mattb7tl
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Post by mattb7tl on Jan 5, 2024 18:15:22 GMT 1
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jan 5, 2024 19:31:50 GMT 1
Breaking down the numbers it's not that impressive & I would say the survey was done on the cheap to grab a few headlines.
1001 responses out of a county of 2.3 million with 660 people in favour, so 66% of 0.435% (or 0.0287%) of the county are in favour of EP+
Hardly something for operators to shout about - surely they should of at least surveyed 1% of the county!
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Post by westyorkshirebus on Jan 5, 2024 20:51:05 GMT 1
There are lies on all sides
Today the campaign for better buses toured West Yorks with their petition to get buses in public control
When a 503 was 10 mins late they suggested this wouldn’t happen under public control
When there was a queue to board a 231 they suggested it was due to cheap ticket machines. Presumably we can look forward to more expensive ticket machines under public control, because that’s is famously what happens with public sector procurement?
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mattb7tl
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Streetlites 🛐
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Post by mattb7tl on Jan 6, 2024 0:53:16 GMT 1
Out of curiosity. Is there any members of the forum left which actually want an EP+?
I remember a discussion popping up in another thread where a lot of active members talked about how their views changed over the pandemic to favour public ownership and franchising.
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Post by delenn on Jan 6, 2024 5:52:50 GMT 1
Out of curiosity. Is there any members of the forum left which actually want an EP+? I remember a discussion popping up in another thread where a lot of active members talked about how their views changed over the pandemic to favour public ownership and franchising. As a rule, I don't want councils running buses. I don't want councils running anything they don't have to. I also admit though that things can't stay the way they are. It may just be that franchising is the best of a bad set of options in some places. |
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joseph
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Post by joseph on Jan 6, 2024 6:26:06 GMT 1
There are lies on all sides Today the campaign for better buses toured West Yorks with their petition to get buses in public control When a 503 was 10 mins late they suggested this wouldn’t happen under public control When there was a queue to board a 231 they suggested it was due to cheap ticket machines. Presumably we can look forward to more expensive ticket machines under public control, because that’s is famously what happens with public sector procurement? They have a point though about the ticket machines, nowadays you're almost guaranteed to find at least 1 broken for every 4 journeys you make each day. |
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Post by Father Dougal McGuire on Jan 6, 2024 8:09:58 GMT 1
There are lies on all sides Today the campaign for better buses toured West Yorks with their petition to get buses in public control When a 503 was 10 mins late they suggested this wouldn’t happen under public control When there was a queue to board a 231 they suggested it was due to cheap ticket machines. Presumably we can look forward to more expensive ticket machines under public control, because that’s is famously what happens with public sector procurement? They have a point though about the ticket machines, nowadays you're almost guaranteed to find at least 1 broken for every 4 journeys you make each day. My bus now as we speak, Reading passes fine on my first trip, now nothing. If I reboot it it will maybe read them for half an hour or so then stop. These ticketers really are awful. I hate them. |
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Post by dwarfer1979 on Jan 6, 2024 10:35:10 GMT 1
Out of curiosity. Is there any members of the forum left which actually want an EP+? I remember a discussion popping up in another thread where a lot of active members talked about how their views changed over the pandemic to favour public ownership and franchising. My position hasn't changed, though I accept I am slightly biased as I work for a bus company in an office role, that unless the council is prepared to put significant amounts of money in then franchising isn't worth it (& given there is nothing like the profit margins that people claim you can't redistribute profit as people like to claim) - if you are offering no improvement in service then all you are doing is adding another level of bureaucracy & cost so everything costs more and takes longer as more people need to sign things off whilst claiming improvements you can't afford. Manchester may have lucked out in the sense that after they made the decision to go for franchising (& they weren't particularly positive about their ability to transform the long term prospects) there is extra funding floating around for bus service improvements (and as it is from HS2 a northern city like Manchester may get a better share) so Manchester is likely to be able to do more than they thought and franchising may come out looking better than it may have if it had been done on the original budget. The problem with all these surveys is that you are asking people their opinion on something they don't understand so you will never get a good answer. You are always asking them to compare the best case of one thing with the worst case of the other option and since people don't know how it works (& it is unreasonable to expect anyone, even enthusiasts if they don't work in management, to understand the minutiae of why things happen) they can't properly compare and so the result will be skewed by the comparison you offer. You also need to acknowledge the tendency amongst bus users of recency bias (they never remember how bad it used to be, the previous operator was always better than the current one) & the idea the grass is always greener on the other side (the operator you don't use is always nicer and more reliable than the one you use regularly) so it was always better in the past and what you haven't experienced (like London for most provincial bus users) is always better than what you have. I'm not sure that Ticketers are actually more unreliable than before, they do more and there are more ticketing options so some transactions are slower but that is the same for all current machines. When I entered the industry we were on simple Wayfarer 3's and you would have a weekly engineer visit to fix the pile of broken machines at the back of the office that had built up over the week (& the next generation of machines were little better) with supervisors going out to swap machines often multiple times a day, I suspect that the Ticketers may actually be more reliable (due to the modular nature of the device each component is optimised for its use) however because these machines are so much more expensive & complicated than previous generations operators probably carry fewer spares so dodgy but not completely broken machines remain on the vehicles for longer until they can be replaced. |
