"Weeks Not Months" hope for Service 18 Improvement

Service 18 at the Bus Station

Kirkby Lonsdale Coach Hire service 18 is the only bus service to a large part of east Lancaster. Despite this, since June 2015 it has been reduced to a handful of journeys per day and has been of minimal benefit to local residents. It has continued in this way despite large sums of money being made available to the County Council by housing developers to improve it.  For the full story read here.

But yesterday the Bus Users' Group attended a meeting in County Hall, Preston together with senior County Council officers; County Councillor John Fillis (Cabinet Member for Highways & Transport); County Councillor Gina Dowding (Lancaster Central and a BUG member); County Councillor Lizzie Collinge (Lancaster East); Lancaster City Councillor Tim Hamilton-Cox (also a BUG member) and even Cat Smith MP!

With all the top brass present, the Bus Users' Group was hopeful of a satisfactory outcome and we were not disappointed.  The Council officers initial position was that all the highways works that the developers' money was also provided for would have to be completed and the actual costs established before they would know how much money was available to enhance the bus service.

This was clearly nonsense and the BUG was able to show the Cabinet Member that there was no reason why the two parts of the project could not proceed in tandem, with officers using their available budget estimates to establish the level of bus service that could be afforded.

Councillor Fillis then instructed the officers to set aside a sum of money to allow the timetable enhancement on service 18 to go ahead. The proposal is to run a service every 30 minutes on the existing service 18 route between about 7am and 6pm on Mondays to Saturdays. The sum of money mentioned appears enough - with other money known to be in the pipeline -  to run the new timetable for long enough to establish viablility. When the BUG Chair asked how long it would be before the new timetable was introduced there was no definite commitment, but the officers agreed it could be "weeks not months".

The Council will have to seek tenders from bus operators and will need to get the service registered with the Traffic Commissioners so we won't see anything this side of Christmas  but it does appear that the end of this whole sorry saga is now in sight!

Stagecoach Announces Christmas Services

With still over a month to go, Stagecoach has announced details of its Christmas and New Year bus services. This year there is a better service on Boxing Day, with enhanced Sunday timetables operating on Lancaster services  2A  3A (Lancaster - Heysham)  6A  40  and 55 and a normal Sunday timetable on service 555. There are stil no services on Christmas Day or New Year's Day. At present the details are buried deep in the company's website (under "Regional promos (sic) and offers" so we have extracted them for you here:

Saturday 24th December 2016

We will run a normal Saturday timetable on all services but service 2/2A, 3/3A/4, 6/6A, 40/41 and 55 will finish around 2000.  Last journeys for services finishing early are below

All other services will run their normal Saturday timetable.

Service 2/2A: Lancaster Bus Station - University 19:19, Lancaster Bus Station - Heysham Towers 19:31, Lancaster Bus Station - Morecambe Battery 19:31, Lancaster Bus Station - Torrisholme Square 20:11

Service 3/3A: Lancaster Bus Station - Morcambe 19:05, Morecambe Battery - Lancaster 19:35

Service 6/6A: Lancaster Bus Station - Morecambe Bus Station 19:05, Morecambe Bus Station - Lancaster Bus Station 19:32

Service 40/41: Morecambe Bus Station -Preston 18:10, Lancaster Bus Station - Preston 18:30, Lancaster Bus Station - Galgate 18:30, Preston - Lancaster 19:40

Service 55: Lancaster - Carnforth 20:00, Carnforth - Lancaster 20:23

Service 555: Lancaster - Kendal 19:30, Kendal - Lancaster Bus Station 18:05

Sunday 25th December 2016

No services will run on Christmas Day.

Monday 26th December 2016 - WE'RE RUNNING ON BOXING DAY!

A special Boxing day timetable will run on Service  2A, 3A, 6A, 40 and 55. Service 555 will run a Sunday timetable. No other service will run today. 

View Boxing Day timetables for services in Lancaster.

Tuesday 27th December 2016

We will run a Sunday timetable on all services. 

