On Trains & Buses

Travel news, views & information from Europe & North America by an independent public transport user

A campaign begins

Posted on September 27, 2012

Yesterday, I found a sign attached to a bus shelter on Churchill Way in Macclesfield calling for support for a campaign to convince Cheshire East Council to retain its financial support of the Monday to Saturday evening bus services between the town and nearby Bollington. The campaign seems to be co-ordinated by Bollington Town Council and has made the front page of the Macclesfield Express too.

That recites arguments about the town being cut off in the evenings and other places are facing the same fate in Cheshire East too. The 130 Macclesfield to Manchester (Parr’s Wood only at times) service was not mentioned in the article, but its Monday to Saturday evening journeys are to lose support too and more places are affected by that decision as will the planned cuts to Sunday evening bus services on service 38 between Macclesfield and Crewe.

Once upon a time, it was possible to talk of making more of an effort to encourage folk to use buses with there being so much of a sense of threat to the continued operation of services. However, that that hasn’t happened is now endangering their continued existence due to dependence on the public purse and maybe the livelihoods of those who need the services for getting to and from work. Some possibly could be operated on a commercial basis and that may happen yet though this is a scary way of finding out which services are or are not sustainable.

The other matter that gives me pause for thought is the way in which the consultation was carried out by the council. On a previous time, there were suggested cuts and the public were invited to respond. The latest review didn’t take that format but rather a survey of bus usage and a series of daytime roadshows, probably held when some who depend on the service whose withdrawal is proposed were at work.

A better way would have been to do that usage survey, held those roadshows when working folk could make them and to have feedback on any proposals. However, it seems that the next stop for the proposals will be a Cheshire East Council cabinet meeting on October 18th without any feedback from the public. The way it has been done looks like an attempt to railroad the cuts in order ensure that they get carried out.

Of course, there still is the matter of local democracy and local folk emailing the likes of Bill Livesley (one of Bollington’s Cheshire East Councillors) to register their opinions on what is planned. With the number of services likely to be affected, it looks as if a fair few councillors need contacting over the matter.

Also, the sum of money that is involved is not that large at around £500,000 and the current budget stands at around £2.2m, again not a large amount given some of the sums that you hear in the media these days. However, the council is seeing cuts in its funding from central government, so I suppose that savings have to be found somewhere. Also, I am left wondering if a moderate increase in council tax would not help with this though many in the borough probably do not fancy the idea of paying more tax and the council is controlled by the Conservatives.

In addition, there is the issue of free travel for older residents and what that is costing. Apparently, Cheshire East’s population is set to get older, so this problem will increase. In fact, some have gone with the idea of the pass entitling you to reduced fares throughout the day and not just prior to 09:30 as is the case at present. With older people being more likely to vote in elections, this is a knotty problem that is set to stay with us for a while yet.

All in all, the consultation was well and good, but I reckon that it could have involved the public more. Having some public comment on the proposed cuts may make it a two stage process, but it has to be better than hearing about cuts without much of an opportunity to provide feedback on them. Last year, there was even less involvement so what we have this year has been an improvement, though there is room for more. Our austere age is presenting some awkward choices for us, but we need to be careful about the loss of bus services. Maybe we should make more use of them to avoid what is happening though the unsettling aspect of the whole business well may have the opposite effect, particularly when we need to encourage less car usage because of road congestion and other sensible reasons.

More cuts proposed for Cheshire East bus services

Posted on September 25, 2012

Cheshire East Council’s Public Transport Consultation has yielded its results and they don’t look all that pretty. Many services face extinction and it could happen just before Christmas according to the proposed timetable. Details of the affected services are divided into schoolday and non-schoolday categories and there’s overview of services receiving financial support too.

While it is a relief to see some pivotal services saved from cuts, there is a surprise too in the form of financial support being recommended for service 27 between Macclesfield and Knutsford. From next month, I was led to believe that was becoming a commercial operation. Maybe that’s like the bus stop sign professing the return of the sadly defunct Sunday journeys of service 108 between Stockport, Macclesfield and Leek following their demise last year. That sign in Oakgrove turned out to be incorrect so it might be the same with the aforementioned recommendation too. Events may have overtaken the consultation.

Returning to the planned losses, school services seem to be taking quite a hit again this year and it looks as if even more of them will be affected than last year. Some non-school services such as the 390 between Poynton, Bramhall and Stockport or the 391 between Middlewood, Poynton and Stockport face total withdrawal altogether. There are more services facing cuts than these but I have selected several for special mention below some that stand out for me. One only can hope that no more savings are needed but it could prove a forlorn one again in 2013.

Service 108: Macclesfield-Leek-Ashbourne

Friday and Saturday only evening journeys, one morning journey from Leek to Macclesfield and Fallibroome High School and afternoon journey from the latter to Sutton: the first of these would be a loss for anyone fancying a day out walking in the Staffordshire Moorlands and Derbyshire Dales but a journey a few years ago had few passengers on it until Macclesfield so these were vulnerable in an era when public spending is under pressure.

Service 378: Wilmslow-Handforth-Stockport

The proposed cuts would leave only a Monday to Saturday daytime service with train travel being needed at other times. This looks like a stark option so axes are in action here.

Service 130: Macclesfield-Wilmslow-Manchester

Monday to Saturday evening journeys between Macclesfield and Didsbury are set for the chop. Sadly, they were seen as marginal during the last round of cuts and seem to be a target this time too. It makes me wonder how anyone working late at Alderley Park (there are some) is supposed to get home; it sounds like more expensive taxis are set to be all that they have if the service goes.

Early Saturday morning services are to be another casualty and it seems that train travel is being cited as an alternative to both. That argument has appeared before but it means that so many spots currently being served will lose what they have. This also was one of the services attracting the most public input and nearly a fifth of those were using it to get to work!

Services 5 & 6: Weston Estate Circular (Macclesfield)

Service 9: Moss Rose (Macclesfield)

Service 10A: Macclesfield-Bollington

Though these are three different services, they face the same cut: the loss of Monday to Saturday evening services. Interestingly, the 10A Sunday service came off council support last year and is run commercially now so there may be hope for some of these journeys. Otherwise, it’s a case of using the more expensive taxi option or walking (always of no cost, of course).

Service 38: Macclesfield-Crewe

It’s the Sunday evening services that are in the firing line here. There was a time when I found these useful though they weren’t so well used so I can see why they are a target. Around ten years ago, there was a proposal to axe all evening journeys on this service but that thankfully never came to pass.

Service 84: Crewe-Nantwich-Chester

This is another trunk service facing the axing of evening services and it seems to be all four of them on every day of the week. Again, train travel has been suggested as an alternative but it still looks like an austere proposition.

Another escape from paper ticketting

Posted on September 17, 2012

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.

Macclesfield to Knutsford bus service to change again at the end of October 2012

Posted on September 11, 2012

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.

Back to darker ages?

Posted on September 4, 2012

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.

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