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jan 6, 2024 14:30:13 GMT 1
Out of curiosity. Is there any members of the forum left which actually want an EP+? I remember a discussion popping up in another thread where a lot of active members talked about how their views changed over the pandemic to favour public ownership and franchising. As a rule, I don't want councils running buses. I don't want councils running anything they don't have to. I also admit though that things can't stay the way they are. It may just be that franchising is the best of a bad set of options in some places. It wouldn't be the councils, it would be the Combined Athority/PTE what is a separate from the local councils. Can anyone provide examples of EPs working long term? As the ones I Can think of only saw improvements for the first few years before things started to slip (some not even lasting that long) - South Yorkshire: Sheffield services now arguably more butchered than West Yorkshire & Rotherham fast becoming just a skeleton network. - NE: Again, major cuts with the North Tyneside network now just a mashup of various tendered routes that are semi-useful at best. All 3 major companies have closed at least 1 depot each with GNE looking at closing a 2nd. Only positive is there's a few extra multi operator tickets for the County Durham area. - West Mids: Might be too early to say as the 'Cross City' project's not completed, but Diamond accepting NX tickets on 'partnership' routes only lasted a couple of months before they pulled out of the agreement, plus some areas have seen cuts as well. - Merseyside: Outside of Liverpool City Centre alot of the 'smaller' routes have seen cuts with large parts of Wirral left with either no service or a very infrequent/almost useless service. |
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Post by dwarfer1979 on Jan 8, 2024 9:52:06 GMT 1
As a rule, I don't want councils running buses. I don't want councils running anything they don't have to. I also admit though that things can't stay the way they are. It may just be that franchising is the best of a bad set of options in some places. It wouldn't be the councils, it would be the Combined Athority/PTE what is a separate from the local councils. Can anyone provide examples of EPs working long term? As the ones I Can think of only saw improvements for the first few years before things started to slip (some not even lasting that long) - South Yorkshire: Sheffield services now arguably more butchered than West Yorkshire & Rotherham fast becoming just a skeleton network. - NE: Again, major cuts with the North Tyneside network now just a mashup of various tendered routes that are semi-useful at best. All 3 major companies have closed at least 1 depot each with GNE looking at closing a 2nd. Only positive is there's a few extra multi operator tickets for the County Durham area. - West Mids: Might be too early to say as the 'Cross City' project's not completed, but Diamond accepting NX tickets on 'partnership' routes only lasted a couple of months before they pulled out of the agreement, plus some areas have seen cuts as well. - Merseyside: Outside of Liverpool City Centre alot of the 'smaller' routes have seen cuts with large parts of Wirral left with either no service or a very infrequent/almost useless service. It does depend on definitions and the like as to what you consider EP etc & grade 'successful'. Hertfordshire has long standing Partnerships, and I believe the first full EP+ rolled out, that are pretty successful but I'm not sure whether what went before was officially an EP (the sense of partnership working dates back 20 years even if not formally referred to as such). Leicester has an EP that is developing positively but may still be in what you refer to as the first few years & Nottingham has a successful long standing partnership (but I'm not sure that ever officially stepped from SQP to EP) that includes private operators as well as the majority council owned business. The big issue with any form of Partnership is that it requires genuine buy-in from both sides which can prove an issue. Diamond do seem to have an issue with this concept a little more widely (they have just pulled out of a multi-operator ticket in Staffordshire as well) and a number of the Combined Authorities have shown a tendency towards antagonistic bureaucracy which tends to work against genuine partnership - since all bar West Mids have been vocal about wanting to franchise and some quite negative about the operators it doesn't create an atmosphere that allows real partnership to work long term. Historically partnerships of this sort have proved more successful outside the big conurbations as there is less political imperative towards political control so allows more long term partnership working though whether the scale & depth of an EP+ can be sustainable with the deeper LA influence into commercial matters at operators remains to be seen but deserves to be tried. It may be that the ex-PTE areas can never get a successful long-term partnership to run as the importance of the bus to the city and the political imperative to influence detailed aspects means that commercial operators can never give everything the authority wants and the authorities can never give enough commercial freedom to the operators, as long as the Combined Authorities can produce the money necessary to achieve what they want then let them try and prove they can do it better but my issue with so many of them is that they can't show the funds to actually pay for the things they criticise the operators for not providing themselves. |
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