Thursday 4 October 2018

New Map Fills a Gap

Ever since the county council discontinued its series of area bus maps, including one for Lancaster and Morecambe, the District has lacked an important piece of information and promotional material for its bus services - a map of the whole bus network showing ALL services, irrespective of who runs them.

Stagecoach has produced maps of its own bus services, but these ignore those provided by other bus companies.  A set of new bus guides produced for the new network being introduced next Monday includes maps of the individual services shown in each guide and there is a stand-alone leaflet with a map of services 1 2 4 and 6/6A, these being the ones that have had significant changes to routes and times.  There doesn't appear - in the short term at least - to be a new version of the full network map, which in any case wouldn't include the four local routes run by Kirkby Lonsdale Coach Hire.

So the Bus Users' Group has stepped into the breach and produced, with the help of our friends at www.gotimetable.com something that has been lacking for several years - a map of ALL the  bus routes in the local area of Lancaster and Morecambe as they will be from 8th October.

The map is on display in our display case at Lancaster bus station and will of course be shown on the Local Maps and Timetables page of this website.  We are also working on a map of all the rural and interurban bus routes from Lancaster and Morecambe, but priority has been given to the Local map so that it could be published to co-incide with next week's changes.









Tuesday 2 October 2018

Greyhound Bridge to Reopen This Weekend

Lancashire County Council has confirmed that the long-running roadworks on Greyhound Bridge in Lancaster will be completed in time for the (third) planned re-opening date of Sunday, 7th October with Stagecoach set to introduce its new bus service network the following day.

Some buses will actually be crossing the bridge this weekend as one lane on Skerton Bridge and Parliament Street will be temporarily closed at times to remove the traffic management measures put in place during the closure.

Timetables and maps for the new services have been available online for some time, but those many users who prefer a paper copy (no need for a signal, no need to keep your battery topped up) can now obtain them from the Stagecoach Travel Shop at Lancaster Bus Station.

As of today, four leaflets have appeared:

New services 1 and 2, together with revised services 4, 6 and 6A appear in one booklet, which now contains all buses between Lancaster and Morecambe, except infrequent service 41. (There is no longer a service 3). This booklet also contains all the frequent services between the city centre and the University and a map of the new routes, which is also available separately.

Services 40 and 41, linking Morecambe and Lancaster with Preston, with some journeys running via the University, appear in a separate leaflet, whilst city services 7,10, 11, 18 are contained in their own Bus guide.

Ingleton and Kirkby Lonsdale services (80, 81) are in another separate guide. 

The leaflet for the 42, Blackpool, service is expected tomorrow (Wednesday) with that for Carnforth services 5, 49 and 55 to follow.  The 555 is not changing and is shown in the current Lakes Connection leaflet.

Passengers for Ingleton and Kirkby Lonsdale have the choice of not just Stagecoach services, but also service 582 run by Kirkby Lonsdale Coach Hire.  Each operator produces its own timetables for these routes (although the 582 print version hasn't been re-issued following changes in September). To avoid passengers having to consult two separate documents the Bus Users Group has produced a combined timetable.  We don't have the resources to print it unfortunately, but its available on the Local Bus Maps and Timetables page of our website, from where it can be downloaded and printed off.  You can see a copy here.

The guides contain route maps of the services shown, but one apparent casualty -  at least for the time being- is an overall map of all services.  The version previously produced by Stagecoach was useful although not ideal as it didn't contain details of the various routes run by Kirkby Lonsdale Coach Hire and thus couldn't present the full Lancaster and Morecambe bus network.

The Bus Users' Group has, however, been working on this and hopes to be able to make an announcement shortly!

Watch this space!

Wednesday 26 September 2018

City Service 18 Contract Extended

Bus Users and Stagecoach managers launched the service in March 2017

Bus service 18, the "East City Circular", serving Moorlands, Williamson Park, Standen Gate and the Prison was launched in its current form in March 2017 after a lengthy campaign by the Bus Users' Group (read about it here)

At the time, Lancashire County Council said that there was sufficient funding available from the developers of new housing at Standen Gate to keep the service going for 15 months.  Following efforts by the Bus Users' Group to promote the new service, including delivering timetables to houses along the route, usage was better than expected and has settled down to about 700 passengers a week,  but even so the contract with Stagecoach was due to expire at the end of October, when the service would have been drastically reduced or even withdrawn altogther.

But just as the Group had uncovered the existence of the developer funding in the first place and persuaded the county council to spend it, we also discovered that following further housing development in the area there was now more funding available.

Under the "two-tier" system of local government that applies locally Lancaster City Council as housing authority receives the developers' money whilst Lancashire County Council as transport authority is responsible for spending it.
Getting the two bodies to talk to each other is never easy, but with the help of our City Councillor members, Abi Mills and Tim Hamilton-Cox (and County Councillor Lizzi Collinge, who has been chasing at the county) agreement has been reached and the County Council has now announced that the contract with Stagecoach has been extended until March 2020.

More good news is that when Greyhound Bridge re-opens (hopefully on 8th October) the service will revert to its previous regular timetable, with a bus every half-an-hour rather than the hard-to-remember 40 minute interval that has applied since January.

Although the number of passengers using the service is encouraging it is still not enough for any bus company to run it as a commercial venture so the Bus Users' Group will be looking for ways to work with the County Council and Stagecoach to encourage more people to use it.