Stagecoach Kent reliability issues on bank holiday

[gray1404]

Do Stagecoach Kent have issues getting drivers on a bank holiday or is there a general issue every day of the week with services not running?

Today I went for the 5 1200 Canterbury to Whitstable which never showed (next service 3 hours later). I got an alternative service to Herne Bay instead.

The 1441 and 1541 from Herne Bay to Whitstable also never showed up. Forget the service number. I bailed at that point and got a bus from the other side of the road back to Canterbury.

This is a really poor show on the part of Stagecoach. My concern is I'm here for the week. Is this a typical service or is it simply as it's a bank holiday.

 

[Man of Kent]

Do Stagecoach Kent have issues getting drivers on a bank holiday or is there a general issue every day of the week with services not running?

Today I went for the 5 1200 Canterbury to Whitstable which never showed (next service 3 hours later). I got an alternative service to Herne Bay instead.

The 1441 and 1541 from Herne Bay to Whitstable also never showed up. Forget the service number. I bailed at that point and got a bus from the other side of the road back to Canterbury.

This is a really poor show on the part of Stagecoach. My concern is I'm here for the week. Is this a typical service or is it simply as it's a bank holiday.

Appears from BusTimes that many buses got caught in bank holiday traffic in Whitstable. As a result, the 5 you went for was half an hour late arriving in Canterbury (it has a 9 minute turnround) and looks to have gone empty to Seasalter in order to run the next journey on time. 400s and 600s were similarly afflicted.

 

[GDKEnts]

I don't think it's just one area that is an issue, not enough time on Sunday timetables if there is no traffic on the road at all.

 

[Islineclear3_1]

Often, you can't move in Whitstable on a summer bank holiday - or any other summer weekend for that matter. I gave up driving there years ago as parking is so awful. I'm not surprised the buses got held up

 

[gray1404]

Looks like the issues I had were due to bank holiday traffic and isolated to Whitstable.

 

[aswilliamsuk]

It's not just Whitstable - the 102s down the coast from Dover and Folkestone often have their schedules shredded by summer traffic (one of the reasons the route no longer goes through to Rye). Weekends in particular see the service in bits by lunchtime, but what can they do? There's no effort to deal with traffic, so the buses have to struggle through as best as they can.

 

[Blindtraveler]

The loop was also suffering yesterday, I used it for a journey from cliftonville to Margate Station mid-afternoon and things were definitely beginning to fall apart, the huge numbers of people on the Kent coast and various towns and resorts puts quite a bit of pressure on the roads and the local connections. And indeed by the time I was travelling rail network was also filling up quite nicely with homebound passengers

 

[alex397]

Stagecoach’s reliability in east Kent is really suffering and I frequently have issues now.

The route 5 you mention has a very tight timetable on a Sunday/Bank Holiday. Even on a quiet day it can easily get delayed. So when there’s the extra holiday traffic in Whitstable the service can be severely delayed. It’s a Kent County Council contract on a Sunday and I believe they set the timetable.

The former Triangle service (now 400/401/600/601) connecting Canterbury, Whitstable, Herne Bay also has issues especially when Whitstable is busy. The revised service was supposed to be more reliable but I’ve continued to have issues using the service.

Much of this is not Stagecoach’s fault. There’s far too much car traffic and bus priority is almost non existent. The local authorities seemingly don’t have much interest in helping improve bus priority.

What bugs me though are evening cancellations as well as Stagecoach’s poor communication when there are delays/cancellations. There are also no main bus stops in east Kent that have real time bus info, as is common on most of the continent, which is useful when mobile data is poor or phone battery is low.