St Helens Area Bus Network Changes - April 2023

[Valandil]

RE: St Helens Area Bus Network Changes - April 2023

(14/03/2023 15:26)iMarkeh Wrote:  It has to link back to Merseytravel somehow as well because the same mess happened with the 61 and now it's happening with more tenders accross various operators. It doesn't link back to just Arriva or just HTL etc, the common denominator between them all is Merseytravel.

Just to be sure I'm following, are you referring to the Arriva route 61 which they took over when Halton Transport went bust?

[St Helens Rider]

RE: St Helens Area Bus Network Changes - April 2023
Commercial operators can sometimes produce some not very useful timetables themselves. For example, services 32 & 35 from St Helens Hospital towards St Helens Town Centre run within minutes of each other and have done for years. I'm sure if researched, there are more than likely other examples.

[Valandil]

RE: St Helens Area Bus Network Changes - April 2023

(14/03/2023 16:24)St Helens Rider Wrote:  Commercial operators can sometimes produce some not very useful timetables themselves. For example, services 32 & 35 from St Helens Hospital towards St Helens Town Centre run within minutes of each other and have done for years. I'm sure if researched, there are more than likely other examples.

Yeah, that whole direction of St Helens has had problems which you'd have thought could have been managed better.
Like in the peaks, the 30 and 17 often used to run together too, with the Solo in front getting packed out and standing, but the Solo behind only having a few on.
As far as I can recall, it was because they had a more-or-less co-ordinated timetable during the interpeak period, but in the peaks the 30 still ran every 30 minutes but the 17 ran about every 36 minutes instead.

[iMarkeh]

RE: St Helens Area Bus Network Changes - April 2023

(14/03/2023 16:22)Valandil Wrote:  Just to be sure I'm following, are you referring to the Arriva route 61 which they took over when Halton Transport went bust?

Yes, the Arriva Halton 61 (not the Bootle 61). Merseytravel put out the timetable to be hourly using 4 buses and it was a right mess from day 1, they then had to put another bus out on the route and rather than just retime the trips which needed the extra time (those generally between 7am and 6pm), they were extremely lazy and retimed all journeys so that now services have extortionate amount of time and end up sitting around at most timing points for at least a couple of minutes. I work out that the first 2 trips from Huyton and first 2 trips from Runcorn could take easily 10 minutes off the journey, upto even 15-20 minutes. Giving stupid times like 10 minutes from Halton Hosp to St Chads School. In the early morning, that can be done in less than 5 minutes. Plenty of sitting around at Rainhill Stoops as well. It's endless. Someone has either been extremely lazy and just said 'all buses will take x minutes between these points' or someone has been told to justify the existence of the extra bus so vastly increase the running time. Journey times which are this much longer than they have to be discourage passengers.

(14/03/2023 16:24)St Helens Rider Wrote:  Commercial operators can sometimes produce some not very useful timetables themselves. For example, services 32 & 35 from St Helens Hospital towards St Helens Town Centre run within minutes of each other and have done for years. I'm sure if researched, there are more than likely other examples.

That I do not dispute. Arriva and Stagecoach can be just as bad at times. The difference is that the commercial operators are putting their own money on the line there, not taxpayers money. They are also not calling for a publicly ran bus network where their same incompetent schedulers would be given significant additional work. Merseytravel on the other hand! Their staff are clearly too stupid to undertake their current simple task of creating schedules, yet they want more control of the bus network!

[St Helens Rider]

RE: St Helens Area Bus Network Changes - April 2023
The new 39 timetable now on Merseytravel's website. What wasn't mentioned in the changes summary is that the service now runs hourly daily.

[Valandil]

RE: St Helens Area Bus Network Changes - April 2023
Surely the Monday to Saturday evening times of the new 29 are wrong.
One trip takes 10 minutes from Rainhill Station to Bold Heath, but the others take 3 mins, etc. and vehicles appear to go back in time by 30 minutes when they arrive at Rainhill Station - I'm guessing they've copied the outbound times onto the inbound part of the timetable too there by mistake.

[St Helens Rider]

RE: St Helens Area Bus Network Changes - April 2023
I'm am also trying to work out what the 29 will interwork with as it wouldn't be cost effective having the vehicle being on layover for about an hour.

[CX06 EBK (Administrator)]

RE: St Helens Area Bus Network Changes - April 2023
It will interwork with the 17 circuit. So the 17 will do Chain Lane trips, 60s and the 29s across their duties. It'll be interesting to see how they run overall because this will require more drivers for HTL.

[St Helens Rider]

RE: St Helens Area Bus Network Changes - April 2023

(17/03/2023 12:53)CX06 EBK Wrote:  It will interwork with the 17 circuit. So the 17 will do Chain Lane trips, 60s and the 29s across their duties. It'll be interesting to see how they run overall because this will require more drivers for HTL.

As well as the increased service on the 39. Thanks for the info.

[Merseysidebusenthusiast]

RE: St Helens Area Bus Network Changes - April 2023

(17/03/2023 05:56)St Helens Rider Wrote:  The new 39 timetable now on Merseytravel's website. What wasn't mentioned in the changes summary is that the service now runs hourly daily.

The 39 is 2 hours still I think it was a mistake at first and they've changed to 2 hours.
https://merseytravel.adidocdn.dev/timeta...6Apr23.pdf