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| Kirkby Lonsdale Coach Hire's service 81 at the Kirkby terminus on first day of operation. |
Bus companies, particularly our local operators, generally do a good job of running the buses, with high levels of reliability and punctuality, when Covid and/or traffic congestion allow.
What they are not so good at sometimes is letting passengers and potential pasengers know which services are actually on offer. With ridership levels currently stalled at 80% of pre-pandemic levels and government emergency funding due to end in less than six months' time you would think that bus companies would be doing everything they could to attract passengers, as would the local authorities in whose areas they provide their valuable services.
But that isn't always the case and last weekend's service revision in the Lune Valley is a case in point, with information on the new services still hard to come by during the first full week of new timetables.
What has changed?
The changes were extensive, particularly in the Lune Valley itself where Stagecoach buses no longer operate. Kirkby Lonsdale Coach Hire now provides two services between Lancaster and Kirkby Lonsdale: 81 via Wray and Melling and 82 via Gressingham and Arkholme. The timetables are co-ordinated to form a regular hourly service between Lancaster and Hornby.
Stagecoach service 80 to Ingleton is completely withdrawn, with Kirkby Lonsdale Coach Hire running a new service 583 from Kirkby with connections from Lancaster.
Finding out the times
With nearly everyone's bus times having changed it should have been predicted that there would be a large demand for information about the new services well in advance of the introduction date. Many passengers still prefer the old-style paper timetable leaflet (it doesn't need a signal or a battery and is free to replace if you break or lose it). But anyone asking for one this week would be told "we are waiting for them to come back from the printers" - a neat way of passing the blame on to someone else, without explaining how far in advance the leaflets were ordered in the first place.
It's all online these days!
But let's not worry about such relics as paper timetables. As everone knows, these days: "it's all online". If only!
The new service network traverses the areas of three councils - Lancashire, Cumbria and North Yorkshire and many passengers or potential passengers will turn to their websites for news of what is happening to their bus service.
Lancashire
Lancashire County Council made a better job of things than the rest. It had the advantage of having issued the contract to Kirkby Lonsdale Coach Hire for services 81 and 82 back in February and has had plenty of time to advertise the change and put the new timetables on its website.
Unfortunately, the Council's website is large and unwieldy and not particularly user-friendly but with perseverence it is possible to uncover the new times.
There are drawbacks. Lancashire's information relates solely to the contracted part of the new network between Lancaster and Kirkby Lonsdale and makes no reference to the buses that continue to Settle and Skipton, or to the new service that links Kirkby Lonsdale to Ingleton anmd Bentham and replaces service 80 even though these buses serve the Lancashire commuinity of Cowan Bridge.
The second problem is that Stagecoach's service 80 and Kirkby Lonsdale's "old" service 582 seem to have been forgotten about and both are still available to view on the council's website, even though they ceased on 2nd April.
Cumbria
Cumbria County Council's area is affected only marginally by the changes with services 81 and 82 just creeping over the border into Kirkby Lonsdale. The Council has been aware of the change for some time and has put a notice on the relevant page of its website:
Unfortunately, as well as geting the date of the change wrong, the notice is still there at least two days after the change. The Bus Users' Group has supplied the Council with the new timetable (which it didn't have) and has been promised that it will be uploaded soon.
North Yorkshire
The significant North Yorkshire communities of Ingleton and Bentham are seriously affected by the changes. Ingleton loses its most direct service to Lancaster with the withdrawal of service 80 and can now only be reached from Lancaster via Kirkby Lonsdale on linked services 581 and 81/2. Bentham and Burton-in-Lonsdale have also lost service 80, which was their only regular bus service, after the Council declined to pay towards the cost of providing it, opting instead to pay for new service 583, which provides four journeys a day between Bentham, Ingleton and Kirkby Lonsdale.
Despite these changes, and the Council's involvement in them, there is NO INFORMATION whatsoever on the County Council's website to explain the changes. They have managed to remove service 80 from the timetable list, but the timetable on display for the 581 is still dated May 2021 and a search for service 583, which is now the only bus service to Burton-in-Lonsdale and Bentham draws a blank:
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| NYCCs website two days after the introduction of service 583 |
Traveline etc
Traveline and the third-party sources of information, such as Bus Times and Google Transit, draw their data from files supplied in the first place by local authorities and operators, so what they can show depends on the quality of data provided.
