We’ve survived IW Festival and just managed to get ourselves back on track in time to get our buses and drivers over to Glastonbury.  While we operate all IW Festival buses ourselves, along with our sister companies we provide around 25 buses for Glastonbury on contract to the transport coordinators.  Although we still have more summer events to come and need to bring in buses for some of them, we have a bit of a breather from them for now.

However, this week is the deadline for registering our timetable starting at the end of August with the ‘Traffic Commissioners’ who regulate the process of setting timetables and routes.

To many the end of August seems an early date to change timetables for the ‘Winter’, but our timetables for main routes don’t really have any seasonal changes these days.  The seasonal routes are the Island Breezer open tops and the Island Coaster coaches and these have their own timetable change dates that are separate to the main routes.  We change when we do because this is the start of the new school and college year, when requirements to carry school children and students change.  It is also now the time when IW Council re-lets its contracts for non-viable routes and journeys, and we have worked with them over the past two years to get the changes all aligned for this one date.  This is good in that we only have one set of changes in the autumn, with another usually around Easter when we can tweak things as needed.

This year the Council has been nice and timely with the contracts too, which were pretty much all agreed a few weeks ago, something that makes the whole process much smoother for customers as well as ourselves.

There are a few changes coming in the new timetable, and we’ll be announcing those in the coming month with a leaflet and web item explaining the changes in detail.  In the main things are staying much as they are now, but there are a few frequency changes and some odd journeys disappearing, along with one route. 

Unfortunately we haven’t been able to reach an agreement with IW Council (not yet at least) over the payments we receive for free travel pass holders (over 60s mainly).  This year the payment levels have dropped considerably again, and we now get around 37% of the fare for the equivalent paid journey.  Overall the latest reduction makes for a big drop in our income, especially in difficult times generally.  In specific areas of the network there are now some journeys and routes, especially those where free travel is the vast majority of all travel, where the route or journeys are just not viable any more.  These are the areas where we are having to make a few cut backs.

We’re also moving a few routes around a bit, creating new links, and making some routes more efficient in the number of buses they need to operate.

We’re still talking very amicably with the Council, but we have been bearing the cut in revenues since 1 April and can’t predict when we may yet have an outcome to the situation.  Sadly that means that we need to cut our cloth accordingly to protect the viability of our operation as a whole.  Unfortunately the whole process of appealing against the repayment levels is very technical, long winded and expensive.  All across the country the accountants, consultants and lawyers are being paid big bucks by councils and bus companies…and we’re all agreed that the real problem is the fact that the government just hasn’t got the funding for free travel to Councils in the right amounts, or to bus companies so that it properly covers the costs of carrying so many extra customers.

So much has happened since I last blogged.

IW Festival has come and gone. From the outside world it probably looks like little more than a weekend with a few extra buses running out of a farmers’ field…if only!!!

The preparation becomes a full time occupation for most of our head office staff for the two weeks prior, and this week is hectic too clearing away, recording all manner of things like pay and mileages.

Festival itself is now a five day job, pretty much 24 hours a day. All our staff and resources are stretched to the limit – being on an Island with boats full we have to make do with the vehicles we have by Tuesday for the event, and staff are similarly unavailable if we have the numbers wrong.

This year we brought in an extra 34 buses and a host of staff from England. The buses need checking over, preparing, fuelling, washing, and of course fetching in the first place. The staff need to be fed, accommodated, briefed and directed throughout.

As ever, the nature and mood of festival goers couldn’t be faulted, and carrying the vast, vast majority of them was a pleasure.

Attention has now turned to returning the 34 buses back to various pars of Southern England, some urgently as they were lent by our sister companies from their regular fleets, some not urgent at all as they are buses displaced by new ones. However, 19 of them are off next week to ‘do Glastonbury’. These need checking over again, ticket fitments removing, cleaning, fuelling and so on before they can depart. 9 are off on Tuesday being collected by mainland drivers, but the other 10 are off next Sunday with our own staff taking them on to Glastonbury and driving them there. The good news for us is that they aren’t coming back – the buses that is!

We’re also beginning to plan for Cowes Week where this year we will be providing the park and ride ‘Sailbus’ service in Cowes, the IW Council having stopped the provision. Our replacement fills the gap and we were happy to do so, though it will cost £1 a trip to cover the costs. We’re hoping to bring open toppers to Cowes for Sailbus this year, if we can find a couple going spare.

We’re also talking with the organizers of some other big events going on this summer, with a view to providing special services at these too. Great news comes for Sandown High School and Ryde High School, who both won through to the National finals of Global Rock Challenge in Sheffield next month – just the job of getting them there and back in seven coaches to sort as I write!

