Saturday 13 June 2009

End of Megabus Plus?

The Doncaster Star newspaper is reporting that the MegabusPlus service from Doncaster will be axed around the end of the month. The Doncaster service is provided as a stop in the Hull-Scunthorpe-Doncaster-East Midlands Parkway route, and checking dates in July on the megabus website brought up no availability from travel from Hull. So while no officially confirmed, it looks as if the Hull-East Midlands Parkway MegabusPlus route will be axed.

MegabusPlus was started in March to connect various towns and cities in Yorkshire, plus Scunthorpe, to London via East Midlands Parkway. There are three routes - one each from Hull, Harrogate and Huddersfield, that connect to East Midlands Trains services to London St Pancras. Both MegabusPlus and East Midlands Trains are operated by Stagecoach, and Stagecoach's Hull depot operates the Megabus Plus service.

If the Hull/Scunthorpe/Doncaster service is axed, then it's a shame but with competition from First Hull Trains, National Express East Coast and National Express's coach service then it was always going to be hard to make it work. Nice to see it was tried though.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The reason Doncaster has been dropped from the Hull to East Midlands Parkway MegabusPlus service is because the owners of Lakeside and/or SYPTE were not happy that the service was using the Lakeside Village shopping outlet as a pick up/drop off point.

I'm not sure what issues they had with the service calling in at Lakeside, but speaking as a driver on the service, there was really only room for one vehicle at a time to serve the bus stop.

The bus stop itself is situated alongside a roundabout and if there was already a bus at the stop (Lakeside is also used by local First Bus services) then you either had to wait until that bus pulled out or you parked alongside it. Both scenarios meant the roundabout was partially blocked to other road users.

I believe that Stagecoach are looking at other alternative pick up points in Doncaster.