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| The Visitor Information Centre in Lancaster |
The Visitor Information Centres (VICs) run by Lancaster City Council in Lancaster and Morecambe are closing - or as the city council prefers to say: "going digital" - from next Monday, 11th September.
This represents a serious setback in the availability of information about bus services (and, of course, many other aspects of the city's life). The VICs were the only place where one could obtain information by speaking face-to-face with a real person and with staff who were very knowledgeable about the bus service and keen to help.
Pick up a timetable
Following the closure of the Travel Shop in the bus station in 2020, they were also the only places where one could guarantee being able to pick up a timetable leaflet for almost any bus service and the Bus Users' Group knows that the staff went to considerable efforts to maintain supplies of these, sometimes in the face of apathy and lack of help from the bus companies themselves.
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| The display of bus and train leaflets in Morecambe VIC in 2018 |
Options
So following the closures, what now are the options for obtaining bus information in Lancaster?
Pick up a timetable
Following pressure from the Bus Users' Group, Stagecoach has agreed to provide a leaflet rack at Lancaster bus station, to be positioned outside the former Travel Shop, where the inspectors can keep an eye on it. |
Stagecoach's leaflet display at the bus station
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Despite the fact that bus operators now supposedly work together with each other and the county council as part of an "Enhanced Partnership", the display contains only leaflets for Stagecoach services (give-or-take the occasional Bus Users Group leaflet than somehow sneaks in!) and indeed it is of such a design that it is unsuitable for the "A4 folded to A5" leaflets that the county council produces for supported services run by Kirkby Lonsdale Coach Hire to not insignificant destinations such as Knott End or Skipton and which have been available in the VICs. It also has to be said that the rack is not always in place, but whether this is because someone forgets to put it out or whether its because they have run out of leaflets is unknown.
At one time Lancaster library was another reliable source of leaflets, but recent visits have shown only a handful of seemingly random leaflets on display and certainly none for any recent changes to services.
The Internet
There is, of course, the internet. Not everyone is comfortable with that or even capable of using it, but even those who are are likely to experience difficulty at times. Computers are only as good as the information fed into them and our recent post on publicity for services 88 and 89 to Knott End explains what can - and what has - gone wrong. Even when everything is working you won't find anything about Kirkby Lonsdale Coach Hire services on Stagecoach's website - or vice versa - whilst the County Council's timetables are buried deeply within a huge council-wide website that is not the easiest to navigate. Yiur best bets are therefore Traveline or Google Maps.
The telephone
If you still want to speak to someone in person, you could always try the telephone. Stagecoach offer a telephone enquiry service for local buses based in, er..., Perth (we think that's Perth in Scotland, not Australia, but you never know)
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| Stagecoach's call centre for Lancaster bus enquiries - in Perth! |
The Bus Users' Group has no doubt that the staff in Perth do a good job of answering questions about Lancaster's buses - as long as they are asked in such a way that they can find the answer on their computers and that enquierers don't use too many local names for places that the computer knows only by their "official" ones. We know from experience however, that if you ask them about something that they can't find online themselves - and which requires up-to-date, local knowledge - they can't really help.
Our other operator, Kirkby Lonsdale Coach Hire, will have that detailed local knowledge and will be able to tell you just about everything you need to know about the company's buses - but of course they won't be able to tell you anything about Stagecoach services.
The City Council suggests you use its special website to find out everything that the VICs will no longer to able to help you with. It's called www.visitlancaster.org.uk and we gave it a try to see how easy it will be to find out about buses after the VICs close.
Assuming you can work out under which of the subject headings bus information is likely to fall...
It actually comes under "visitor information" , which local people may not feel appropriate, but there you will find a section called "Getting Here" (even if what you are actually trying to do is to find a bus to get somewhere else). This then tells you:
Basically it says, "don't bother us...go and ask someone else". The information on how to get here by car takes up three times as much space and even details on how to get to Lancaster "by air" (via Manchester or Liverpool airports if you were wondering) takes up just as much room.
Digital Screens
The Council says that the services of these specially trained staff at the VICs will be replaced by a number of "digital screens", of which we can only say that we hope they work better than the one at Lancaster railway station, which has been unable to display bus service information ever since it was installed
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The seemingly permanent "connection problem" that results
in a lack of bus information at the railway station |
We understand that closing the VICs will save the council £250,000 a year or 0.8% of its £20M+ budget. A classic case of decisions made by people who know the price of everything but the value of nothing!
