Around two years ago, I was making use of Arriva’s m-Ticket app on a Blackberry Curve 8520 that I then owned. Apart from a certain sluggishness due to the hardware and its 2G internet connection, it worked fine until I forgot the PIN that it needed. From then on, I returned to paper bus tickets and stuck with them ever sense.
However, curiosity and a better phone have me having another go. This time it’s from Google’s Play Store from which I got the app. It remains free of charge and seems so that the world of Android and a HTC Desire S armed with 3G connectivity have made for a smoother and faster experience. The fact that it is a touchscreen phone allows the developers to make a better interface too.
Also, there are some savings to be had. For instance, a North West four weekly ticket costs £56.70 and a day ticket for the same area is £4.20. The paper counterpart to the latter is £4.60 and four weekly tickets will set you back £72.00. Interestingly, weekly tickets cost the same via the app as they do from a bus driver.
To work the app needs personal details such as name, address and date of birth. For payment, you can store a credit (or debit) card number in the app with the card’s security code and a PIN provided by Arriva needed for any transactions. Topping up beforehand is another option if you don’t like the idea of card details on a phone.
With the app, you can see ticket prices before you buy and activate any that you buy price to use. There are no single journey tickets on here so they need to be bought from a bus driver. That must make the app easier to maintain for the developers and means that the range of tickets is easier to browse. While doing, I found some for areas that I might be inclined to visit such as Northumberland’s coast. It’s good to see what’s out there ahead of time instead of holding up a bus trying to get the information. That it’s all doable on the move only helps too.
This time around, that PIN will be stored somewhere for safekeeping and my hope is that my time with mobile bus ticketting will continue longer than it did two years ago. It might surprise you now but I had put this option out of my mind until I spotted someone else showing a phone to a bus driver on getting aboard. That was enough to make me go investigating again.
The first change is the service number which will become 27B. From the start of the month, service numbers will be 27 and 27A. Quite why they are changing like this is beyond me since just calling it the 27 would do just fine and that’s what I’d keep calling it. Maybe the amended numbering might be caused by goings on in the Northwestern Traffic Commissioner’s office.
More importantly, the 08:30 Monday to Friday journey (or 08:25 as it says on the Cheshire East Council website) from Macclesfield now serves Alderley Park, a good idea given recent loadings but one is left wondering if a break in service will do it harm. Midday Monday to Friday services will call no longer at Alderley Park so any lunchtime journeys to shops will involve a walk out of the site to the road. The same situation would apply to anyone wanting to get to Knutsford from after 16:30, a nuisance given the onset of longer hours of darkness.
On one hand, there seems to be an air of greater sense regarding the timetable though anyone working at Alderley Park clearly loses out more than they did with the October 6th changeover to commercial working. The later alterations come into force on October 29th and they don’t have any impact on the Saturday timetable. Could there be more to follow after user feedback? That would be interesting to see. Hopefully, we won’t see that 18:40 journey from Knutsford disappear; it deserves to succeed.
It was in August 11th of 2009 that Cheshire East Council launched a new and very welcome innovation: a real time bus tracker for two of the bus routes in the borough. One was the 130 between Macclesfield and Manchester and the other was the 27 between Macclesfield and Knutsford.
After more than three years, it seems that we are being relieved of this useful service from October 6th. It only ever may have been a pilot but it came in handy during many a disruption, particularly when I worked at a place based in the countryside and not in a town as I do now. As it happened, my bus home today was delayed by nearly twenty minutes and the Timeline (that’s its proper name) service proved its worth in keeping me posted as to when it would arrive.
Of course, it hasn’t been perfect. For one thing, streetside screens providing real time information were limited and ended up being installed in strange places: Alderley Edge instead of Wilmslow’s Green Lane, Fallibroome Road in Macclesfield instead of somewhere more central like Churchill Way. However, there was a screen installed at Macclesfield General Hospital so it wasn’t all unusual. However, these placements meant that it was the web-based service that came in most handy with being in possession of a smartphone allowing access to the latest arrival times while waiting at a bus stop.
Latterly, performance hasn’t been perfect either with parts being needed for the system earlier in the year and taking a while to be put in place too. Not every bus operating a service had the required tracking equipment either so scheduled times were what appeared for those and they could be very misleading when a bus has been cancelled because of a breakdown.
What has reduced my own dependency on the service in recent times has been timely running of services apart from tonight. The summer holidays have helped too as has the opening of the Alderley Edge bypass and the better performance of the M6. Getting home on winter evenings often involved a deal of uncertainty when traffic conditions clearly were far from ideal. There have been waits in the dark of around 60-90 minutes when road traffic accidents and winter storms, including snow and ice, caused chaos. November often turned out to be an eventful month along the A34 but January gales caused their share of disruption too when they caused electricity power supply failure that turned off traffic lights. Those events don’t seem to have intruded for a while but maybe I have other means of dealing with these.
