Stagecoach Announces "Temporary" Service Cuts

 

A Stagecoach bus on service 1: but is it running today?

In recent months, following the effects of Covid and Brexit,  Stagecoach has been suffering from ad-hoc cancellations of journeys.  The journeys not operated have varied from day-to-day depending on staff availability and have left many passengers inconvenienced at short notice.

Now, with the driver shortage and staff sickness continuing, the company is taking a different approach. and has  announced a list of journeys that will not be operated "until further notice". Although this will inconvenience the passengers that use those particular journeys regularly, it does at least introduce a degree of certainty into what will and will not be running.

The services selected for cuts are those on which buses are usually the most frequent or those where most parts of the route have alternative services available.  And for those who believe that the company prioritises the needs of students above everyone else, it is notable that the vast majority of cancelled journeys run to or from the University.

Here is the full list of "temporarily" cancelled journeys:

SERVICE 1

SERVICE 1 UNIVERSITY TO HEYSHAM TOWERS 14:28

SERVICE 1 UNIVERSITY TO LANCASTER BUS STATION 09:08

SERVICE 1 LANCASTER BUS STATION TO HEYSHAM 06:52, 11:53, 18:13

SERVICE 1 HEYSHAM TO LANCASTER BUS STATION 06:08

SERVICE 1 HEYSHAM TO UNIVERSITY 12:40, 15:40, 19:00

 

SERVICE 1A 

SERVICE 1A UNIVERSITY TO LANCASTER BUS STATION 13:58, 16:58, 17:30

SERVICE 1A UNIVERSITY TO HEYSHAM TOWERS 19:40

SERVICE 1A LANCASTER TO HEYSHAM TOWERS 16:43

SERVICE 1A LANCASTER BUS STATION TO UNIVERSITY 13:57, 19:07

SERVICE 1A HEYSHAM TOWERS TO UNIVERSITY 06:50, 07:35

SERVICE 1A HEYSHAM TOWERS TO LANCASTER 20:35

 

SERVICE 2X 

SERVICE 2X LANCASTER TO MORECAMBE 14:05

SERVICE 2X MORECAMBE TO LANCASTER BUS STATION 11:58

 

SERVICE 4

SERVICE 4 LANCASTER RAILWAY STATION TO UNIVERSITY 09:45

SERVICE 4 LANCASTER RAILWAY STATION TO LANCASTER BUS STATION 10:45

SERVICE 4 UNIVERSITY TO LANCASTER RAILWAY STATION 09:06, 10:24

SERVICE 4 LANCASTER BUS STATION TO UNIVERSITY 08:24

 

SERVICE 40

SERVICE 40 LANCASTER BUS STATION TO PRESTON 10:30

SERVICE 40 PRESTON TO LANCASTER BUS STATION 12:05

 

SERVICE 100

SERVICE 100 MORECAMBE TO UNIVERSITY 14:42

SERVICE 100 LANCASTER BUS STATION TO SOUTH WEST CAMPUS 10:18

SERVICE 100 SOUTH WEST CAMPUS TO MORECAMBE 10:53

SERVICE 100 SOUTH WEST CAMPUS TO LANCASTER 15:53

 

We now understand that the journeys selected are part of crew duties that do not include school runs or peak-hour journeys on infrequent services. Nevertheless, the reductions are substantial. The 18 cancelled journeys on the 1/1A represent 9% of the total Monday to Friday service on those routes as do the 5 out of 50 journeys cut from service 4, which include the usually busy 08.24 from the Railway Station to the University.

The reduction on the 2X / 100 cycle is smaller, representing 4.2% of those usually operated.

Although reducing the uncertainty of whether any particular bus will turn up, the company warns that further cancellations may still be necessary on a day-to-day basis, depending on the staff position. Conversley, it may be possible to reinstate some trips if the staff position improves.

Stagecoach Cumbria & North Lancs is currently advertising jobs for qualified bus drivers at Morecambe depot at £11.96 per hour and trainee drivers at £9.98ph rising to £11.07 when qualified and then to the full driving rates of £11.55 (Minibus) and £11.96 (big bus) after six months. Click here for more details.