Wednesday 28th, Thursday 29th and Friday 30th December 2016

We will run a normal Monday - Friday timetable. 

Saturday 31st December 2016

We will run a normal Saturday timetable on all services but service 2/2A, 3/3A/4, 6/6A, 40/41 and 55 will finish around 2000.  All other services will run their full timetable. Last journeys in Lancaster are the same as Christmas Eve.

Sunday 1st January 2017

No services will run on New Years Day.

Monday 2nd January 2017

We will run a Sunday timetable on all services.

Tuesday 3rd January 2017

All services are back to normal from today.

The Bus Users' Group would like to congratulate Stagecoach for making this information available sufficiently far in advance to allow people to plan their travel over the Christmas period (although perhaps it could be made just a little more prominent on the website?)

New Hope for Service 18 Improvement?

The Bus Users' Group is pleased to announce that some progress appears to be being made on improving the bus service to east Lancaster after the County Council has sat on available funding for almost five years. Now, with additional section 106 money coming from another development it looks, at last,  as if something might actually happen.  For the full story read on:

Standen Park

Bus service 18 links Lancaster City Centre with Moorlands, Williamson Park, Lancaster Leisure Park, Lancaster Farms Prison and Ridge as well as the Standen Park housing development on the former Moor Hospital site.

In 2012, Lancaster City Council received £500,000 funding from the developers of Standen Park under section 106 of the Town and County Planning Act 1991 to improve the bus service to the development and for improved provision for cyclists and pedestrians.  The objective of such funding is to provide alternatives to car use for residents of the new homes and therefore to mitigate the environmental effect of the development.

At the time, service 18 was subsidised by Lancashire County Council and operated once an hour during daytime on Mondays to Saturdays.  The section 106 money would have allowed the frequency of the service to be at least doubled and for evening and Sunday journeys to be added. However, despite the receipt of the money no action was taken. In 2014, the service operator, Kirkby Lonsdale Coach Hire decided to run this and other city services on a commercial basis, thereby ending the County Council's involvement.

Unfortunately, service 18 did not prove to be a commercial success for Kirkby Lonsdale Coach Hire and in June 2015 it was reduced to four journeys a day. Again, despite a request from the Bus Users' Group, the County Council refused to take any action to replace the withdrawn journeys, despite the £500,000 being still available, Instead, it announced that the bulk of the funding would  be spent on an improvement to the junction of Wyresdale Road / Quernmore Road / East Road and Moor Gate, despite this not being the purpose for which the money was provided. This work was undertaken over the summer of 2016 and is now complete although the County has refused to divulge the cost and therefore identify how much money may be left for the bus service.

In the meantime another housing development - the Miller Homes site at Lancaster Leisure Park - has come on stream with additional section 106 money being made available to enhance the number 18.

In order to prevent further delays, the Bus Users' Group informed the County Council's Public Transport Team and asked them to take action internally to secure this new money and apply it for the purpose for which it is intended.

It now appears that County has been speaking to at least one local operator and is "awaiting feedback on options" to improve the service.  This is the first sign that any action is being taken by LCC almost five years after the initial funding became available. Whilst we accept that some time will have to be taken to ensure that the new money is spent wisely we will continue to press the council to bring about an early improvement to the service.

The Bus Users' Group has also been invited to attend a meeting at County Hall in Preston with the Council's Cabinet Member for Highways & Transport and County Councillors to discus the original section 106 funding and, hopefully, to ensure that whatever is left of it is now allocated to its intended purpose.

BUG Says "Thank You" to Local Councillors

The Bus Users' Group has received a grant of £100 from both County Councillor Gina Dowding (Green Party, Lancaster Central) and County Councillor Lizzie Collinge (Labour Party, Lancaster East) from the Local Members Grants that each Councillor can award to local groups working to benefit local people.  The grants will help to meet the running costs of the Group and enable us to increase our work on behalf of bus passengers throughout the District.

The Bus Users' Group would like to place on record its thanks to Cllrs. Dowding and Collinge.