Working from home is one option that has come my way and comes in handy when there’s a fall of snow or some other weather event. That it keeps me productive too during times when the road system doesn’t work as well as it should helps too. My workplace also has an urban situation as I mentioned earlier so evenings of catching buses on dark roads through the countryside are behind me for now; it’s not the best of circumstances when things don’t run so smoothly. In fact, it offers the fallback of going home by train should road traffic really become gridlocked.
Another factor could be that bus operators have got better at timing their services. Even the this year’s two week closure of the Alderley Edge bypass around the end of June and the start of July had little effect on service running for the 130, much to my surprise. That we have an economic downturn probably helps too because it cuts down on the number of cars on the road.
Even with more reliable bus services, it remains a shame to see real time bus tracking going from us in Cheshire East. Sadly, it looks unlikely too that it will be replaced for a while given the current constraints on public spending. While that makes me think about contingency measures, I am left wondering about how many were making use of the service as well. In the beginning, it got its share of publicity but that later waned. Also, the unreliability that it suffered and the changeover to a web based map interface made it less convenience for smartphone users unless you had links to parts of the older site like I did. Looking at it now, it probably needed investment to make it better and more comprehensive and it appears this is the wrong time for that.
So, could we manage without it by doing better than standing at bus stops in hope like before. Twitter seems an obvious candidate for such things and that may be something the council may wish to explore but it needs manpower and I am not sure that they have that. There has been a lot of talk about the “Big Society” and Cheshire East’s answer to Torbay Bus Routes would be commendable. It would take more than a one man effort though seeing as my own are limited as things stand.
Bus companies are active on Twitter too and High Peak have their own account. With the provision of delay information to the nearest minute, that could be a substitute but it needs an investment of time and effort to rise above the provision of general information. There is an unused Arriva Northwest Twitter account or at least it purports to be that with someone’s name attached to it. It would be good to see Arriva’s bus operation in this part of the world being as active on Twitter as those in the Northeast and Yorkshire and there’s room for bettering those too.
Real time bus tracking will be no more in Cheshire East on the same day that the Macclesfield to Knutsford bus service becomes a commercial enterprise without council financial support. The coincidence looks linked and is a sign of the austere times through which we are living. Would a more vibrant economy with stable public finances bring us better things, the ever handy real time bus tracking among them? It is hard to answer that but time could tell an interesting story.
Though it’s at the southwestern corner of Wales, Pembrokeshire is worth the extra effort taken to make a visit there and you can manage one without using a car too. There are regular train services and the county council expends some effort on its bus network too. Thus far, I only have made two visits to these parts with the most recent one updating and refreshing my knowledge of the available travel options.
Trains
The county has no less than three railway lines serving it with Transport for Wales running the trains: one each to the terminii of Pembroke Dock, Milford Haven and Fishguard. Each of these is largely single track in nature so service frequencies are not hourly. Those three railways start out as a twin line from Carmarthen before the Pembroke line splits off after Whitland and the Fishguard one after the request-only train stop of Clarbeston Road.
The Milford Haven line seems to see the more traffic than others with many services travelling all of the way to Manchester using two carriage trains, something that Arriva Trains Wales may need to revisit in light of a recent Saturday journey on a busy Summer Bank Holiday weekend though another on the following Monday worked out less busy.
Though the port only sees two daily ferry departures to Rosslare in Ireland, Fishguard too gets a reasonable service even if the frequency is less than the two hourly one enjoyed by Milford Haven and Haverfordwest (Pembrokeshire’s county town). Last May, it also gained a new station called Fishguard & Goodwick so that’s something for the locals in both places.
The Pembroke Dock line also gets a largely two-hourly service (less than that on Sundays though) so it’s an option for getting to attractive spots like Tenby and Manorbier. Pembroke too is a ferry port with departures for Rosslare though it is Fishguard that enjoys a service meeting its early morning arrival from across the Irish Sea.
Ferries
The mention of ferry services brings to mind a curiosity about services to Wales from Rosslare in Ireland’s county of Wexford. The Stena Line ones go to Fishguard while those operated by Irish Ferries go to Pembroke instead. While I might have thought that history might explain this situation, it seems to be a recent phenomenon and one for which I have yet to find an explanation part from running different routes for the sake of personal success. Maybe it’s down to competition on the Irish Sea? After all, there was a time when both forbears of Irish Ferries and Stena Line used Fishguard for a time. Then again, there was opposition mounted by Sealink (Stena these days) to the commencement of a Dublin-Holyhead operation by the B+I Line (now part of Irish Ferries) when that replaced the previous long standing Dublin-Liverpool service when that became unsustainable after 159 years.