Lune Valley Timetables: You Couldn't Make it Up!

New Lune Valley services:  Nice buses - shame about the publicity!

 On Monday, 4th April bus services in the Lune Valley  underwent a complete revision with major changes to timetables between Lancaster and Kirkby Lonsdale and consequential changes to services 580 and 581 between Kirkby Lonsdale and Skipton. That date also saw the withdrawal of service 80 between Lancaster and Ingleton and its partial replacement by service 583 linking Bentham with Kirkby Lonsdale. Stagecoach withdrew completely from the area, closing its Ingleton outstation, and Kirkby Lonsdale Coach Hire became the sole operator on the routres concerned.

Although the new services represented an improvement for many passengers, at least those within Lancashire, their introduction was marred by confusion over timetables and a lack of information about when buses actually ran.  We wrote about it here: (Click to read again).

The sources of information available to passengers - or more importantly, would-be passengers - are: printed timetable leaflets; roadside timetable displays; bus company websites; council websites and third party services, such as Traveline, Google Transit and various apps such as Catch that Bus or Moovit.

In the Beginning:

At the start of the new timetables the information available to the public was as follows:

Printed timetables:  None available

Roadside timetable displays in Lancashire were up to date on 4th April. Cumbria's display in Kirkby Lonsdale had not been updated and as North Yorkshire County Council no longer update their cases in Ingleton and Bentham these had been done by the Bus Users' Group and the Friends of Dales Bus on a voluntary basis, using timetable displays compiled by Dales Bus.

Stagecoach website: Former services 80 and 81 were still being shown on the "Timetables" section and in the Journey Planner.

Kirkby Lonsdale Coach Hire website:  No details of the new times and the old 582 timetable still shown. No indication of any changes having taken place.

Lancashire's website: New 81 and 82 timetables available, but former 80, 81 and 582 times still being shown as well.

Cumbria's website:  Former 81 and 82 timetables on view with a note to say that changes were expected from 1st April (which was the wrong date).

North Yorkshire's website:  Former service 80 removed, but only an out-of-date version of the 581 available and no mention of the new 583 even in the "Forthcoming Changes" section. (NYCC actually pays for the 583!)

Traveline and Third-Party websites:  The new 81 and 82 times were on the sites, but so were former services 80 and 582. The 581 was out-of-date and there waa no mention of the 583.

Three Weeks Later

So, after three weeks of the new times and routes being in operation how are the various parties performing the vital task of keeping passengers informed?

Printed Timetables:  Still no sign.  Normaly, for a supprted service Lancashire County Council would have produced leaflets for the 81 and 82, but as Kirkby Lonsdale Coach Hire was supposedly keen to promote the through services to Settle and Skipton it was agreed that they should produce something. We await the finished product with interest!

Roadside Displays: Lancashire's displays show the contracted times rather than those actually being operated by Kirkby Lonsdale Coach Hire (see below). The electronic departure board at Lancaster bus station has also not been updated, other than to remove the old Stagecoach services, so does not show times for the 81 and 82, but continues to show the 582!

The bus station board continues to show a 582 at 1715, but not the 82 at 1735.

Stagecoach website: Following a tip-off from the Bus Users' Group, Stagecoach removed the 80 and 81 timetables from its website sometime during the first week of the new times.

Kirkby Lonsdale Coach Hire website: Around the 21st April a timetable for all the new services appeared here. However, it differs from that produced by Lancashire County Council in at least two respects: An early morning Saturday journey, which KLCH say is an 81, but LCC say is an 82 running five minutes later and the 1420 service 81 from Lancaster, which KLCH, but not LCC, say goes at that time only in school holidays and on Schooldays leaves at 1400.

Cumbria has updated the 81 and 82 and removed the 582 after the Bus Users' Group sent them a copy of Lancashire's timetable, but they still don't have the current 581 or the new 583 on their site.

