Similar reduction in Manchester ticket price but only for those inside the M60 - plus a new "cross city" service (a rarity in Manchester, connecting the core First area to the University/ Hospital area on the Stagecoach side of town).
As I said though this is not going to be of much benefit to the majority of users, Bolton & Leigh are outside this boundary and yet make up a huge proportion of passengers on the routes that pass the M60. Bury is also outside the M60 however they have operated a special fare on the 135 service for a while (£2.50 day tickets and a weekly for something like £8). That "cross city" service is a knee jerk reaction to Stagecoach who a few months ago introduced a new service the 50 which has serves Media City, Salford, Manchester City Centre, Burnage and East Didsbury with a high frequency service.
First got lazy and tried to make their money by squeezing more money out of the existing passenger base, the above inflationary rises each year trying to make up for the declining number of people using their buses.
Very true, I remember when a weekly ticket cost £10, a few months later it had gone up to £12, then £14, then £15 and now it's £18.
As for the (joke) remark about their weekly ticket costing twenty pence in a few years, I wouldn't count on it. Knowing these clowns they would increase the fares to compensate for the loss of income from the other routes.
They will have lost me, if Stagecoach do run a fairly frequent daily service near me. I would rather pay less and have a more reliable service but with fewer choices in services to get home than put up with First any longer.
But a lot of their initiatives seem quite half hearted.
They did a campaign with the Manchester Evening News several weeks back with tokens for free day tickets, one token for one ticket which was fair enough though nobody actually seemed to advertise this fact so I reckon the take up on this was negligible.
Look at the amount of articulated buses they bought for Manchester/ Leeds etc that were redundant after just a few years.
They are the backbone of the 135 service however last Sunday they were all "grounded" (due to Remembrance Day there were many road closures and I guess they didn't want one going down a road it couldn't get out of). This gave an opportunity to run every service with a Gemini double decker and the difference was astonishing. It wasn't as cramped yet still had roughly the same number of passengers as usual.
Perhaps my memory is completely wrong here but were the original articulated buses swapped with those in London which had been spontaneously combusting? Either way those Volvo jobbies got taken off their routes and I don't know who they got palmed off on. The Scanias are ok but get overcrowded too quickly, I assume they are used on the 135 mainly for Cheetham Hill where they have the biggest flow of passengers boarding and alighting.
Or how First came up with a new livery for Hybrid buses (like Stagecoach have a dedicated livery for Hybrid buses) then started painting non-hybrid buses in it, then started a whole other livery, like nobody knows what the strategy is.
I've lost track of what livery is for what now, the pink and lilac livery is what I'm guessing is their new corporate scheme (having seen this around Leeds), the hybrid double decker has a silver base with the pink & lilac while the hybrid midi-bus has the GMPTE sponsored silver and green livery. Everything else seems to be the original Barbie livery, or have I missed a few?
I like the hybrid midi-bus however they use it on routes that should use a double decker which isn't going to score points with the self loading freight, try using that on a Saturday night for Manchester-Tyldesly and it really does feel like Steerage in there.
The double decker hybrid on the other hand is awful, it has so much wheelchair and buggy space it means the lower deck has a strange seat layout and not that many seats. It also has the ride quality of a pacer riding the sleepers, is that just because of the way the vehicle is built or does the really bad seating design play a part in that too?
Phil
hock:
and the depot (
) needless to say that has gone quiet as well!.