Buses
Returning the world of land transport, Pembrokeshire does have a reasonable bus network and inspection of bus timetables reveals that council financial support is needed for most if not all services. Richards Brothers of Cardigan seem to operate most of the services in Pembrokeshire along their workings in Ceredigion and Carmarthenshire. First Cymru do operate a Haverfordwest-Tenby service but otherwise Pembrokeshire seems to be a bastion for local independent operators and it’s no bad thing to see.
There’s multi-operator ticketting too with West Wales Rover Tickets valid here as they are in Ceredigion and Carmarthenshire. An adult day ticket will cost you £7 and it’s £28 for an adult weekly one. There are equivalent child tickets costing half the prices of the adult ones.
Richards do their own day and weekly tickets too and these cost less than their multi-operator counterparts and only apply to their own services. An adult day Explorer will set you back £5.50 and it’s £18 for a weekly Explorer. The child equivalents of these cost £3.50 and £12, respectively. Interestingly, there’s also a family day Explorer ticket for either two adults and two children or one adult and three children. With my seeing quite a number of families around on my last visit, I reckon that this is a great idea that should be adopted in more places.
In terms of the type of bus services being operating, there’s a mix of trunk routes and other more visitor friendly coastal services that aim to give folk an alternative to clogging up narrow country roads with car traffic; some only are a single car’s width with hedges on either side so it’s best to be warned. Given the wonders of Pembrokeshire’s coastline, it is easy to see why so many visitors come here and there’s a National Park protecting it all along with the Preseli Hills too. Traffic jams and conservation don’t go hand in hand so something had to be done.
The trunk services do their bit for curtailing car usage too with services like Haverfordwest-Fishguard-Cardigan (412), Haverfordwest to St. Davids (411), St. Davids to Fishguard (413) and Haverfordwest to Tenby (349) offering decent service frequencies from Monday to Saturday. On Sundays though, there is a markedly reduced frequency on some of these with the 413 not running at all.
In fact, my last visit saw me make use of the Sunday 412, operated by W. H. Collins of Haverfordwest with a Duple-bodied Dennis Javelin coach that was more than twenty years old so low operation only seems to be a Monday to Saturday affair on this route. The vehicle’s age became more apparent when the windscreen wipers needed to be put going because of a rain shower though the coach ran well otherwise. There was ticket machine on board either so the validity of my return fare of £5.75 (the single is £3.40) depended on my being remembered by the driver! With three to four services on Sunday, no staff changeover was needed and I got back to Haverfordwest from Fishguard without any bother.
The coastal services especially come into their own during the summer months when seven day operation is available with three services each way a day being common. Away from the May to September period, the days of operation need checking since a number are Monday/Thursday/Saturday only and routes alter too. However, Saturday visitors should be fine all year around and there is something to be said for exploring somewhere when it is quieter too though a coastline of around 180 miles in length should have plenty of unoccupied nooks and crannies.
The northern and western coasts are well served and the southern coast isn’t neglected either. The Strumble Shuttle (404) runs from Fishguard to St. Davids and calls at Strumble Head, hence the name. Buses take a while to cover their route on this service so it could be a good one for those wanting to let someone else do the driving and look at what they pass along the way. Mind you, it can get cosy on the small buses used during the school summer holidays but that’s such a not a big price to pay. Also running from Fishguard is the Poppit Rocket (405) that calls at Poppit Sand and other places by the coast on the way to Cardigan; in the off season, it starts eastbound journeys from Newport instead though.
In the west, there’s the Celtic Coaster (403) and the Puffin Shuttle. The former of these is a summer only shuttle service for St. Davids peninsula. Given that Britain’s smallest city has its share of attractions and is not far from alluring coastline, it is not surprising to learn that it is something of a visitor magnet so this bus service is an attempt to curtail traffic in the area to keep it appealing to those coming from elsewhere. The latter route is in two parts though: St. Davids to Marloes and Martin’s Haven (400), and Haverfordwest/Milford Haven to Marloes and Martin’s Haven (315). On my first visit to Pembrokeshire, I made use of the latter though it doesn’t seem to be what it was back then with afternoon journeys to Haverfordwest seemingly unavailable; a journey by train looks to be in order.
Services 387 and 388 (the latter is summer only and both get the branding of Coastal Cruiser) get you from Pembroke to delights such as Bosherston, a recommendation from a local on my first visit that I have yet to follow up, Freshfield East, Angle and Freshfield West. On my latest visit, I played with the idea of catching the 349 to Manorbier and then the 387 or 388 from Bosherston after a walk before sticking with trotting between Strumble Head and Fishguard instead. The unused idea could be handy yet.