Once again, Lancashire seems have got things partly right, with the new 81 and 82 times in the system, although services 582, now withdrawn, is still in the system and available to view and download.
Things are not so rosy in North Yorkshire as a search for buses "from Lancaster to Ingleton" shows.
The first problem (above) is that a search for "Ingleton" throws up a menu of 30 options (including "Singleton" and "Dingleton". "Ingleton, North Yorkshire" is 17th on the list, just below "Ingleton, Durham".
But finding the right Ingleton doesn't solve the problem.
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| Service 80 lives on for Traveline |
Service 80 is still given as an option for travel between Lancaster and Ingleton three days after its withdrawal.
But what about the bus companies?
Surely the bus operators themselves will want to promote their services via their own websites. Our local operators each have a website and use it (or try to) to promote their services.
As the new operator of a new network you would suppose Kirkby Lonsdale Coach Hire would be going all-out to ensure that its customers knew about and understood the new services. But its website has been strangely silent about the forthcoming changes and continued to display the old 582 etc times after the change had taken place. The website was finally amended yesterday after an enquiry from the Bus Users Group, but only to remove the old times!
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| The 582 - now you see it - now you don't! |
Kirkby Lonsdale Coach Hire is a small (but growing) operator with a no-doubt overstretched management and admin team, but the same can't be said of Stagecoach.
Anyone hearing rumours about a change to their bus services and heading over to the Stagecoach website today would have been reassured to find that nothing had changed and that the 80 and 81 were carrying on as if nothing had happened!
Service 80 apparently carries on running to Ingleton just as it has done.
And the 81 will still take you from Lancaster to Kirkby Lonsdale at 11.00 this week, just as it did last week! (Anyone tempted to try the alternative option of the 555 at 0925 and changing at Kendal should beware - this journey runs Saturday Only until July!)
On the roadside
Lancashire CC has been very good and had replaced all the roadside displays in its area (and in Kirkby Lonsdale) before the first bus on Monday morning. The displays at Ingleton, however, don't show the amended times for the 581 or any details at all for new service 583.
Cumbria relies on Lancashire to promote the 81 82 and 581 in Kirkby Lonsdale, whilst North Yorkshire no longer updates its cases in Bentham and Ingleton (and beyond) and relies on the volunteers of the Friends of Dales Bus, supplemented by Lancaster Bus Users' Group to do so. Needless to say, all these cases are up-to-date.
The electronic departure board at Lancaster bus station, which has its data for non-Stagecoach services supplied by Lancashire County Council does not have details of the new 81 and 82 times on Monday and is still showing the old 582 departures.
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| The bus station departure board today: The 1715 582 to Hornby no longer runs and the new 81 at 1735 is missing Strangely, despite service 80 still appearing on Traveline and LCC's website the 1725 departure to Ingleton (at least) has been removed from the board. |
So where can I find the new bus times?
If all you need are the times between Lancaster and Kirkby Lonsdale then Lancashire County Council's website has them here: Service 81 Service 82
At present, the only source of comprehensive information for the whole Lancaster-Kirkby Lonsdale - Bentham - Ingleton - Skipton corridor is the very useful website of Dales Bus. Although primarily concerned with designing and funding summer Sunday "Dales Bus" services in the Yorkshire Dales National Park, the Dales & Bowland Community Interest Company is a very useful source of information on all public transport in and to and around the National Park.
Unlike any of the three county councils, or even the bus operator istelf, tDales Bus has managed to produce a timetable for Lancaster to Skipton buses, which you can find on their website here. If what you want are the times of the buses to Bentham and Burton-in-Lonsdale then they are here.
The Bus Users' Group has also make this information available on this website's Maps & Timetables page, which has details of all the new times as well as maps and timetables for all other services in the Lancaster area.
The availability of the internet means that it has never been easier for bus operators and local authorities to reach the public and to provide them with information. Why then do they seem to find it so difficult!
Our three local councils and two bus operators have, between them, managed to come up with a mish-mash of missing, out-of-date and incomplete data on changes to one the major interurban bus corridors in North Lancashire and Yorkshire.
Luckily, the "not-for-profit" (Dales Bus) and voluntary (Bus Users' Group) sectors are here to do the job for them and make sure that bus times are not "top secret" as they would be if we left it to the professionals.