Meanwhile, we will be registering our next timetable change in a couple of weeks’ time, so are busy finalizing the timetables and other details.

It’s that time of year when there isn’t time to stop for breath.

Last Sunday was Walk the Wight and we provided 18 buses/coaches and drivers as part of our sponsorship for the IW Hospice.  With this being during the summer season and with our increased Sunday service levels, finding staff was not as easy as in past years.  The vast majority were office and engineering staff who were all willing to give up their day off for such a great cause.

This is one of those events when the vast majority of our staff from Head Office in Newport is out early in the morning for a hard day’s driving – something to remind us of the early starts that many of our staff make day in day out to run our regular service.

With so many buses now used on a Sunday, the vehicles for this had to come from our coach fleet, which required a fair bit of juggling.  Our more recently trained staff have automatic only licences, and the majority of the coaches have manual gearboxes, so marrying up drivers and coaches was a logistical exercise in itself.

Mr SV made his usual appearance.  Most people probably assume that the boss gets the easiest jobs and the best vehicle to drive.  However, experience over the years proves that the opposite is the case – leading from the front, by example, and all that!  Mr SV had the fun of winding his way between Alum Bay and Freshwater Bay more times than he cared, and despite the Bay being a favourite spot was glad to end up going to Newport instead by late afternoon!  The coach for this exercise was also one with a gearbox that has 4 gears, then another 4 through a gate in the gearbox – making heavy going of the ups and downs and twists and turns of the West Wight!

This coming weekend is our ‘Bustival’ event at Havenstreet Station – details of which are on the website.  This is a celebration of 80 years of Southern Vectis, but nevertheless is another big task to organise, this time pretty much delegated to our marketing man who is doing a good job of puling it all together while the rest of us are already bogged down by the biggest task of all…

…IW Festival is now less than three weeks away, and this is by far our biggest challenge each year.  Although we plan early, in fact as soon as the previous one finishes, there is much to do in the last few weeks.  Behind the scenes we are busy creating three ticket booths out of old small buses.  Meanwhile, one of our old coaches lives on as our mobile ‘home’ for the event and other events.  A couple of our staff have been busy working on this conversion for months now as and when they have had time, and this too is now nearing completion.

Thirty five buses need to be readied in the next couple of weeks.  Fifteen of them are double deckers we have had mothballed for months since our new ones arrived, but all have to be prepared and checked over before they can be used.  The other twenty are all due from our mainland sister companies, most of them also buses stored since they were displaced by new vehicles over the past few months.  These need to be brought over to the Island next week and prepared too.

The event requires a significant number of non driving staff to carry out a huge range of support activities, and these are all in place, but we still need to do all manner of odd things - like train a number of staff to operate traffic lights on the highway!  Miss SV and Lady SV look after catering for the 5 day period, and have to keep a whole army of staff on the go day and night, so have been taking deliveries of some foods, planning menus, and arranging all manner of other things that we need to keep our staff in fighting form.

Ferries have been booked for visiting buses for some while now, but also for the 300 bar staff who we bring in from London by coach and ship back, all during the critical times when we are at our busiest.  Similarly, we are now sending tickets out for our direct coach services from London into the Island, and for the many people who have been buying their travel tickets over the phone in advance.

All manner of things need to be put in place for festival, from ensuring that our cash is collected, our paying in machines are emptied regularly, and that we not only have enough fuel delivered, but also that the extra deliveries are booked on the already full ferries during the weekend. 

Our man who looks after our old style ticket machines has purple hands at the moment, having spent a couple of days this week changing ribbons in ticket machines ready for our ticket booths and shuttle buses.  We’ve taken delivery of the extra ticket rolls we need for the event, all specially printed with the days of the event to ensure tickets can’t be reused.

Our scheduling team are finalising the allocation of work to drivers, and we are busy building our temporary depot out in the West to run the extra buses from, next to the accommodation we have had booked for a year for our mainland staff staying with us.

There are plenty more things to do and we really are now flat out.

However, two weeks after Festival, Glastonbury calls, and we already have a team lined up and ready to roll down to Somerset as we assist our mainland sister companies in providing shuttle buses for this event for the third year running.

Cowes Week is about 9 weeks away, and we have already started making some new arrangements for that.

Betsival follows not long after!!!

We’ll try and keep blogging on our hectic activities over the summer, but I’m sure you will excuse us if we don’t do so as regularly as we’d like to!

