Lack of buses along Deansgate In Manchester

[Brickmill]

RE: Lack of buses along Deansgate In Manchester

(20/01/2019 17:06)SF07 Wrote:  Any bad night of traffic and Deansgate is clogged up with traffic trying to get out of the city centre (along with a lot of other roads). Also can get congested in the run-up to Christmas, which is why First re-route services away from Deansgate during November and December.

A lot of services that do serve Deansgate only runs one way and that's mainly due to the traffic restrictions at Albert Square/Princess Street after the Metrolink 2CC started. With traffic unable to turn right out of Albert Square, services 191/197 are arriving into Manchester via Peter Street, Deansgate and John Dalton Street, while service 278 (soon to be replaced by the 84) leaving via John Dalton Street and Deansgate. If those restrictions weren't in place, Deansgate would probably not be served by those services.

Would be nice to see some services travel further into/across the city centre, like buses from the south terminating at Shudehill or northern services going beyond Shudehill/Piccadilly Gardens but traffic problems would the main restriction. More likely to get the opposite, like Stagecoach warned about a year or two ago, where services would terminate at the edge of the city centre rather than Piccadilly Gardens.

Service 41 will cross from North to South again from next week, as the 18 already does. Numerous other services from the North and the West reach Piccadilly having covered a lot of the city centre. The worst services for city centre access are those from the East. Before 1995, all Ashton Old Road services and many Hyde Road services ran across the city centre to Victoria offering excellent integration with services out of the old Arndale Bus Station and even trains from Victoria.