Summary
All in all, Pembrokeshire is well supplied with train, bus and even ferry services. A little upfront work might save a lot of driving and not a little congestion. So far, it has done just that for me and there is more of Pembrokeshire for me to savour yet.
September always seems to be the time of year when many changes to Cheshire’s bus services take place. In the good times, it was a matter of seeing who would be operating council-supported services. Nowadays, though, there are public spending cuts to face. As it happened, we got a fair few around the same time last year and that trend appears to be continuing. Some services have survived the subsidy withdrawals with the Macclesfield to Bollington 10A Sunday service being among them.
Whenever a service survives commercially, it raises the question as to whether it needed the public money in the first place. The Sunday 10A looks very much like one of them since there was no change to the timetable when it lost its funding. With others, the effect is clearer as will be seen later.
The Beartown Bus network that provides Congleton’s town bus services is one of those moving beyond council funding. The effect of that change in fortunes is being felt from tomorrow with Bakers introducing a lot of changes as follows:
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Services 90 and 92 have been cancelled and will be replaced by the revised 99, 99A, 99B, 99C services. Service 91 has been moved to a new registration with the new 95 service Congleton - Retail Park - Lower Heath with slight timing changes.
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The separate 93 and D1 registrations have been cancelled, and the journeys have been incorporated with the revised X38 registration. The X38, 76 and 93 services will provide a frequent service to and from West Heath and the X38 has been revised with more journeys to and from Crewe.
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Service 76 is unchanged Monday to Friday, but the Saturday journeys now serve the West Heath loop via Chestnut Drive.
The Monday to Saturday service 27 between Macclesfield and Knutsford is another test case and will lose its subsidy from the 6th of the month. Thankfully, High Peak Buses (the Centrebus/Wellglade joint venture) are continuing with its provision, although frequencies will be cut to at least 90 minutes as opposed to the hourly one that we have at the moment. Unsurprisingly, the ineffective Congleton journey extensions added to replace the long abolished service 34 between there and Alderley Park are being dropped. Speaking of Alderley Park, the 27 once was the only way of getting there from Macclesfield by bus and the service frequencies suffer in the new timetable. Arriva has been operating the 130 Macclesfield to Manchester service through that site for a few years though, and it now seems that more will be making use of that from October onwards. Knutsford comes off worse though since there is no alternative, and I am left wondering at the sense of cutting these journeys when commuters can add patronage. On the other hand, having an 18:40 departure from Knutsford to Macclesfield looks like a positive move, and it will be interesting to see how they get on with that journey.
Saying with the High Peak network, they will be taking over weekday daytime workings on services 1 (Macclesfield to Forest Cottage) and 14 (Macclesfield to Langley) from Arriva on September 16th. No change in route or timetable is involved and Arriva will continue to operate the evening and Sunday workings. However, they seem to be billing the routes as new to Macclesfield when Arriva have been providing them since before I moved to the town. Of course, they are new to High Peak so that may be one explanation…
Other than the above, there are small route changes forthcoming on the Arriva service 10(A) between Macclesfield and Bollington and the Stagecoach service 378 between Wilmslow and Stockport. The former commences on September 16th and September 2nd is the start date for the latter. From what I have seen, these are the types of developments that you’d see when economic fortunes are good, so there’s nothing very typical of our times here.
Then, there are various commercially operated school services starting from the reopening of schools next month. This is a reminder of how many school bus services lost their council money last year and how many got stopped in the middle of the school term too. Along with public scheduled services, these seem to be facing the same moves away from public funding and that appears to be the way the world is going around here.
Aside from all these, there has been a public consultation regarding supported public and flexible bus services. Encouragingly, there has been a huge response to this with the presentation of the results of the exercise to the Cheshire East Council cabinet being delayed until October because of the volume of information that needs processing. Quite what the outcome will be when cash is tight, it is hard to say. All the public meetings from which the input was collected were held during the day when those who work for a living would be unavailable so let’s hope that has no bearing on the results. October could yield some important news yet.
On a more positive note, Arriva has introduced new buses to Macclesfield with Silktown Links branding. They are Optare Solos and all have 12 registrations so we aren’t getting cast-offs from other places, an encouraging sign. Some of the SWB Dennis Darts that we had were getting on in years so it possibly was time for us to get something new for a change; a 61 reg Wright Gemini double-decker has been sighted too since the start of the year though I cannot confirm if that’s a permanent fixture. Having newer buses in the area sits a little uncomfortably with all else that is happening and there could be much learnt yet. These times cannot be called steady anyway so we’ll need to get through them somehow.