Large Fall Reported in Lancashire Bus Passengers

The number of passengers using buses in Lancashire fell by 5% in 2015/16 compared to the previous year according to statistics released by the Department of Transport. There were 2.5 million fewer journeys made by bus in the administrative county, which excludes Blackburn and Blackpool as well as those areas administered separately since 1974, with the total falling to 47.6 million per annum.

The drop was significantly greater than in each of the two previous years, when the reduction was around 3% per annum. Since 2009/10 the county has lost a whopping 22% of its bus passengers with only one authority in the North West region reporting a steeper decline.

In the North West as a whole the  reduction was just under 3% for the year and 11% since 2009/10 meaning that Lancashire's loss of passengers is twice the regional average. Only Warrington in the North West has done worse, losing almost 13% passengers in the year and over a third of all passengers since 2009/10

For England as a whole bus passenger journeys have fallen only 2.5%  due to the inclusion of London in the figures, where a huge financial investment in new buses, extra services, modern payment systems such as Oyster and contactless bank cards, as well as the sheer difficulty in using cars in the city, had led to steady growth until 2014/15, although even here the last year has seen a decline.

The Department's report doesn't attempt to explain the figures but the years since 2009/10 (and long before) have seen steady above-inflation increases in bus fares and reductions in services, with rural services being particularly badly affected as councils have sought to reduce or even eliminate funding for non-commercial services.  A further factor has been the falling price of motoring, particularly fuel, which despite very recent increases has been very cheap for the last few years with oil prices falling and government reluctance to increase fuel duty.  None of these, however, would seem to explain why Lancashire has done so much worse than the rest of the region or England as a whole.

As for the future, at least one major operator, Stagecoach, has frozen its fares for the current financial year and has introduced better-value fares for young people, which should encourage extra journeys. However the effect of this could well be overturned by the withdrawal of many bus services no longer paid for by the County Council following  the cuts in April this year.  The decline is therefore likely to continue.

The Department for Transport's report is available via this link  (see table BUS0109 Passenger journeys by local authority area England)

Trials and Tribulations at the Bus Station

Lancaster bus station is equipped with a very useful overhead electronic display screen, telling passengers the times of buses due to depart, their destinations and which stand to find them at. It's particularly useful for those who have a choice of services and just need to know which one will be next without traipsing round several stands to consult - and remember - the paper departure lists. New and occasional passengers also find it very useful, but recent developments mean they should take care!

Having been abandoned by the County Council as part of its expenditure cutbacks the screen is now maintained by Lancaster University, with funding from United Utilities after a campaign by passengers to get it reinstated.  The University has the laudable aim of adding Real Time information to the display so that users know not just the time the bus is due to leave, but a prediction of when it might actually do so.  Stagecoach has recently made this information available via its website using data collected from GPS-equipped ticket machines that continuously report their position - and therefore that of the bus - allowing information as to where the bus is to where the timetable says it should be - and it is this that the University is attempting to incorporate onto the system.

Following a revamp earlier in the year the departure screens looked like this:

Only scheduled departure times were shown and the destinations were shown in an odd way that prioritised the stop location over the town the bus was heading for. So in the image above the 1900, 1928, and two 1930 departures are all shown as going to "Bus Station" and only in parentheses to their actual destinations of Preston, Morecambe, Kendal and, er...Lancaster - this last being another failure of the system that appears to consider several Lancaster local services as circulars, which they aren't.

At the beginning of October the screen layout was changed to incorporate real time information, where this was available.

It showed scheduled times of departure and in the next column either "on time" or, as in the case of the 1658 service 2 to Heysham (top right), a predicted actual time, although this would have been more useful if the journey concerned had been shown in timetable order (i.e. before the 1700 to the University on the left hand side of the display) rather than predicted time order). 

As can be seen from the image a significant number of buses had no real time prediction shown, presumably due to a breakdown in communication somewhere between the on-bus GPS signal and the display itself. What isn't so apparent however is that several significant services seem to have disappeared from the screen altogether - The 1710 service service 40 to Preston, 1715 service 80 to Ingleton and 1715 service 555 to Ambleside are all missing!