North Yorkshire have not made any changes to their website over what was being shown at the start of the timetables.  Neither have the Traveline or other third-party services been corrected and further investigation has shown that, incredibly, Traveline still shows the 2021 Summer Sunday service on the 580/581 which finished for the winter last October!

So where should I look for the correct times?

As ever, the best and most reliable source of information is this website! Admittedly, the existance of competing versions of the 81/82 timetable has left us in somewhat of a dilemma, but we have decided to link to the Kirkby Lonsdale Coach Hire site, partly because it is more likely to show what is actually happening, rather that what the contract requires, and partly because personal observation has shown that on schooldays the 1420 from Lancaster does in fact leave at 1400 and does, in fact, leave people behind who were expecting it to run 20 minutes later!   We also link to one of the excellent timetables on the Dales Bus website, as this shows the through journeys between Lancaster, Settle and Skipton in a way that confirms they are through buses (and have through fares) in a way that the operator's timetable doesn't.

Nul Points!

Quite frankly, the whole thing is a shambles.  Passengers first became aware that changes were afoot in the Lune Valley as long ago as last Autumn, when Stagecoach gave notice that they wished to withdraw at the end of the year. This was subsequently delayed until April to allow time for a proper look at what was needed by way of replacement and to conduct a tendering excercise, which had been done by mid-February.  The situation was then complicated by North Yorkshire County Council wishing to do its own thing in the Bentham area, which resulted in the 583 rather than a direct replacement for service 80 but even so there should have been plenty of time for all concerned to get things right.

Bus operators are required to register details of all their services and any changes to them with a body known as the Traffic Commissioners, to whom they must give 70 days' notice of any changes. Part of the reason for this is to ensure that the public are kept informed. Interestingly, the Bus Users' Group has been unable to find any record of an application being processed by the Commissiooner's office. Could it be that the National Traveline database has not been fully updated, which is why the various other information sources have failed to pick up on the changes?

But for whatever reason, the system has clearly failed, and after three weeks of operation, incorrect information is still widespread in the public domain (from one party or the other) and PEOPLE ARE STILL MISSING THEIR BUS!  And this is not a trivial matter. The six passengers that a BUG reporter witnessed at 14.20 in Lancaster bus station, hoping to catch a bus that had left at 14.00 had an hour-and-a-half to wait for the next one; whilst anyone wishing to catch the 82 from Lancaster at 0655 on a Saturday morning will not be amused to find that it left at 0650 and was an 81 anyway!

The Bus Service Improvement Plan for Lancashire promised "improvements in information and publicity" and on this eveidence these can't come soon enough.

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.

Bus Improvement Funding Cut by 80%

Lancashire County Council, jointly with with Blackburn-with-Darwen, is to receive only 20% of the funding it bid for to implement the county's Bus Service Improvement Plan.

The government's National Bus Strategy for England, "Bus Back Better", invited local authorities and bus operators to develop proposals to improve bus services through Bus Service Improvement Plans, which would be granted funding from a £3bn pot.  The Plans were to be "ambitious" and were meant to transform bus services throughout England with measures such as more bus priority schemes, more frequent services, lower fares, better buses and improved publicity and information. They were also set to transform the way in which buses are regulated, away from a "competitive" model to one where "co-operation" was more improtant.

Lancashire County Council, in a joint bid with Blackburn-with-Darwen Unitary Authority, submitted a bid for £170 million's worth of improvements but has been informed that it will recieve just £34.2m out of a reduced total of £1.1bn (down from the promised £3bn) of government money.

Independent analysis of the 79 bids submitted found that the cost of fully-funding all of them would have been somewhere between £7bn and £10bn, far outstripping the £3bn budget. That budget, however, has been progressively reduced since its announcement, with much of it going on emergency Bus Serrvice Recovery Grants to keep existing bus services operating through the pandemic.

It Could Have Been Worse

Lancashire was one of only 31 councils to receive any funding, with neighbouring Cumbria and North Yorkshire Councils receiving nothing at all.. 

