arrivamatt
Member
This is something that in my opinion, the industry isn't very good at though. As a lot more people shop in out of town retail parks, services to these retail parks are generally shocking. A lot more people live in new housing estates too and these are often poorly served. All bus operators want someone else to pay them to serve these areas but if it goes well, they want all the profit but if it doesn't go well, least it's not their funds. Workplaces, there are significantly more people now working at big name warehouses and yet with Milton Keynes as the exception, big box industrial is rarely served, especially at shift times.
I'd also say that in some instances, Arriva actively doesn't want people to go to major places. Cheshire Oaks, a shopping centre with an annual footfall of nearly 8 million. They lobbied Flintshire Council to get the 5 tender removed from Cheshire Oaks. In Leicester, at Fosse Park, buses to the internal stops are shocking. Inside Fosse Park is now an intercity coach hub with 30+ departures per day from there. Plus now there is AirCoach running hourly. And yet all that goes into Fosse Park is the 104 and X6. The 50 and X84 stop outside and so for people wanting certain parts of Fosse Park, they have to hike around the retail park, at which point it's easier to drive.
Hopefully this won't be considered returning to or digressing into the retail park question again, but can answer some of the questions from a both a customer and bus network design perspective to keep us on-topic.
There are several striking similarities between both Cheshire Oaks and Fosse Park. It'd be difficult to argue that both locations are car-centric by design, situated near to several motorway junctions on the very outskirts of a major locale. The former is served by a multitude of other operator's interurban services that can call, quite logically, with a minimal time penalty and without requiring additional resource. Service 5, operated by Arriva, runs at a lower frequency, is a tendered service and still calls relatively close to the park, but by glance of the timetable, it doesn't appear to have the bandwidth to do anything further.
Unreliability is a big issue there but why is the solution to that remove buses from a huge destination? The solution should be to install bus priority and make it easier for buses to access. There are a good few options for easy ways to improve access to Fosse Park so that more buses can serve it without a huge time penalty. All it needs is operators, the councils and Fosse Park to work together rather than continuing this spiral of decline where everyone just removes the bus from a major demand point just because there can sometimes be a few delays.
Fosse Park is well served by the 50 and 104 for local traffic, and X6/X84 for customers travelling from further afield. We've experimented with a number of different ideas on how we can penetrate Fosse Park better, but the reality is that sending the 50 either into or through the park would require additional resource just to bolster the existing timetable given the congestion into the car parks, exacerbated at this time of year, so would disagree that driving to and around the park is quicker than walking the short distance from the bus stops. You'll be aware that the gravity of the retail presence has shifted since the redevelopment of Fosse Park West and the construction of the new Everards Brewery (if you haven't been, do go - it's brilliant!) where we've seen our customers utiilise the Sainsbury's stop as a central hub, from which virtually all of the retail outlets are within a <400m radius, the industry-wide benchmark for walking proximity to bus stops, and you could argue that this provides easier access to more of the space than the M&S/ASDA stops. We also considered that whilst Fosse Park is a major trip generator, we must consider the market as a whole, and any time penalty incurred by diverting the service would be a major detractor for our customers in Enderby and Narborough.
Only today, we met with the travel planning team who work closely with Fosse Park, and we engage with them very regularly as a key stakeholder. The missing element you haven't quoted would be cost - the requirement to increase road capacity to give us better bus priority. Who pays for this? There's an appetite from all parties to encourage modal shift for staff and customers but retail also has its challenges; particularly as the park would have to balance recovering said costs with keeping tenancy rates attractive, which may compromise occupancy. Fosse Park is private land (owned by The Crown Estate) so outside of the Council's remit. It's a complex issue, but pleasingly, we've seen employee modal share increase at Fosse Park incrementally over the past four years as a result of continued network improvements and stakeholder engagement.
The huge Caterpillar site at Desford, unserved by buses. Next, Enderby has to be propped up by worker buses due to the lack of normal buses. Magna Park only has half decent buses because the park fund them. Huge housing estates in Derby are left unserved. Major theme parks - Sullivans, Reading Buses and to some extent Go South Coast have got huge business serving theme parks, but there are far too many attractions like this. Operators aren't bothered with Drayton Manor having nothing and Twinlakes having the stupidly confusing 5A for a few weeks of the year. There are many more examples but you get what I am saying.
The wider point around "Arriva doesn't want people to go to major places" with your other examples; sorry, but there's evidence to refute this statement and not sure I do get what you're saying. Drayton Manor is served by Tamworth's 110 up to every 15 minutes, albeit a short walk from Fazeley Square, where we've sold travel and entrance tickets as a combined bundle. Clearly, the 5A from Leicester to Twinlakes operates during the summer school holidays as it wouldn't be commercially viable to go there during school term time - as most of the target audience of the theme park will be in school. Magna Park in Lutterworth is only funded for core shift journeys - but we operate there commercially for the entirety of the day to compliment this offering and to offer more customers, more choice. Caterpillar (and neighbouring Neovia) has been served by Arriva in some way in the recent past, and unfortunately, it wasn't commercially sustainable - but we had a go. We approached Next in Enderby, but they needed something more bespoke that didn't fit with our overall proposition. Derby has a very comprehensive bus network for a city of its size, well served by multiple operators. Like every bus operator in the country in the deregulated market; if there's a commercial opportunity that's is viable, then it'll be evaluated and pursued.
The bigger problems with the buses around Fosse park is that with the exception of the X84 the services are so unreliable as to be almost unusuable and take so long that it can be as quick to walk due to a combination of circuitous routing and buses regularly having to wait for time for much of the day.
Personally I would only be serving Causeway Lane on the way into Leicester with services leaving St Margaret’s via the back exit and running nonstop to Jubilee Square on the way out and would also look into introducing set down only restrictions as far as KFC on the 50 to move local passengers onto the 51.
With the exception of serving the residential roads of Narborough Road South, the 50 takes broadly the same route that the car would take. Without quoting the exact figure, route 50 operates above the depot average in terms of on time performance. I hear the ask about the speedier routing out of Leicester; but the omitted bus stops are more popular boarding locations than Jubilee Square. By your suggestion of moving customers onto the 51 and introducing set down only restrictions, they'd effectively receive half of the frequency assuming that they're only travelling on the common section of route only from the city centre, which isn't necessarily true.
The thing about Leicester in particular is that to take the 50 for example the buses that operated on the route now were for the most part built before those that operated on the route 15 years ago. Whilst investment is often focussed on certain routes in most areas each time the flagship routes get new buses the displaced ones typically cascade down the routes with the oldest ones being withdrawn whereas in Leicester the last few rounds of investment have seen some coridors be downgraded in absolute terms with midlife buses being shipped out and end of life ones cascaded from other routes being shipped in in their place.
The 50/51 corridor should be allocated E400MMCs - the newest in the fleet. Fully appreciate that this isn't always quite the reality at the moment, where allocation has had its challenges whilst electric infrastructure is being installed at Thurmaston, but service delivery hasn't been compromised. The corridor will be one of the beneficiaries of brand new Wright Electroliners over the next few weeks.
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