Warrington's Own Buses

[Valandil]

RE: WBT Network Warrington

(30/10/2015 20:02)Dentonian Wrote:  The illustration is to show how "interworking" services (ie. coming in on one route, and going out on another) would allow buses to have more than 5 minutes stand in the Interchange. The illustration suggests avarage of about 8 minutes. Whether it is as practical as it sounds is another matter. An average of 8 minutes suggests inefficiency, with the possibility of change times to save resources (eg. a bus) without either reducing the service or reducing the round trip time. Still, with NW fares they could probably afford spare buses coming out of their ears!
Other operators have moved away from intertiming for various reasons, such as marketing/branding favoured routes and keeping punctuality problems within a service. There is also the question of capacity at the relevant Bus station, depending on maximum stand time etc. On TFGM Bus Stations, for instance, no bus is supposed to be on the stand for more than 5 minutes.

The thing with Warrington is that most services are not frequent enough to work by themselves and they also take an annoying number of minutes meaning that interworking is pretty much essential.*
In fact only the 17 doesn't interwork at all as far as I know (apart from with the 17A/17C/18) due to having branded vehicles, though the 6 and 32A also don't interwork during the day, though both of them interwork with nearly everything under the sun in the peak periods.

So currently we have every Stockton Heath service apart form the 6 interworking with every other during the day (except around lunch time when e.g. a 5 goes onto a 6 some time around 12:30 iirc) and other long patterns of seemingly disparate services interworking like 19/22/2/25/23/1.

* Having said that, I wish that e.g. the 14/15 became every 10 minutes combined; there would be no need for them to interwork then.