There have been a number of developments at the bus station lately, all of them positive!
Firstly, and most welcome is the re-opening of the refreshment kiosk, which has had a complete refurbishment and is now under new management. The chance to get a cup of tea and a snack whilst waiting for a bus is greatly welcomed by passengers.
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| The kiosk is now open again. |
Passengers also find the electronic bus departure board very useful, especially now it has "real time information" added, although it would be even better if all buses were being tracked in "real time"
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| The display board with real time information added (on some departures) |
The board is maintained by IT specialists at Lancaster University, who took on the task when the County Council shut down the previous board to save a little bit of cash. The Bus Users Group works with the team at the University to improve the way information is presented on the board. We are aware of some problems, such as service 80 going to "Community Centre" (which is actually in Ingleton) and the 81 going to "Booth's Supermarket" (which is the one in Kirkby Lonsdale and not the one in Hala (or Milnthorpe or Carnforth for that matter!). Getting these put right is taking some time as the board uses information from the national public transport dataset and tracking down the right people who deal with these out-of-county locations has not been easy. But we are working on it! In the meantime, if you do spot anything else that could be improved or needs correcting please let us know by leaving a comment below.
We now have a link from this website directly to the board, so you can see what it is showing at any moment from wherever you and your "device" happen to be. It can be found at the top of the right-hand sidebar, just above the similar links to the train departure boards at local stations or by clicking on the link below.
Last, but by no means least the Bus Users Group now has its own display board! Ours is a non-electronic version and uses good old paper-and-ink, but we can use it to explain the work of the group, advertise our meetings and forthcoming events and for promoting bus services in and around the city. The poster case was kindly donated and erected by Lancaster City Council and we are also grateful to the Facilities Department at Lancaster University for help in preparing the contents. If there is anything you'd particularly like to see shown in the case then please let us know. You'll find it on the left, just inside the Damside Street entrance near the telephones.