Readers of this blog will know that ‘Disco Dave’ has been resident at Yarmouth for a few weeks now, managing the fall-out from the closure of the Yar Bridge.  His role is to safely guide the route 11 buses as they turn round to the West of the Bridge, and to guide the passengers back and forth across the bridge, which is open to pedestrians.  In addition of course, he is there to look after our customers during a period of confusion!

While Disco Dave was sunning himself down west for a week on holiday, a more junior Dave stepped in for him.  Junior Dave displayed his youthfulness by taking one of our company bicycles out west (we have five of them for transport in various places, usually Newport).  The bike was deployed as a quicker means of crossing the bridge, although Junior did get a good old Isle of Wight ‘Oi, yer carnt ride that there bike on this bridge’ from one of the workmen.  Obediently, he continued using it, but alighted for the river crossing.

Anyway, Disco Dave is now back, and in a misguided display of youthful prowess, decided he too would use the bike.  The result…”saw someone I knew – turned round – waved – yelled allo – hit kerb – over handlebars – sore and bruised”.

So, if you see Disco Dave out west, please don’t distract him while he’s riding the bike.

Sometimes, things are just so much more bother than they should be.  Usually things that are already bother, and which become even more bother.

We have our new timetable to plan commencing 30 August 09.  We have to register it with the Traffic Commissioner in Bristol (except they have to be sent to Leeds, because that’s where the powers that be have ‘centralised’ the administration of registering bus services – why Leeds we wonder every time, briefly distracted by the thought of some committee of civil servants choosing that fine city) and they have to be processed there 56 days before our timetable can start.  That means that by the end of June we have to have written all our timetables, sorted out any consultation we need to make (usually Highways and the IW Council Public Transport people) and sent them off.

So, that’s about 56 days, or eight weeks from now…which means we have eight weeks to decide what we can and cannot run viably, tweak, improve, cut back, or simply dispense with altogether.

This year a number of routes and journeys that are unviable, but which are funded by the Council come back up for tender from the same date (Councils are responsible outside of London for providing ‘socially necessary’ but ‘un remunerative’ routes and journeys).

Its bother – lots of work, continual pondering, brainwaves, and hesitations, as we lurch toward a decision on what we should do.  There are many pluses and minuses from every decision, and we always end up agonizing over the last one or two.

So why is this year even more bother than usual? 

First of all, not far short of half of all our customers are travelling on free passes.  The IW Council has to set a scheme to repay us for their travel.  The new scheme for the year started 1 April 09, but we still don’t know what we are being paid.  It’s actually quite difficult planning service levels which incur very big costs when you don’t know what you are getting from your customers.  Ask any other business how they would manage!

Secondly, we have to calculate all the tender prices for the Council funded routes and journeys at the same time, and as part of the combined process.  In calculating our prices to operate them, we have to give a net price – that is after taking the fares.  Hmmm – we don’t know what the fares are that we are receiving for nearly half of our customer journeys!!!

And finally, from 15 May 09 free travel will no longer be permitted on our 4 Island Breezers or the Island Coaster.  That means that we’ve also got to guess how many passenger journeys will be made after 14 May, but by the end of June, to decide whether to run all or any of them for the remainder of the summer season after 29 August 09.

We still need a few more drivers to keep our staffing levels up.  We could do with a Crystal Ball Gazer too!

At the heart of running a bus company is the need to have timetables and routes that are achievable to operate all the services reliably. At the same time our critical efficiency is the number of buses and drivers we have on each route. If they are sitting around for long periods of time, even cumulatively, then we are paying for more than we need. On a route that runs with say four buses, the fifth bus would increase our running costs by 25%, so getting the right times and routings in vitally important. We spend a huge amount of time effort and monitoring making sure that we have the optimum usage of our buses and drivers across our network.

So that’s why major road works cause us hell! No only do services become unreliable, but if sustained we simply can’t manage without extra buses on the road. Not only do they cost shed loads of money to run, but we simply don’t have them sat around. At £170,000 for a double decker, you can’t afford to have them sitting around in garages just in case you might need them.

So, when the news came in that Yarmouth Bridge was due to be closed for five to six weeks, we all groaned heavily. The Bridge is a critical link in the road network and for our bus network. How do we manage these sorts of closures…

1. Try and persuade the powers that be to let our buses through – by far the easiest option, which does work sometimes, especially for school coaches.
   
2. Find a nearby alternative route that misses as little route as possible without taking extra time – works in many cases, especially towns.

3. Find another route that keeps us on time, but misses out a chunck of the route. This is where we get into detailed discussion with IW Council. Will the contractor pay for a replacement service, usually a link shuttling between missed out areas and the diverted bus route, while the route is diverted. Not unusual, but an expensive operation, especially for long periods of time.

