More issues with overcrowding preventing children getting to school.

[Dwarfer1979]

What needs to happen, across bus operators and schools/colleges is communicate better for the September peak to make it smoother. Spending a few bob on a bus and driver to duplicate a service that you believe will overflow in September, is almost certainly lower, than the ongoing costs (both financially and time) of meetings and letters to discuss how to fix the problem for the rest of the school term, despite it being a short term problem.

Not it isn't, not even close. The cost of a bus and driver is several hundred pounds a day (unless you happen to have one of both sat around normally doing nothing anyway just in case which is very unlikely) and in my experience there aren't any meetings about these sort of issues. Unless you run normally with excess spares then you need an extra vehicle in the fleet (so after buying/renting it you have insurance, tax & maintenance costs to cover) whilst for most operators you will have to pay someone a full shifts pay to cover that (so something between £120 & £200 depending on your wage rate plus employer contribution taxes like NI unless you have some sort of part time agreement as there are minimum paid time agreements) unless you take out your supervisory/management cover at the very points in the day when they are most important to be on call to address issues.

Most schools are very hands off over school transport (unless they are running the contract themselves) and unless the council have funding available there is very little interaction with them once they check you are running the contracted vehicle size so there aren't a lot of meetings around these sort of issues. It is reported by the customer services function (who are the ones writing letters to parents so not expensive) and after a quick resourcing review between schedules, operations & management which can be done largely via e-mail either something happens or it doesn't. After that it is just responding explaining the situation in a standard format every time anyone contacts you.

I am generalising here and so there will be places where it won't fix itself within september, but in lots of cases it will fix itself but there needs to be better comms from all parties to mitigate this in the first place by ensuring that operators are aware of uptake in a
Something of note though with the 391, it's tendered. Fully tendered. It seems silly to be bashing Belle Vue for their choice of vehicle unless the vehicle standards/specs are lower than what is in the tender/contract. The onus would then be on the council or college/school to properly communicate and get changed made to the tender (if possible and within procurement rules) or source alternative transport.

Communication could be better, we had a council once who issued about 60 student passes for what was at the time a commercial bus service that ran under a low bridge meaning none of our double-deckers would go under it and didn't tell us until November how many passes had been issued (and as a commercial service we had significant season ticket sales of our own) - and even then got it wrong as they included a number for another operators service on our initial list meaning they told us there were 90!

One of the issues that does come up is that with current registration timescales doesn't work with the education planning timescales. Technically operators need to be making decisions around changing registrations for the start of the new school year in September by the end of June (and the firm deadline of 6 weeks to avoid short-notice applications around which the TCs are tightening up is mid-July) whilst schools often don't know their numbers until mid-August (and of course they won't know how those students will travel). You may be surprised how late a lot of parents leave it before checking travel options for school, there are lots of parents who leave it until the week before the school starts to try and find a bus (and often find there isn't one) and before the rise of mobile based ticketing the number of parents who bought their tickets one or two days before the start of term and then complained that we couldn't post the paper ticket to them ready for their kid to go back the next day was shocking. Often the first point an operator of a normal bus service knows what the loadings will be like for the school year is the first day back by which time it is often too late to do anything meaningful. The system of travel to school doesn't work but it is rarely something that the operator can control or influence until much too late to be able to do anything about it (particularly with current £2/£3 fare caps where often even student season tickets on longer school trips can be more than paying per trip so you don't even get a full picture of season ticket sales in advance on normal service buses.

 

[markymark2000]

Te first bus from Stockport and the last bus to Stockport are commercially run, according to this timetable. Presumably the contract wanted a bus from Macclesfield around 7am, and Belle Vue is in Stockport, so presumably they decided to run it in service rather than run it empty. Even if it does take far longer to get to Macclesfield that way.

I forgot they got added. 90% of the timetable is tendered though and the vehicle spec on the 2 commercial journeys (which aren't affected by the schools) will be dictated by the rest of the tender spec.

Not it isn't, not even close. The cost of a bus and driver is several hundred pounds a day (unless you happen to have one of both sat around normally doing nothing anyway just in case which is very unlikely) and in my experience there aren't any meetings about these sort of issues.

That isn't what seems to be being suggested when all of the 'kids being left stranded' posts get put in the press, the operators, colleges and councils all reply that they are 'working hard to resolve the problems'. You can't be working hard to fix the issue but not be putting in any time to get the issue fixed. It's all time, and time is money.
MPs, councillors, council transport staff, council comms staff (press releases), schools/colleges and operators all taking time to read and write emails to acknowledge and maybe fix the issues. That's a lot of peoples time on the subject which will come at quite a cost when all added up. Plus the costs through the year with extra congestion as parents stop trusting the school buses and find alternative transport (normally private vehicles), plus costs of any lost productivity in work for parents or people who are having to collect the stranded kids to get them to school. Plus costs of loss of education because kids are late. This adds up a LOT and just because it's costs that you can't see going through the company books, it is still costs which add up to a significant sum.

