Metropol

wells wrote:

JAS84 wrote:You imagine wrong. There used to be, but now Stagecoach does almost all services in Hull and East Yorkshire Motor Services does routes which lead into the East Riding. So Stagecoach pretty much have a monopoly here.

Still pricing will be set on a market by market basis and the poster you were responding to was clearly talking about a ticket that takes him inbetween several towns.

The £5.10 dayrider ticket is specifically a 'Torbay Dayrider' and only covers Newton Abbot/Torquay/Paignton/Brixham. It sounds like a big patch but all of these towns are only a few miles from each other and actually doing the maximum journey possible can only be achieved by using the main '12' service which essentially links the town centres together on main roads and so even then you're not doing many miles. Certainly you can cover much bigger areas for much less on other dayrider schemes.

My issue isn't so much around the pricing of the dayrider - £5.10 is still good value if you are actually going to use it as intended and hop on and off a lot of buses all day. My issue is that they've deliberately priced all return tickets to be more than the dayrider so you're still shelling out the £5.10 even though you're only going to do a single return journey between 2 towns that are only 3 miles apart! 85p / mile to travel by bus is not good value for money, local economics considered or not.

Other nasties like still operating a peak time on Saturdays & Sundays and not moving to any kind of off peak pricing until 7PM (when you can get a much better priced 'Nightrider' ticket for £2 covering the same patch as the dayrider) only add to the sense of being ripped off.

As I said in my earlier post, if you want to travel between 2 points that are close to a railway station then the railway should have the buses knocked into a cocked hat here, with them charging much less to do a much shorter journey, yet they don't seem to bother with the insanities of the timetable and infrequency of the service. They *have* since December introduced additional trains on the Newton Abbot-Paignton line which they've been very vocal about, but these are almost all daytime services and are restricted to weekdays which are not much use when it's peak time connections and weekend services that are the main problem. The stock used to run them is very questionable too - the other day I did actually get on one and ended up on a 4 car train consisting of a 3 car 158 with a 153 on the back even though there were less than 10 people on it, yet in the evenings I still get piled into a 2 car pacer with 100 people standing all the way. And FGW are STILL using 150/1s to operate 4 hour+ Penzance-Bristol services but yet are now happy to let a 158 potter about doing 15 minute trips between Newton Abbot and Paignton. A bizarre use of stock if ever there was one.

Just noticed Nexus have posted a lovely little 1989 documentary about public transport.

Alexia wrote:We had "Please let the bus out" and thumbs in the mid-90s down our way. Weirdly, Stagecoach and Glyn Williams had differently designed thumbs.

Indeed Wumpty had them in the early 1980s

I went to Ely the other week and the dot-matrix display kept scrolling something along the lines of 'This is a 'one' railway service to Peterborough.' It's only been six years since that brand was used (turns out it stood for 'operated by national express' and was supposed to unite the former three franchises for the area, but instead just confused people in station announcements - '7:20 one service' or the '7:21 service')

Critique wrote:I went to Ely the other week and the dot-matrix display kept scrolling something along the lines of 'This is a 'one' railway service to Peterborough.' It's only been six years since that brand was used (turns out it stood for 'operated by national express' and was supposed to unite the former three franchises for the area, but instead just confused people in station announcements - '7:20 one service' or the '7:21 service')

Well wiki'd.

I've recently noticed that Cardiff Central omit the operator name (i.e. Arriva Trains Wales) for most Valley Lines services off platforms 6 and 7. Given their frequency, the number of stations served, the need for bilingualism, and the fact that it is very very very rare that any trains apart from ATW services use 6 & 7, I can see why.

Alexia wrote:I've recently noticed that Cardiff Central omit the operator name (i.e. Arriva Trains Wales) for most Valley Lines services off platforms 6 and 7. Given their frequency, the number of stations served, the need for bilingualism, and the fact that it is very very very rare that any trains apart from ATW services use 6 & 7, I can see why.

Would be nice if this sensibility extended elsewhere - at London Waterloo 100% of services are operated by South West Trains, yet the operator name is included in every single announcement.

Critique wrote:...turns out it stood for 'operated by national express'...

Ooh! I never knew that! Presumably a backronym, as 'one' itself was chosen for its unifying status, I'd have thought...

Quick question: Why is Northern Rail so awful? I have probably only traveled with them a handful of times but I'm fairly sure one of the trains I was on recently was some sort of converted bus - it had bus bench seats and it was incredibly low quality. The connecting East Coast train, in comparison, was lovely.

Buses is exactly what they are, they're called Pacers and they're utter crap.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacer_(train)

Critique wrote:Quick question: Why is Northern Rail so awful? I have probably only traveled with them a handful of times but I'm fairly sure one of the trains I was on recently was some sort of converted bus - it had bus bench seats and it was incredibly low quality. The connecting East Coast train, in comparison, was lovely.

You're comparing an InterCity operation with a Regional operation. It's not unlike comparing a coach service to a local bus service.

East Coast is profitable, and returns a healthy surplus to the treasury every year.

Northern is far from profitable, and takes massive subsidies to keep it going.

The muppets at the SRA (since collapsed back in to the DfT) at the time Northern's franchise was let decided that it should be a "zero growth" franchise, meaning passenger numbers would not rise over the term of the franchise and fleet investment would therefore be minimal. The franchise is now over (and Northern still have at least a year or two thanks to the Virgin cock-up in 2012) and passenger numbers are up considerably.

Critique wrote:I went to Ely the other week and the dot-matrix display kept scrolling something along the lines of 'This is a 'one' railway service to Peterborough.' It's only been six years since that brand was used (turns out it stood for 'operated by national express' and was supposed to unite the former three franchises for the area, but instead just confused people in station announcements - '7:20 one service' or the '7:21 service')

Count the amount of First Capital Disconnect trains which still peg themselves as WAGN and station Thales Matrix Boards that say WAGN/www.wagn.co.uk! Even where I work we still refer to Network SouthEast on some systems! We split things using codes BRB and LUL (not NWR and TFL respectively!)