Merseyside Night Buses

[E400]

RE: Merseyside Night Buses

(24/08/2016 22:36)mr t Wrote:  Sadly what the Arriva and Stagecoach business and finance people expect is a return for every journey or service - look at how many routes have been chopped especially by Arriva over the last couple of years, and high profile ones too that allegedly no longer pay, even though there is a fair % that use the day or weekly tickets and thus dont get recorded getting on or off buses, so therefore certain services look like they dont carry anyone when actually they could all be half full and the mangers dont see that, so its like a victim of their own success - if passengers simply scanned their tickets every time they boarded a bus the depots would then know exactly who and how many times that person uses the bus and what ones etc. We finally got the Merseytravel passes to scan, but still no operator ones do, so the service providers realistically has no idea how people use their own services at the moment, which is surely wrong in this digital and computer age - if we were all tracked then there might be patterns of people using certain routes or 2 routes to get to places and then they could respond to that by having a new services etc.
Sadly passsenger needs and providing a "full" service has disappeared in this age since deregulation. The only way things will change is if bus franchising is introduced where the timetables are stipulated or if Merseytravel has an increase in its bus fund to introduce more services that it used to support until the budgets keep getting cut over the last 5 years. Otherwise, its the shareholders that are the most important people in bus companies these days

Stagecoach have their Smart card tickets, I would imagine Arriva isn't too far behind them. The Stagecoach passes also scan on Arriva ticket machines. As for the 86 - it will mainly be used by students, most of whom will have Arriva passes, which are not valid on Stagecoach. I can see the 86A having a very healthy service, especially at weekends, but Stagecoach may struggle unless they hit freshers with very hard with marketing.

Most freshers default to an Arriva pass because of the 699 - Stagecoach may only benefit from second and third years who realise they can save big time if they wait for the 86, and now that this is 24/7, Stagecoach have a massive opportunity to win a market share of students.

Let's face it - cash fares are not going to be around much longer. Pre-paid tickets is the way it is going. Arriva and Stagecoach must appreciate this and must therefore be expecting minimal cash fares. This also helps the security aspect (though I maintain that there is only a marginal increase in risk from normal evening services).