In the rest of the North West, Greater Manchester will receive £94.8m and the Liverpool City Region £12.3m, but Cheshire gets nothing.

The partners to the Lancashire Enhanced Partnership (of councils and bus operators) will now need to decide which of the proposals in their Bus Servicxe Plan to take forward, although it is possible that the funding will come with strings that reduce their ability to set their own priorities rather than adopt those of the Department for Transport.

The Bus Users' Group will be discussing this at our next meeting on May 19th in Lancaster Library (start time 2pm) and we hope to have a speaker from the County Council to update us on the latest position at that time.

More details of the announcement can be seen in this article in bus industry trade journal Route One.

Lune Valley Contracts - A Correction

 

Stagecoach service 81 at Kirkby Lonsdale - but not for much longer.

In our previous post on the new bus service contracts in the Lune Valley (read again here) , we made much of the "fact" that no bus operators had submitted tenders for the new contracts and that as a result, the Council had had to negotiate a deminimis agreement.

We were therefore surprised to be contacted by a local bus operator to say that they had submitted a number of tenders, both compliant to the contract specification and with alternative proposals. A second operator has also confirmed that it submitted a tender.

Our information came from Lancashire County Council's website, specifically the "Local Bus Service Tender Results" section, which at the time of writing was displaying this document

We trust readers will agree that our interpretation that "no tenders were received" was not unreasonable!

The information and detail that councils are required to publish when it comes to tenders is highly specified and, as with many legal documents, prioritises "the letter of the law" over what an interested lay person might find useful.  Lancashire has accepted that what was initially published could have contributed to the misunderstanding.

It seems that in fact three tenders (i.e. tenders from three operators) were received and that within those three submissions there were a number of alternative options. However, after consideration of all the options, the bid finally accepted varied slightly from the specification of what was originally put out to tender.  The original tender was therefore "not awarded", and a "deminimis subsidy partnership" was entered into with Kirkby Lonsdale Coach Hire instead.

The Council has now amended the information on its website to more correctly represent the outcome of the tendering excercise.

Read it for yourself on this link

We are happy to set the record straight and apologise for our part in any confusion.

Lune Valley Contract Costs Revealed: Tendering Excercise Produces No Tenders!

  

      Kirkby Lonsdale Coach Hire will be running all the buses in the Lune Valley from April

Lancashire County Council will be spending £278,000 a year to keep buses running in the Lune Valley following Stagecoach's decision to stop its commercial services from April.

The figure was announced following the completion of a tendering excercise to secure replacement services that actually attracted no tenders, meaning that the Council had to negotiate an agreement with Kirkby Lonsdale Coach Hire.

Stagecoach has operated services 80 (Lancaster - Ingleton) and 81 (Lancaster - Kirkby Lonsdale via Melling) without subsidy since April 2016, when previous support from the council was withdrawn. The comapny received just £9,000 a year from the Council to provide an extra early-evening bus from Lancaster.

Lancashire also pays Kirkby Lonsdale Coach Hire £61,000 a year to operate service 582 between Lancaster and Kirkby Lonsdale via Gressingham and a further £35,000 a year to run Sunday buses on both routes.

It's not clear from the documents in the public domain whether or not the £278,000 replaces the payments currently being made, although the Sunday contract at least was due to continue until October 2023. The council therefore could be looking at additional costs of anywhere between £182,000 and £269,000 a year from April, when the new contracts commence, an increase of between 73% and 156%

No Tenders

It's not clear why no tenders were submitted for the work, although a number of factors may be in play. This part of Lancashire has very few bus operators capable of taking on services of this size and scope, requiring two buses running all day, seven days a week, with extra buses needed at school times. Competition for tenders is therefore limited.

Nor is it the best of times for bus operators to be taking on new commitments. Passenger levels were decimated by Covid and by the government's "Avoid Public Transport" campaign, which was unfortunately very effective. Ridership - and therefore revenue -  has since recovered only to 80% of pre-Covid levels and journeys made by concessionary pass holders, who make up a large proportion of passengers on services such as these, are stuck at 50% because elderly people appear less confident in resuming normal travel patterns.

