Just spotted this - lessons learned clearly.
“First West of England’s popular Q Buster buses will return to Bristol this September following a £600,000 investment by the company to keep Bristol moving.
Some twenty extra vehicles, about the same number as during the pilot last December, will be ready to step in on the busiest cross-city routes that suffer from delays caused by sheer weight of traffic. They will be deployed by First’s Control Centre where delay hotspots are identified on the routes, particularly during peak travel times.
The vehicles will be used wherever they are needed but including services 1 and 2 (Cribbs Causeway to Broomhill and Stockwood) and 75 and 76 (Cribbs Causeway to Hengrove) which are amongst the busiest and often suffer from gaps in the network as they get held up crossing the city. Each route will have dedicated supervisors on the street on weekdays from 7am through to 8pm, equipped with tablet computers connected to the Control Centre so they can quickly identify problem hotspots and call up support.
The vehicles will be brought in from other parts of the country and extra drivers will also be deployed into the operation.
First West of England Managing Director James Freeman said:
“Our Q Buster buses were a popular and effective addition to the network in the last weeks leading up to Christmas last year as they meant that we could quickly plug any gaps in our timetable caused by traffic congestion, particularly at busy times.
“We’re expecting Bristol’s traffic problems to be worse than ever this Autumn, so we’re planning ahead and investing in the service. We’re bringing the Q Busters back much earlier in the season, starting in September so that we can tackle the big spike in road traffic that we know comes in as the autumn school and University terms set in.
“Buses have a vital role to play in tackling Bristol’s traffic congestion, by giving people a viable and reliable alternative to getting in their car. That’s why we’re making this significant investment to help our customers can get the sort of service they rightly expect from a system that runs smoothly.”
“This is very expensive to do but we think it is well worth it to improve the regularity of services in the city.”
Up to twenty buses and the extra supervision were introduced in December last year in the approach to Christmas. This enhanced investment will come to the city three months earlier this year, in order to avoid the effects of the added congestion after the summer holidays, which has a detrimental effect on the city’s bus service.”