The Solo SR and the Streetlite WF have both fallen by the wayside because they are really neither one thing nor the other. The market has shrunk for these buses because its been squeezed from both ends; for smaller capacities it is cheaper to buy and run a breadvan, and for bigger capacities you may as well get one of the shorter E200MMCs and have done with it.
There's still plenty of Solo and Solo SR buses available on the used market, but they are getting older and will require more work than they used to.
Otherwise, the option is to go and buy a Mercedes Sprinter City 45 or something similar. They seat 15-25 people, are low-floor, and parts are plentiful because they're based on a common van model. Yes, they have all the suspension travel of a lump of concrete, but they are perfect for rural or housing estate routes.
Now we have four big national groups dominating most of the big markets. Smaller operators can't easily pop up and start trying to cream off passengers on a major Stagecoach route for example.
They never could, especially not against Stagecoach!
This rather suggests that there is no commercial place for small operators in the registered local bus service market - if they are having to rely on second hand vehicles that are no longer produced; no longer required by mainstream operators.
I disagree, I think it is a natural consequence of the fact that smaller operators will generally be operating the sorts of rural and housing estate routes which are most suited to a Solo/Solo SR or a Streetlite WF. But, as above, the market has gone for those buses.
Stagecoach getting Switch to reopen the production line for 100+ Solo SR buses was unusual, and was probably related to the specific operating territory that Stagecoach wanted them for. Even the other big operators have largely gone for breadvans for their smaller routes in recent years.
I don't think the 'creaming off' model works any more - the Authorities and public generally don't want this to happen (so the funding, legislative and operating models are reflecting that), and anyway there is an evershrinking amount of cream to be had.
Sort of. Not deliberately though.
If you look at somewhere like West Yorkshire, the small operator TLC Travel largely exists by mopping up the early morning, late evening, and Sunday work on tenders for the routes which the big operator only wants to run during the daytime. There are loads of examples in West Yorkshire of First, in particular, running the main service 7am-7pm Monday to Saturday and TLC picking up the stuff outside of those times.
Now the whole point of franchising is to prevent that issue where the big operator creams off the profit during the day and leaves the taxpayer to pick up the tab for the rest. Sadly, the consequence of that is that the whole route will be franchised in one go, first bus to last bus seven days a week. So where does that leave the indy running the Sunday tender?
