Inspired by posts on another thread regarding regular passengers and knowing where they get on/off, I thought I'd start a thread to compare what we're expected to know by our employers.
My background is in a typical family coach operator who did school services, plus private hires and holidays. I probably had a bad deal by having to know the lot of this, plenty of drivers just stuck to schools if they could. Training for us was being directed around a school route by another driver once, or for anything else being given either a school/place name or post code. Of course this meant new drivers regularly found themselves (reasonably) reversing into a school car park to pick up when in fact the school prefers to walk through a snicket to a totally different street or similar.
We were expected to know:
Around 15 school routes (3 over an hour long and only just within 50k)
The locations of 7 swimming pools
The locations of around 10 feeder schools for each swimming pool (and the safe routes to/from them)
The locations of 45 pick-up points for holidays (the furthest 2 were 112 miles apart) and the safe routes to/from/between them
We weren't expected to know, but needed a good working knowledge of:
Towns/villages & taxi services within the door to door pick-up area (they advertise it as including 1 million homes!)
Fares & fare stages on each route as we didn't carry ticket machines.
Times as we didn't carry timetables (just a start and end e.g. dep 0735 arr 0850 199 Anytown to Anytown Comprehensive).
Other companies routes serving the same schools to deal get pupils home when we ran out of seats (all too regular)
I bet I'm not even close to the worst either! What was everyone else expected to know?
My background is in a typical family coach operator who did school services, plus private hires and holidays. I probably had a bad deal by having to know the lot of this, plenty of drivers just stuck to schools if they could. Training for us was being directed around a school route by another driver once, or for anything else being given either a school/place name or post code. Of course this meant new drivers regularly found themselves (reasonably) reversing into a school car park to pick up when in fact the school prefers to walk through a snicket to a totally different street or similar.
We were expected to know:
Around 15 school routes (3 over an hour long and only just within 50k)
The locations of 7 swimming pools
The locations of around 10 feeder schools for each swimming pool (and the safe routes to/from them)
The locations of 45 pick-up points for holidays (the furthest 2 were 112 miles apart) and the safe routes to/from/between them
We weren't expected to know, but needed a good working knowledge of:
Towns/villages & taxi services within the door to door pick-up area (they advertise it as including 1 million homes!)
Fares & fare stages on each route as we didn't carry ticket machines.
Times as we didn't carry timetables (just a start and end e.g. dep 0735 arr 0850 199 Anytown to Anytown Comprehensive).
Other companies routes serving the same schools to deal get pupils home when we ran out of seats (all too regular)
I bet I'm not even close to the worst either! What was everyone else expected to know?
I preferred the sixth from run to be honest, our college was private so the kids were often *ahem* entitled.