Flixbus Comes to Lancaster

Thanks to the vigilance of our publicity officer, Alex, we can report that Lancaster will be served by a third long-distance coach operator when a new Glasgow to London coach service starts calling in the city, or at least on its outskirts, from 29th April.

The newcomer is "Flixbus", a German company that already operates a wide network of services throughout Europe and a growing number of routes in the UK. The company also owns the famous Greyhound Lines coach service in the USA.

As with existing operator Megabus, which until recently was part of the Stagecoach group, Flixbus coaches will call at Lancaster University rather than the city centre, which perhaps gives a hint of where both operators see their target markets.  Similarly, both provide a single journey in each direction, although they do follow slightly different routes.

So how do the two compare?

Flixbus coaches will leave Glasgow (Buchanan Bus Station) at 0830 every morning, except Wednesday and Thursday and run non-stop to Lancaster University, calling there at 1140. From Lancaster, the coaches will call at Preston (Coach Station) 1220; Manchester (Shudehill Bus Stn) 1340; Birmingham (Dudley Street) 1605; London (Finchley Road) 1835 and London (Victoria Coach Station) at 1910 giving a Glasgow to Lancaster journey time of 3h 10m and a Lancaster to London time of 7h 30

Northbound coaches leave London at 1000 and call at Finchley Road 1030; Birmingham 1255; Manchester 1520; Preston 1635; Lancaster University 1720 and arrive at Glasgow at 2030.  The Lancaster call, at 1720, is right in the middle of the afternoon peak for students leaving the campus and the Flixbus coaches may not be exactly welcome there at such a busy time.

Not much room for Flixbus during the afternoon peak in the Underpass.

At the moment, bookings are being taken only for journeys up until 23rd May, so times and days of operation may change after then.

The Megabus service, which runs daily, provides an earlier northbound journey and a later southbound one.  Coaches leave Glasgow (Buchannan Bus Station) at 1100 and run non-stop to Lancaster University at 1405. They then call at Preston (Coach Station) at 1445; Manchester (Shudehill) 1550; Manchester Airport 1630; Birmingham (Navigation Street) 1810 and London, Victoria Coach Station at 2105.

Megabus is just five minutes faster than Flixbus between Glasgow and Lancaster at 3h 05m but half-an-hour faster to London, despite calling additionally at Manchester Airport.

Northbound coaches leave Victoria Coach Station at 0800, Birmingham at 1045, Manchester Airport 1230, Manchester 1300, Preston 1410, Lancaster University 1450 and Glasgow at 1805.

Note that the stopping places may not be always where you expect them, with neither Megabus nor Flixbus using the coach stations used by National Express in Manchester or Birmingham.  In the former city they call at Shudehill Bus Station, which is near Victoria Railway Station and which has a convenient tram stop attached to enable access to other parts of the city centre.

In Birmingham, both eschew the delights of the much-improved Digbeth Coach Station, well-known to generations of coach travellers, in favour of obscure (and frankly, unwelcoming), side streets.

The Flixbus stop in Dudley Street

The Megabus stop "Navigation Street"
(actually just round the corner in Brunel Street)

How do fares compare?

As with all long-distance public transport today, the answer to "How much does it cost" is "It depends!"

Both Flixbus and Megabus use yield-management techniques to offer cheaper fares on less popular timings and higher fares where demand is expected to be greatest.  At present, Flixbus will have no direct experience of demand on which to base their prices (although they will have been keeping an eye on their competitor's fares). Initially, they seem to be offering single fares between Lancaster and London for either £19.99 or £24.99 depending on the date, although you have to add a £1 "service fee" to actually obtain a ticket.  Full details of fares and times are on the website www.flixbus.co.uk, but be careful: if you go instead to flixbus.com  you'll be offered fares in US Dollars. You'll also get the times in the 12-hour clock format still used in America, rather than the more familiar 24hr-clock system.

Megabus is offering fares to London at £18.50 (£17.50 in the return direction) at the moment, but once again there is a "booking fee" of £1.  Fares on both operators are likely to change once competition begins.

Can I reserve a seat?

On Megabus a small number of the more desirable seats towards the front of the coach is available to reserve at a small additional cost. All other seats are on a first-come-first-served basis, although one assumes that the number of tickets sold will not exceed the number of seats!  The Megabus website is here.

Flixbus offers the opportunity to reserve a specific seat, chosen from a seating plan, at a cost of 99p (although seats in the front row will cost you £2.49). They also offer anti-social passengers the prospect of "travelling neighbour free" by reserving the adjacent seat, but the examples we found involved payment of an extra £18.74 (almost another single fare) to do so. 

Both operators have seating plans on view, from which it is apparent that Flixbus will be using conventional single deck coaches, whereas Megabus favours double-deckers with most seats on the upper deck.  Unlike, Megabus, Flixbus does not own its own vehicles, but hires them in from contractors, so actual seating plans may vary.

But What of National Express?

Britain's best-known long-distance coach operator, which this year celebrates its 50th birthday, withdrew its last daytime service from Lancaster to London just before the Covid-19 pandemic struck in 2020.It now offers Lancaster passengers only calls on its overnight Glasgow to Birmingham service 181. Unlike the newcomers, National Express does at least call at the city centre Bus Station (or, more exactly just outside it on the "Night Stand" in Damside Street) but the timings of 0240 Southbound and 0300 Northbound may not be thought the most convenient and a change at Birmingham is required to reach London.  The National Express website is here.

Meanwhile, trains from Lancaster taking just 2h 30m to reach London run regularly throughout the day and if you can book in advance and be a bit flexible about when you travel you can get there for around £34 or £21.75 with a railcard.

Buses: The Secret Service

 

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:

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.

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!

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.

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.