Following an email from the Bus Users Group, more recently the Display has reverted to scheduled times only

Some of our concerns appear to have been acted upon. Buses now go to "Morecambe (Bus Station)" and "Preston (Bus Station)" etc rather than the other way round (although the 49 seems to go to "Railway Station (Carnforth)")  and local services 7 and 11  go to "Vale Estate" and "Marsh Estate" rather than Lancaster Bus Station. Service 41 to Preston has reappeared but some important services are still missing such as 555 to Keswick (no 1115 departure shown above) and 81 to Kirkby Lonsdale (again no 1115 departure). A separate visit also showed a service 42 departure to Blackpool shown incorrectly as heading to Garstang, due to a failure by the system to cope with the fact that service 42 is registered as two separate services either side of the town, whilst buses operate as a through service.

After the Bus Users Group pointed out that the system appeared to be being tested on an unsuspecting public some notices have appeared warning that "some of the departure stands shown for services may not be correct"  but as yet there is nothing to warn passengers that several important services are missing altogether.

The Bus Users Group strongly supports the incorporation of real time data into the display and welcomes the initiative by the University to do so. We hope that the system will be fully up and running very shortly - and that ALL services from the Bus Station will be included in it!

Park and Ride Set to Fail?

Lancaster's first Park & Ride scheme is due to open later this month (or early next?), being required as a planning condition of the construction of the Heysham Link Road.  The service will link a dedicated car park site adjacent the remodelled Junction 34 of the M6 with the City Centre, although full details have not yet been made public. Even the offical Cabinet Member Report that authorises the service is short on detail but from what little information has been provided it appears that the service is, perhaps intentionally, perhaps through lack of expertise, being set up to fail.

Park & Ride is a long-established concept in the UK with many cities and large towns running successful schemes taking traffic out of central areas. As one would expect a great deal of research has been done into what makes schemes successful, but one such report - from the prestigious Chartered Institute of Highways & Transportation. (CIHT) on what constitues best practice suggests that Lancashire County Council, for whatever reason, hasn't got it right.

So how does the Lancaster Scheme compare with "best practice"?

CIHT's Report suggests that:

Park and ride facilities should be sited at convenient locations, intercepting the main radial routes of the conurbation it services, preferably with a dedicated high quality bus service. The sites need to have prominent advanced signage with good accessibility whilst providing attractive and secure parking facilities including adequate lighting incorporating CCTV coverage. Toilets and real time information are "desireable" though not "essential"

Lancashire Proposes:

A 650-car site, incliuding 60 disabled spaces,lighting and CCTV columns, fencing and landscaping, road markings and traffic signs as well as (unspecified) "bus shelters".

Comment: The site meets the "convenience" requirement being at the junction of M6 and Caton Road and it appears that lighting and traffic signage (of whatever quality) are to be provided. Note, however, the curious reference to CCTV "columns" and the inference that cameras and, importantly, camera monitoring are not automatically included! Toilets and Real Time Information will not be provided.

As for the "High Quality Bus Service" CIHT suggests:

The sites should be welcoming and provide high quality waiting areas, toilets and information points (real time information and toilets were considered to be desirable but not essential). In addition, waiting times should be no more than 8 to 10 minutes (10-15 minutes maximum off peak) and the number of dedicated buses used should ideally be sufficient to ensure that one is waiting at each park and ride site. Route lengths need to be carefully co-ordinated and designed, incorporating a limited number of intermediate stops conveniently located at popular locations.

Park and ride services are generally being provided from 07.00 until 19.00 with varying arrangements at weekends. Weekend provision depends largely on the activity and demand in the town centre together with the associated on and off-street parking charge policy. Clearly, free or low parking charges in the town centre will reduce the demand for services and fewer services are provided on Sundays, except on special occasions.

Comment

In place of "high-quality waiting areas", Lancashire is proposing an unspecified number of bus shelters, which may or may not be fully enclosed and contain seating and lighting.

