Publicity for buses on the South Bank

Now it's time for bus publicity on the south bank to be put under the spotlight. Operator wise Stagecoach is the only large operator and they produce timetables for all their services. Some include maps and tourist information, such as the 350 timetable, while others are just a timetable. Quite to easy to work out which are the most important services!

Scunthorpe town services are all included in one small guide with a map of summary of the 'out of town' buses. Hornsby services are also included in what is a useful little guide. Hornsby themselves also produce a timetable for their main out of town route, service 4 to Brigg - but it's just a timetable with not even a front cover.

So now for the councils, and first North Lincolnshire Council. They produce 7 timetable guides with timetables, a route description and a map of the services in timetable on the back cover. These cover all areas of the county apart from Scunthorpe town services (the Stagecoach guide does that). These are OK, the timetables are easy to read, there are details of connections at Barton and the bright coloured front covers are eyecatching but the way they are organised could be done better.

Currently all the Brigg timetables are in one guide - great. But for Barton you need three different timetables. Confusing. This is probably to remove duplication of timetables amongst different guides but in my opinion duplication is a sacrifice worth making for simplifying the number of guides. They you could have one for say Barton and the Humber Bank Villages, one for Brigg and Kirton, one for Winterton area and one for the Isle of Axholme. Thats only 4 guides to produce, and the number of timetables in more than one guide would probably be quite low.

Town maps would also be useful - these are included in the council's rural bus map - but that is just full of errors. See this post I made on the Transport East Midlands forum - http://www.travelem.proboards67.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=archieve&thread=675&page=1
With that many mistakes its a way of confusing people and putting them off using the bus, rather than attracting them to the bus network.

Moving onto North East Lincolnshire they publish one bus timetable guide for the whole area, and it includes a summary of train services (though omitting the Brigg Line and Summer Sunday Barton line service) as well as bus stand information at Grimsby Riverhead Bus Station and an area map. A separate bus map is also produced; theres a couple of errors in that but overall not bad.

So at least basic information is produced on the south bank, and in some places it's a lot better than basic. But still room for improvement and proof reading.