On Monday 2nd September, operation of tendered services 360 and 361 between Scunthorpe and Goole passed from East Yorkshire (Elloughton depot) to Stagecoach (Scunthorpe depot). The timetable for this daily service remained unchanged.
In one sense, the unchanged timetable is logical - why should the timetable alter because of a change of operator? Yet the timetable is very much optimised for operation from the 'Goole end' of the route, and some minor changes could provide a better service for probably less cost.
Perhaps the biggest oddity is the Saturday timetable, which requires two buses for the sake of half an hour, as a service 361 departs Goole at 1110, with the arrival of the 'previous' service into Goole at 1139. When operated by East Yorkshire from Elloughton Depot that may have made operational sense if a a driver and vehicle change needed to take place. However now a bus has to run 'dead' from Scunthorpe to Goole for the 1110, and another returns 'dead' from Goole to Scunthorpe after 1139. Given that Stagecoach have a depot in Scunthorpe, surely the timetable could be rejigged slightly to require only one vehicle all day, with driver swaps in Scunthorpe as required? Or if a second vehicle is required, ensure any 'overlaps' between vehicle requirements are timetabled to the Scunthorpe end of the route, to avoid large amounts of dead running? Potentially an easy cost saving (and better for the environment with less dead running).
Another oddity is with the morning peak Eastoft to Goole service Monday to Saturday and the evening peak return. The main purpose is to link the East Riding villages along the Ouse to Goole, and the road network means starting back at Eastoft in North Lincolnshire is a sensible thing to do. For an Elloughton based operator, it is also the sensible start and finish points for these journeys, as they can easily run dead to/from Eastoft via the A161. However for a Scunthorpe based operator, the marginal costs of running as full route journeys from Scunthorpe to Goole would be marginal. Missed opportunity? Could miss out Tesco Extra and Ealand village to cut marginal costs back further? Or at least start in Crowle, which has to be run through 'dead' anyway to get to Eastoft.
The timetable also requires dead running from Scunthorpe to Goole each morning and reverse in the evening Monday to Friday and Sunday. Operating a full in service 360 or 361 at these times might be a little optimistic, but is there a missed opportunity to run a Scunthorpe-Crowle-A161-Goole fast service? Or at least to reinstate the early morning Swinefleet-Goole short and early evening return - the extra mileage would be zero?
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4 comments:
Some really good statements here and I too wonder whether SEM will look to change this at the next opportunity, perhaps merging with the 90 in some ways to provide a better overall service. That said, I'm not sure when the tender is up as if they lost that, they would need to rewrite that, but agree there are many improvements that can be made with no extra cost.
The contract will be run exactly as East Riding Council have specified and paid for, not a journey more or less.
Bluntly, why would East Riding consider changing that contract when the changes would benefit passengers in North Lincolnshire, who apparently don't currently fund the service at all?
Reading between the lines of North Lincolnshire Council (NLC)'s publicly available documents (such as BSIP+ meeting reports) there's an undercurrent that NLC find ERY difficult to work with regarding cross-boundary services, which would make any changes to the contract difficult to attain even if NLC were offering funding.
Expect to see more of this nationally as franchising comes in. We're already seeing TravelWest (former Avon area) specifying services without stops outside their area where the road layout forces the route into another county, and we'll see more of that sort of thing.
And, also being blunt, when you think up these changes, maybe you should consider the background to the relevant contracts, what would be necessary to get those changes made and the likelihood of them happening?
It would make your proposals more powerful if you could provide arguments as to why the changes would be worthwhile in that framework rather than just "Hey, I think this would be good!", which from a professional point of view all too often come across as frankly bus-spottery in the most contemptuous sense of that term.
"Bluntly, why would East Riding consider changing that contract when the changes would benefit passengers in North Lincolnshire, who apparently don't currently fund the service at all?"
Five points to this:
-East Riding didn't seem to have an issue with North Lincolnshire passengers benefiting when the Sunday service was brought in. They could have specified a 360 via Amcotts as a quicker way to get East Riding passengers to/from Scunthorpe, but didn't
-There are potential cost savings with the Saturday service if the Scunthorpe-Goole and Goole-Scunthorpe 'dead runs' were eliminated.
-Some of my suggested enhancements would benefit the East Riding - e.g between Swinefleet and Goole
-Extra passengers - whichever country they are from - means extra revenue if they can be obtained no/very minimal extra cost
-Depending on the type of contract (e.g. who keeps the revenue), Stagecoach could introduce some of the suggestions commercially as an add on for very minimal cost. It would be similar to how some of the 'positioning' journeys on the 50 between Saltfleet and Grimsby operate 'in service'
I see from Bustimes.org the Sunday 350 will be fully operated by Scunthorpe depot every 2 hours from 8am but Ashby extension is gone. Edit: There have finally put details up with less than 6 days to go before the changes..
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