At the time that tenders were being sought, the government's emergency Bus Service Recovery Grant was due to end in April and its future was uncertain. (It has since been extended to October). Finally, all bus operators are currently suffering from a shortage of driving staff, brought about by a combination of Covid and Brexit and are understandably reluctant to take on new work, particularly work with a contractual commitment to continue.

Fortunately, the Transport Act 1985, which requires councils to seek tenders before awarding subsidies, also allows them to negotiate directly with operators should no tenders be submitted.

North Yorkshire

Stagecoach services 80 and 81 will cease in April

Stagecoach originally gave notice of withdrawal to take effect in January and since then has been running the services under a temporary contract at a cost equivalent to £235,000 per annum. North Yorkshire County Council had been contributing 25% of that cost, meaning that if the temporary arrangements had been made permanent the cost to Lancashire would have been £177,000pa for services 80 and 81, plus of course the existing £96,000 for the 582 and the Sunday service making a total of £273,000 which is in line with the results of the tendering excercise and subsequent negotiation.

The new services, however, benefit from a more evenly-spaced timetable between Lancaster and Hornby and a regular two-hourly timetable up each side of the valley, with some buses continuing, as now, to Settle and Skipton, meaning that the link between Lancaster and Ingleton is maintained. North Yorkshire County Council, however, declined to continue its contribution (it had withdrawn its previous subsidy in 2014), meaning that service 80 will be discontinued.

Some buses will continue to run through to Settle and Skipton

NYCC has made a separate arrangement with Kirkby Lonsdale Coach Hire to provide a limited extension of the route from Lancaster to serve Bentham and Burton-in-Lonsdale from Kirkby Lonsdale, but journey times to and from Lancaster are extended with a lengthy wait for Lancaster-bound passengers at Kirkby Lonsdale.  Wennington and Wray also lose their service to their local shopping centre at Bentham as well as an afternoon workers' journey home from Lancaster on service 80.

Our Involvment

The Bus Users' Group first got involved in services in the Lune Valley in 2016, when the county council withdrew its previous support for the services. At the time, Stagecoach chose to continue to run some of the service without subsidy and we were successful in persuading the council to pay for the extra early evening journey from Lancaster that still runs and which will be included in the new contract.

Evening and Sunday buses and all services via Gressingham and Whittington were withdrawn at that stage and it took until November 2018 for the Bus Users' Group and local campaigners to get buses restored to that side of the valley. The imaginative campaigning by local residents went a long way to achieve this, with at  least two campaigners getting coverage in the national press and on radio and TV

Bus Campainger, Duncan Foster, made the national press and TV with this stunt.

In July 2020, Sunday buses returned to both sides of the Lune Valley when Lancashire increased its budget for bus service support and was also able to take advantage of the government's Better Buses Fund. A contract was awarded to Kirkby Lonsdale Coach Hire, after four operators submitted tenders, at an annual cost of £35,226 (less revenue from fares). Once again, the Bus Users' Group was instrumental in securing this service having pressed the County Council to include it in its "Better Buses Fund" improvements.

The Future

In many ways the new services will be an imprpovement on what was there before, at least in Lancashire, but we are aware that they are not perfect.

Issues include the lack of a workers' bus home from Lancaster to Wennington and Wray and the re-routing of a mid evening bus from Kirkby Lonsdale from the western side of the valley, where it was used by passengers, to the eastern bank.

The County Council has undertaken to review the new services once they have settled in and we will be taking advantage of that review to put forward any ideas for changes at that time.

As also requested by the Bus Users' Group the service numbering has been simplified and the new services will carry the following numbers seven days a week:

81 Lancaster - Hornby - Wray - Melling - Kirkby Lonsdale

82 Lancaster - Hornby - Gressingham - Whittington - Kirkby Lonsdale

The timetables for the new services are on this link.