My late-night bus service to work has just switched over from SEWTA (a co-operative of little local bus services) to that multi-national bastion of transport, Stagecoach. Now with SEWTA, we always had the same driver every night (a man looking not dissimilar to Nick) who always liked a chat and knew most of his patrons well having served them day in day out for the past few years. He always arrived fifteen minutes before his due out time so that instead of standing on the cold, unforgiving and downright dangerous city centre bus station, you could sit on the bus and read your Guardian in comfort.
Sadly he's gone driving old ladies round Chepstow-way and we're left with another faceless Stagecoach driver. AND last night he turned up 15 minutes late, moaning about not having enough flexibility on his time-sheet, leaving me, an old lady and a strange bald man with a backpack and some weird ringtones stranded on said unfriendly bus station, not knowing if he'd turn up at all. Fortunately I wasn't too late for work as he put the hammer down somewhat, driving at 40mph through residential streets littered with parked cars.
Earlier (about 45 minutes earlier) my 22:03 bus didnt turn up and I had to hot-foot it to the junction at the bottom of the road for the 22:14 which goes the other way into town.
I wouldn't mind a one-off but this particular episode repeats itself fairly often. Surprise surprise when you find out the operator once more is Stagecoach.
Interesting company Stagecoach. Its founder, Brian Souter, donated about a million quid to a postal political campaign to halt the rescinding of Section 28. He's deeply in bed with Alex Salmond, Nicola Sturgeon and the merry band of modern day Rob Roys in charge in Scotland at the moment. In March 2007, he donated £500,000 to the SNP and then in April 2007 the SNP's commitment to re-regulate the bus network was dropped from the 2007 manifesto. Coincidence surely...
Also in the news the other, city council funded bus company around here have upped their ticket prices by 35% in the last year (twice in the last two months!) and now I notice they've completely re-numbered their routes. The bus that comes up my way in the day was the 17, but is now the 5. That's easy enough for me to adjust to, but try telling the poor pensioner who pops to town once a week that she now has to remember a different bus number. It's bad enough that they've moved the bus stand that the 17-cum-5 leaves from 800 metres AWAY from the bus station, in preperation for it being demolished 6 months ago. (i.e. that's when it SHOULD have been done.)
Maybe some people will come back at me and say "at least you don't have First".. but to be honest, long journeys aside, I never had any problems with First when I lived away from home. I wish First had bought out National Welsh / Red & White back in the mid-90s, rather than this shower of shite we now have.
Oh...I haven't even got onto how they brutally murdered another home-grown independent bus company that served the routes round here, and absorbed them into their ranks. Or how they're saving money by dragging in dilapidated second-hand buses from London (complete with Oystercard stickers and bomb warnings). Nor how they have upped one arterial route to one bus every 10 minutes, but how there's only one bus between 7pm and 8pm.
Public transport eh? Don't get me wrong; I love it when it works. Sadly, with these clowns in charge, it tends to fail spectacularly when it doesn't work.
I invite others to share their tales of woe, or (more likely) invite ridicule for wasting 5 minutes of your time on a petty rant.
