Bus services you think are useless.

[D2007wsm]

The number 6 in Weston-super-Mare. It runs every 70 minutes in the day with no service in the evening or on a Sunday. Plus it takes an arse about face way to get into town.

The number 3 it replaced was much better.

 

[Jellyfish261]

Perhaps unfairly - and more a frustration/vent as it's all the ingredients of a good network - buses around Cardiff

A hourly 8 bus (City - Grangetown -Bay) through the day for the population it serves is so far from the potential the route has to offer

Any of the evening services on the basis the frequencies are so poor (we recently caught an 11 that was circulating Splott 50 minutes late on an hourly service...which led to almost everyone being unhappy)

First Bus 304 on the fact it begins as a semi-decent express before a grand tour of South Cardiff and the Bay

30/X30, Newport/Cardiff Bus would easily justify a more regular service along the corridor and increase patronage, especially during gaps in the train

 

[stevieinselby]

However in urban areas I wonder how many would still exist if the schools were under joined up LA control AND the buses were in school budgets. I feel that you'd suddenly find that it was possible for far more children to go to their nearest school, and that schools would suddenly become far more able to adjust their capacities in order to allow this to happen!

Local authorities usually only provide home-to-school transport for pupils attending their catchment school or when they have been allocated to a different school (either because their catchment school is full, or because they need specialist provision). Some also provide transport to the nearest faith school as well, although this is discretionary and so fewer councils are offering it these days. Setting school allocations in order to minimise expenditure on transport is unlikely to be in the best interests of educational outcomes!

When I used the 1 last month I counted 30 people on the bus leaving Selby with 8 of us travelling to either Market Weighton or Pocklington. Just because you might not use it doesn't mean it isn't useful for others.

From what I've seen, the service is a lot busier on Mondays (Selby market day) than Fridays.

Currently useless are the two Saturday. Monday and Thursday 139 Ripon-Fountain Abbey (and return) workings given the hourly York-Ripon are extended for the summer to Fountains Abbey running 5 minutes in front to the Abbey and 10/20 later from the Abbey than the 139.

It isn't worth the hassle of mucking about with the timetable for the 139 to remove two 30-minute round trips from the schedule for the 6 weeks that the 82/84 is running to Fountains Abbey. The rest of the daily diagram is still needed for the services to other villages so the savings would be negligible and probably less than the admin costs of making the temporary change. If the summer extension to the 82/84 becomes a regular annual thing then it might be different, but not for a one-off.

 

[alex397]

The 36 diversion via St Nicholas at Wade was introduced when the former Eastonways routes that terminated in the village were withdrawn. There were sufficient numbers of passengers - especially from an OAP complex at The Oaks, where Eastonways had terminated - that offering them something to get to and from Margate was worthwhile, bearing in mind that the main road stops are around 600m away. Whether that is still the case post-Covid, I don't know, but it certainly wasn't useless at the time.

Thank you. It’s interesting to hear the background to this, as I wasn’t aware of how the St Nicholas diversion came about. Though it does remind me now of seeing a timetable of a service terminating at ‘The Oaks’.
I’ve travelled on the St Nicholas journeys 3 times. Twice no one has boarded or alighted, and the third time the driver didn’t divert for the afternoon journey. These 3 journeys are not representative of course.

 

[gingerheid]

My selection is the T2 in Cambridge. It runs from one Madingley Park and Ride to Fen Ditton and Milton Park and Ride via Impington. I'm sure the idea is to provide links from Histon and Impington (though it avoids the former) to the Eddington development and.... but on the limited viewing I see of it, it's usually a decker with a driver and perhaps one passenger?

It's quite fun that in this thread - apart from the Cambridge link-together-park-and-rides-slowly one - there is no service everyone agrees is useless!

It's now proposed that T2 link between three P&R sites on this strange route is to be put out of its misery before the contract ends, though tbh the fact that this is not until August 2027 offends me slightly! I understand they have a contract but I feel like they could do something better with 2 the buses from kinda nowish, particularly in the evening. While the consultation document had an option for a revised link between just 2 Park and Ride sites, the proposal for a replacement is now a half-hourly service on this route from Cambridge to West Cambridge, and then back across the North of Cambridge through Eddington & Darwin Green towards the Science Park and Cambridge North. I can't see it being well used or particularly commercially viable, but at least it will link origins and destinations!

The proposal document (available at page 29 at this link) says that the T2 had an annual cost of £1.1m, had estimated annual revenue of £53k, and a cost per passenger of £18.71. With 16 return journeys a day 6 days a week (excluding bank holidays) we can estimate that the average journey saw 5 or 6 different people at some point in the journey. I'm genuinely baffled as to where they were going as that's much higher then I'd have guessed. The consultant's report (page 80 on the above link) mentions that they initially identified the Eddington, Histon Rd, Villages, Milton P&R stretch as the strongest part of the route, so I can only think that it's something like local journeys from the Iceland and Aldi on Histon Rd into the villages, if the T2 runs ahead of an 8?