Instead of "waiting times being no more than 8 to 10 minutes"  Lancashire proposes a bus every 30 minutes, which means that someone arriving at the site just after a bus has left will have to wait half-an-hour for the next one. Neither is there anything in the Cabinet Report to suggest that enough huses will be used so that there is "always one waiting" leaving the would-be user to wait for up to 30 minutes in what may, or may not, be a "high-quality waiting area".  The Report does not specify routes or city centre stopping places, but a reference to the provision of facilities for bus crews being available at the Bus Station - at the bottom of the hill on which the city centre lies - suggests that this might be one of them.

The Report does not contain details of days or times of operation.

Concerning charges CIHT recommends:

Charging policies are primarily designed to encourage longer stay visitors to use park and ride, such as commuters and shoppers together with tourists where appropriate. However, park and ride fares will normally also compare favourably with shorter stay parking charges making the service attractive for shorter visits. Using park and ride removes the need to search for parking places and direct access is provided to the town centre which is particularly attractive for infrequent visitors who are unfamiliar with the local geography.

Almost all services (in a survey referred to in the report) charge for the bus element of park and ride combined with free parking. The average return fare for an adult is £2.25 with most charging between £2 and £3. Several discounts are offered for children (mostly free with adults), offpeak travel, groups sharing a car and concessions. Some permit unlimited trips per day for one ticket

Lancashire proposes a more complex and less user-friendly charging system.  All users of the car park will be required at purchase and display a £1 parking ticket.  Those proposing to use the bus service will then pay a further £1.50 return fare (75p for children)  Group and Regular User Discounts will be provided but are not specified in the Report. 

According to the County Council All-Day Parking in Lancaster city centre costs £6.50 and therefore for a car containing up to three adults the Park and Ride will offer a (small) saving.

In the case of Off-Peak travellers, such as shoppers or tourists the position is less attractive. For two adults travelling together the cost of using Park & Ride will be £4 ( 2 x bus fare + £1 parking charge). If two children are included this rises to £5.50.  Short Term parking in the city costs:

Up to 1 hour £1.40 

Up to 2 hours £2.40 

Up to 3 hours £2.80 

Up to 4 hours £3.50  

meaning that it will always be more expensive to use Park & Ride if there is more than one person in a car and even a single person would need to be staying for over 2 hours to make a (small) saving, although as Concessionary Bus Passes will be accepted the situation will vary depending on how many people in a car have such a pass.

So How Does it Compare?

It appears that the Lancaster Park & Ride Scheme meets the requirement of a convenient location and will meet some (but by no means all) of the high-quality waiting environment requirements, 

The proposed payment system is hardly user-friendly, requiring users to park, find a ticket machine and buy a ticket, return to the car to display it and then find the bus stop where they can wait up to 30 minutes for a bus!  Whether the cost is attractive depends very much on the length of time users will be spending in town and the number of concessionary pass holders in the car.  For comparison, the return fare on the regular bus service 81 from Caton Road Business Park into the City is £3.20 so the service may prove attractive to some local residents who can "park" at home.

Where the service falls down badly is the proposed frequency of one bus every 30 minutes. Whereas regular bus users can cope with this and can adjust their lives around the bus timetable, this service is supposed to attract car drivers who are used to the freedom of setting off when they please. Nor, unlike regular bus passengers, are they used to hanging around - even in a "high-quality waiting environment" - for up to half-an-hour, especially for a bus journey that "should" only take a fraction of that time.

It appears that the service has been designed around what the county can afford, rather than what is needed to make it a success and that were it not a requirement of the planning consent it might not be provided at all. Lancashire proposes that the service will run for at least 18 months to get it established after which it is hoped that a bus operator might take it on commercially.  The Bus Users' Group will be surprised to see it last that long unless drastic improvements to the offer take place as, at present, potential users are being expected to negotiate a fiddly payment system, which may or may not save them money, then wait a long time for a bus that will then take them into town through the same congested roads that they could drive along themselves.