Arriva North West - St Helens Depot

[Gillmoss 0324]

RE: Arriva North West - St Helens Depot

(11/04/2013 19:16)507009 Wrote:  Double deckers are without a doubt required on 10/10A journeys leaving Liverpool from early afternoon until late evening. The loads are massive: this route needs deckers more than the 12/13 for me. It's not all about bunching either; while this exacerbates the problem, it's not unusual for several buses to run on time in a row and still be packed to the rafters.

(12/04/2013 06:46)M60lad Wrote:  I tend to agree that sometimes deckers need to be used o 10/A/B/C corridor from Lime Street-Page Moss, I've done the trip many a time mainly in the peaks and most if not all leave Queen Square with good healthy loads on them and some leaving with standing loads, although once past Page Moss loads start to thin out from what I've seen with only the odd person getting on and getting off, in fact sometimes I've been the only person on a 10A from Wiston Hospital to St Helens.

The problems really start though is if something goes wrong on the railways which is what happened a couple of months ago and the queues for services to Huyton and beyond were quite lengthy with virtually every bus at Queen Square taking upto 5mins or more to load up and then leaving full and standing.

The main problem though is since the QBP has been introduced as it has seen less buses on 10/A in particular, in my opinion extra's neeed to be operated at the peak sometimes

Some good points there and I think many of the problems with overcrowding have gradually developed since the Arriva takeover of MTL in 2000.

You still had roughly a 50/50 split of double/single decks on MTL’s Lancashire Travel/Liverbus 10, 210 and 274/275, decker’s on the 8/9’s and also CMT, Merseyline and North Western/Arriva North West which IMHO I reckon was about a third more of the capacity/journeys which is now running along the Prescot Road corridor.

With the takeovers since 2000 the Prescot Road corridor has lost 2 maybe 3 operators along it and in turn I don’t really see any fall in passenger numbers along Prescot Road one of the Merseyside’s most used bus corridors. Yes Arriva/Stagecoach/Merseytravel go on about high frequencies and other cop outs like if your first bus is full you’ll usually have a bus behind that is less full (usually not the case) . But if there’s unreliability/hold ups and ‘doughnutting’ buses will come in a convoy and you’ll end up waiting more than 10 minutes to get 1-2 packed buses with no alternative and no chance of getting a seat particularly from Page Moss to the City Centre.

The best solution to this problem is to have some form of decker operation on the Prescot Road corridor. However Arriva/Stagecoach and the depot’s concerned don’t seem to want to go for this and I can’t really see how the current situation will change/improve unless they change their mind on this.

Common sense at the moment should see the 10/10A/10B having only Pulsar and Enviro300 sized vehicles on them and SH/GL/GM’s PVR’s should appropriate enough to have this. If not get those kind of vehicles transferred from depots which may not need Pulsar etc. operation and can cope with Dart’s and Solo’s.