Unless you run normally with excess spares then you need an extra vehicle in the fleet (so after buying/renting it you have insurance, tax & maintenance costs to cover) whilst for most operators you will have to pay someone a full shifts pay to cover that (so something between £120 & £200 depending on your wage rate plus employer contribution taxes like NI unless you have some sort of part time agreement as there are minimum paid time agreements) unless you take out your supervisory/management cover at the very points in the day when they are most important to be on call to address issues.

I know of a number of ops where there are buses stood around in the morning and drivers who would be able to cover a week. In your op, and in a number of others there may be no resource available without taking from supervisors or management, but that doesn't mean that no one has resources. I assure you there are many others who could take on the work. Ops who don't have the resources or will to commit to a year+ school contract but would be willing to take on the work for 2 weeks of the year around their normal line of work.

Communication could be better, we had a council once who issued about 60 student passes for what was at the time a commercial bus service that ran under a low bridge meaning none of our double-deckers would go under it and didn't tell us until November how many passes had been issued (and as a commercial service we had significant season ticket sales of our own) - and even then got it wrong as they included a number for another operators service on our initial list meaning they told us there were 90!

That's not very good. I note that Hornsby in Scunthorpe had similar issues. Their Facebook posts suggesting the college sold more tickets for the service than there was capacity.

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Unfortunately, more student tickets have been sold for these journeys than the capacity available on the buses. Ticket sales through the school and college are outside our control. We are already operating the highest-capacity vehicles available to us at these times.

 

[Dwarfer1979]

That isn't what seems to be being suggested when all of the 'kids being left stranded' posts get put in the press, the operators, colleges and councils all reply that they are 'working hard to resolve the problems'. You can't be working hard to fix the issue but not be putting in any time to get the issue fixed. It's all time, and time is money.#

A public statement to the press that may be overstating what is happening, unheard of.

MPs, councillors, council transport staff, council comms staff (press releases), schools/colleges and operators all taking time to read and write emails to acknowledge and maybe fix the issues. That's a lot of peoples time on the subject which will come at quite a cost when all added up. Plus the costs through the year with extra congestion as parents stop trusting the school buses and find alternative transport (normally private vehicles), plus costs of any lost productivity in work for parents or people who are having to collect the stranded kids to get them to school. Plus costs of loss of education because kids are late. This adds up a LOT and just because it's costs that you can't see going through the company books, it is still costs which add up to a significant sum.

I think you may be both underestimating the cost of running extra journeys and overestimating the cost of sending a few e-mails/letters to respond to complaints. In my experience 99% of these sort of complaints don't end up in the press so generate very little beyond a short discussion and a simple response and even when it does it often doesn't get beyond the first step once the school/council realise it will take a cost to provide the extra capacity. As a Scheduler and Network Planner this side is actually my job and it is very rare for the level of response you describe happening and we have generally have a couple of overloading issues each year to deal with.

Most of the costs you are suggesting should be considered are not direct costs to the operator (or even fall on them at all) but you are expecting the operator to cover the cost of avoiding them on work that is often distinctly marginal at best with no warning (so holding resource in just in case). Making school buses a commercially viable proposition is pretty difficult in general, in my experience parents massively underestimate the cost of providing a peak school bus and massively overestimate how much income their fares provide, it either relies on life expired buses and part time drivers who are only paid for 3 or 4 hours a day or on combining the school work with something else to cover the rest of the costs of running a bus (whether that is private hires, contracts or service work) none of which is helped by having to provide extra capacity at the drop of the hat to cover an unexpected capacity issue at a loss.

I know of a number of ops where there are buses stood around in the morning and drivers who would be able to cover a week. In your op, and in a number of others there may be no resource available without taking from supervisors or management, but that doesn't mean that no one has resources. I assure you there are many others who could take on the work. Ops who don't have the resources or will to commit to a year+ school contract but would be willing to take on the work for 2 weeks of the year around their normal line of work.

I have never worked in any operator in a 25 year career that deliberately ran with school peak gaps in their schedules, and those that do probably aren't school bus operators so won't be able to drop that resource in simply to cover a school bus (& certainly aren't any of the businesses we have been discussing in this thread) though coach operators may sometimes have a vehicle in the yard as it isn't deployed on a tour or hire on that day. My current employer actually does but that is only because of the loss of a contract and we are working to adjust timetables/schedules to fill those gaps (including a discussion to improve the peak service on a contract to utilise space we didn't have last year) but even then those gaps often aren't in the right place to fit with overloadings elsewhere. Any operator who does have those gaps isn't going to be willing to take on extra work as a charity, they are going to be expecting to be paid to run the extra bus so that is still a cost incurred.

Even if you do have a bus sat around there will be even less that have a driver sat on pay doing nothing. You may be able to adjust the duties to add a trip but the driver still needs paying and so even a relatively short and local school trip is likely to cost over £20 per trip and many of the trips where these sort of issues arise are longer runs so significantly more than that.