Just curious, is this speculation or factual? Just interesting reading as Arriva Northumbria is almost the opposite, the whole network bar 2 routes, I believe, is fully commercial and I'd be fairly confident that the evening buses aren't making money and are being cross subsidised by their day time counter parts. Stockton, Redcar and Darlington is much of the same aswell, even known the last lost a few evening services on a Sunday recently but there's still evening services on most routes every other day. Durham, less so, admitably.
It is perhaps an example of management doing things differently. My comments predominantly come from the North West, Wales and West Midlands areas and when you go to most Arriva areas and look at the evening services, check what the council funds (information mostly via freedom of information requests) and they tend to match up pretty well.
Wales division, Chester 10, Wrexham 1 and 2, Rhyl 12 and 11M and possibly the Bangor 5 are the commercial routes. The rest are funded.
Merseyside most evening trips are funded in some way. The town of St Helens for example, a relative Arriva stronghold, most routes are tendered (the HTL evening only services and the 32/32A and 38A), under deminims payment (31/34/89/320/352), or under BSIP funding (329). Leaving the only commercial routes as the 10 and 10A. Many other examples scattered around Merseyside. Manchester, all evening buses are funded.
West Midlands area, only routes which run past 8pm which are commercial are Telford 4 and Tamworth 7E and 110
A new thread may be best as this would be a long post to post all of the sources as of course it involves a lot of different councils.
I appreciate @markymark2000 is an enthusiast with a great deal of minutiae knowledge (and a frustration when any of this is wrong) but this needs to be tempered with reality.
I have experience within the industry. I choose not to give my full professional background on this forum.
Well that is useful - please come and ride my bus, you can find all the information you need on the bus ...... Sorry, got to do better than that to get results from all this investment in marketing you've made.
This is the low effort end of the scale. As I have said repeatedly, you can scale up the effort all the way to full Alex Hornby route refreshing with liveries, roadshows and new uniforms etc etc. Any promotion is better than what is going on now!
It's also surprising how many people can pick up leaflets on the bus and use that to encourage them to make other journeys (such as they see evening journeys that they never knew existed or found it hard to get times for), they can also go home and use the leaflet to inform others. It's nowhere near as effective as posting to every household but it is a form of marketing which would work, especially on a low effort end. I am trying specifically to not say everyone should be doing all out marketing to promote a marginal route in decline because everyone would then be saying it can't be justified.
Presumably you have a plan to send someone else out to make sure all the drivers had done what you asked during the 5 min walk round check plus this?
Can drivers not be trusted to do anything these days? In operators that I have experience with (ranging from small firms to big operators), drivers would be more than capable of doing this sensibly after walkaround check. Use some logic on this, it's a network map and a fares poster, they only get updated about twice per year. You say it as if it's something that needs doing daily! I don't know why you are making a mountain out of this mole hill.
In my county of residence Ticketer is hardly used. The two main operators (about 96% of scheduled mileage) use other machines. I concur with @greenline712 that the process of interface between scheduling system to EBSR to BODS can be fraught with difficulty.
I don't know which area you are so can't of course go too far into that but as I have said, there are alternatives such as agents and while some operators may be doing things as you suggest, others will not be.
One particular operator has had fairly major issues with this interface and has recently introduced an upgrade, but that doesn't seem to have solved everything. Even the data to their own journey planning website has been unreliable, with whole services missing.
There may well be issues with user carelessness/unfamiliarity/tasks that only need doing occasionally so get missed [updating date ranges for schools etc]
Errors in the data will probably also mean errors in the EBSR, so putting them right will involve the work of resubmission (at a cost) and Local Transport Authority proformas sought.
Depends how the data is created in the first place and how it is created. For operators doing things the way you explain, yes things may be more complex. In other cases, less so. As I have said, I have done BODS for operators and bar one or two hiccups, I could create the data pretty easily.
Any operator receiving a long list of @markymark2000 issues will likely put them on the pile of 'to do' items when the timetable changes - if it means asking for NapTan changes and stuff it'll be even further down the pile, due to the amount of time needed to deal with them.
Not really. Generally it's not longer lists, It's route X does/doesn't serve stop 1 [stop name and ATCO/NAPTAN code] or sometimes it's routes wrongly listed as not for public use (for Ticketer operators, this is solved within a minute by finding the service and then clicking a checkbox. Other methods may take longer). It's proven how easily these can be fixed with firms like Falcon Buses and D&G fixing issues within a day. Centrebus however until recently, their datasets hadn't been updated in months. That wasn't a 'this route has this issue', it was a '70% of the data is incorrect' sort of thing. The very few instances I have given a fuller list, about 50% have been resolved quickly and I am now working with the operator to resolve the others.
NAPTAN stuff I report separately to the council, no point informing operators of a missing stop as you say, they will just be reporting to someone else.
The situation seems to be the difficulty getting through to the right people. once you are through to the right people, one of two things happen. Either 1, they are fixed quickly, or 2 they are indefinitely ignored (irrespective of timetable changes).
We are very, very far away from Traffic Commissioners enforcing BODS accuracy, aside from operators wilfully refusing to supply information. The TCs have hardly any staff, and they are not going to be looking at this in any detail any time soon. In fact, I predict that the governance system will have changed before then.
I understand. You asked how is it going to change and enforcement is the only solution which will see real results in my opinion. May not be practical with how things are right now but that is what will be needed eventually as the softly softly approach has stopped working. Given Traffic Commissioners want to start using BODS as evidence of operators reliability, it's in their best interests to get a grip on BODS compliance as that will make some of their other goals easier to achieve.
In both organisations they are no doubt well or over loaded with work, and have to prioritise. Your long lists may not be acted upon immediately. Money, and resource, is not readily available.
For BODS/Naptan, if it was done right first time, there wouldn't need to be money or resources used fixing the issues. Ongoing maintenance, especially NAPTAN, is minimal, there only becomes a longer list if it's been neglected or updated really poorly (Unless someone suddenly moves all of the bus stops in a council area, then I can see why there may be an issue!)