.

Sadly the story was heavily skewed left-wards as it was written by the heavily-lefty Adam Kula (he of "labour are the clear winners" fame). Shame.

georgiegirl5 wrote:
The Real Librarian is obviously not a bus user, who relies on the buses to get home from work. The bus company should be congratulated in trying to keep the buses running, even without money from the council.

You are wrong as it happens, but I am also a council tax payer.

The Real Librarian wrote:
QUOTE Ian Manning, the managing director of Stagecoach West, said: “After spending 20 years developing these tendered service routes we could not let them fall by the wayside due to Government spending cuts UNQUOTE . I don't wish to be rude and perhaps I am missing something, but if Stagecoach have been spending 20 years trying to develop a route and it is still not comercially viable, then maybe it should be allowed to fail. . Neither the government, the council or Stagecoach are a charity. They are spending our money here.

sound about right to me. why would you keep these routes running when they dont make money/cover costs. if people want to live further away from town centres they should be able to make their own way not rely on heavily subsidised public transport. common sense to scale down some of these routes imo.

Why not use smaller mini buses on the more lightly used routes? Or as they do in some rural areas in this country have a system where you book up teh bus in advance to call at your village? I think they use this in Cornwall.

captain
Too technical for Swindon.

Excuse the long post....

Good on Stagecoach for publicly stating that they are willing to continue these routes, at least for the mean time.

Once again disappointing that SBC continually fail to see the social and economic benefits in driving modal shift to public transport, or at least if they do failing to prioritise them - and it's not for want of money, only tonight I am expecting ratification of a proposal to effectively lose £500k from SBC's coffers by maintaining reduced town centre parking charges for a further year - all based on a report regarding footfall in a commercial shopping centre that may or may not be linked to alterations to parking charges (rising footfall could as easily be linked to the rising cost of road fuel, meaning that Swindon residents are choosing to shop closer to home, rather than driving to Cribbs Causeway, Bath or Cheltenham, as examples). On top of which even if SBC collect additional Business Rates as a result of additional spend in local shops that money is pooled nationally, so there is no direct financial benefit to Swindon there either... ...happy days...

I am not for a minute suggesting that everyone should stop driving, politically no one is going to enforce that. It's about giving people choice, and a modal shift to attractive public transport improves the situation for all. If you do drive around Swindon, particularly at peak times, compare your morning drive during the school holidays to one when the schools are in - a pretty big difference? - I'd say so. So imagine if a proportion of your fellow drivers decided that they'd rather not bother with having to drive themselves to work every day and chose to take the bus instead, suddenly your road is clearer and they get a journey with an opportunity to do a bit of reading or whatever on the way.

The key problem here is the structure of the bus industry in the UK (outside of London) which was effectively de-regulated from October 1986. This means that unlike many other networks (such as Gas, Electricity, Water) and public transport networks in every other civilised country on the planet (no, really - even the others that followed the de-regulated model, such as New Zealand, have backed out of it) there is no formal central planning, bus services are registered based on the decisions made by each operator, with public funding filling in some gaps in the network. Imagine if each electricity supplier had to run a cable off their own system to each of their customers houses (and change them over when customers changed suppliers!), there would be chaos. In terms of funding the electricity supply network there are parts of the network where cables are highly profitable (e.g. a short cable run supplying many power hungry customers) and parts where it isn't (i.e. a long cable run out to one isolated customer who uses little power) - however we don't question the economics of supplying the isolated customer, cross-subsidy within the network comes into play and the highly profitable parts of the network balance the unprofitable parts of the network.

In public transport terms this means a lean authority implements strategic policy through tactical planning of timetables and fares and contracts operators to provide services. The operators planning extends to vehicle and driver rosters to meet the requirements of the contract in the most efficient way for the operator. This has proved to be the most effective structure for achieving modal shift, most notably in Zurich (and the surrounding Canton of Zurich) plus cities such as Toronto.

On-road 'de-regulated' competition has proven in the UK (and elsewhere where it has since been reversed) to be an utter failure, resulting in generally declining custom, and the situation of commercial operators chasing the easiest most profitable traffic - with farcically inefficient scenarios such as two operator's half empty vehicles chasing each other down the road every half hour for the available traffic, with no inter-availability of return tickets between each operator. You may well ask what the benefit of this is - a planned network could define that a half-hourly service was appropriate and deliver effectively the same service with half the resources or alternatively deliver a bus every 15 minutes with the same resources. Urban public transport is what economists refer to as a 'natural monopoly' - i.e. competition in the direct delivery to the customer results in inefficiencies and ultimately a worse situation for the customer.

If you really want to know more (I know most won't :-) ) you should read 'Transport for Suburbia' by Paul Mees, an excellent text looking at the structures behind failing public transport (including the de-regulated UK bus industry) and those behind the success stories such as that in the Canton of Zurich.

Oh and if you want to knock the policies of Swindon Borough Council go and look at the public transport provision in similar sized Oxford or slightly larger Reading and try telling me that SBC are doing a good job of offering modal choice....