4. Will we simply have to cut the route short – possible where there is no alternative route, especially near an end of route, or where the Council or contractor say they don’t want to pay!

5. Could we schedule in extra buses and drivers to take care of the extra running times. Not an easy option, especially in peak summer when buses and drivers are pretty much all used flat out. However, being part of a big group we can get hold of extra buses sometimes, and maybe a few casual staff. Very expensive though!
   

…And so on to Yarmouth Bridge.

Our West Wight route 7 in both directions crosses the bridge, as does route 11 and The Needles Breezer – six crossings an hour! Closure of the Bridge means lengthy diversionary routes. Route 7 could get as far as Pixley Hill then divert to Freshwater and on to Yarmouth through Wilmingham Lane, but would need an extra bus in the timetable. Route 11 could do the same, but would also need an extra bus in the timetable. The Needles Breezer can just about make the diversion via Pixley Hill, but needs an extra bus at really busy times. The diversion would still leave between Pixley Hill and Yarmouth without any bus service, so an extra bus on a shuttle service would be needed. That’s four extra buses a day – the total cost would be tens and tens of thousands of pounds. IW Council is understandably unhappy about spending their road repair budget on replacement buses.

Hmmm! After much thought, we’ve got a plan for IW Council. The saving grace is that the Bridge will be open to pedestrians, so this is the plan:

Divert route 7 between Freshwater and Yarmouth – this misses out a big section of the route between Colwell and Yarmouth, but we know that the diversion can be done within the timetable. Let the Needles Breezer use Pixley Hill – no option really here, but it can cope with the extra running time most of the time. In busy spells our man in the Hut at Yarmouth can take a spare open topper out with him from Newport, as we aren’t running all our open tops until the late May Bank Holiday. Route 11 continues all the way as far as the Yarmouth Bridge, at least providing some service for the missing 7, and then turns round in front of the Bridge itself. We know from an accident just before Christmas that you can turn a bus round in the road in a tarmac entrance! The passengers can walk across the Bridge to the Bus Station at Yarmouth.

So what are the downsides…well, firstly, we need someone to see the 11s reversing and turning round…secondly, the timetable needs rewriting between Freshwater and Yarmouth. This is more of a pain because we need to submit a temporary timetable to the Traffic Commissioners for the revised routes – more paperwork! Oh, and we need to change all the timetables on the affected sections of routes. And TREES, especially in Wilmingham Lane on the diversion route. All the buses affected are double deckers! But we have a plan that doesn’t cost lots of extra buses and drivers, and retains a level of service throughout most areas during the closure.

Anyway, that’s what’s happening – IW Council have had landowners and contractors cutting the trees prior, and we’ve done a deal to pay for a member of staff to oversee the buses turning which is much much cheaper than extra buses. He’s also on hand to advise customers and to walk them across the bridge –and we have just the man, Disco Dave who normally acts as Service Manager in Newport Bus Station juggling late running buses and drivers! We’ve changed the timetables, registered with the Traffic Commissioners – and remembered that the school coaches can’t cross the Bridge too – that’s an extra run morning and afternoon for one of our coaches, linking Yarmouth side of the Bridge with West Wight Middle School!

And the best news of all is that it’s all running smoothly given the scale of the closure. So, if you’re in Yarmouth and you see a big fella in a yellow jacket strutting his stuff and talking in Cockney rhymes, say hello to Disco Dave for us!

After sorting out the timetable change ready for Easter a fair few of us have taken a welcome breather over the Easter school holidays – especially those of us with kids to juggle!

We’re all back today though, and we’ve still got plenty to occupy ourselves with…

   We received the tender documents from the IW Council for those bus journeys and routes that they help to fund before Easter – mostly for evening journeys, or the rural routes run by Wightbus.  For us they represent about 2.5% of our revenue, so are not big business.  They are of course vital journeys for people who rely on buses in the evenings as well as the daytime.  The bind with them is that it takes about 10 minutes to price them, but many many hours of work to fill in all the forms and questions the Council has about all manner of things – we all understand why Councils have to do it, but that’s no great relief at the time!!!  Miss SV is studiously going through page after page of documents making sure we cross every‘t’ and dot every ‘I’.

   Later this week it’s time for our ‘long service awards’, when we entertain those staff who have been with us for literally decades.  Lady SV is working hard on making it the perfect evening for our long standing and valuable staff and their guests.  It’s always a rewarding night and nice to have time to chat and reminisce with people who in some cases have given their whole working life to the company.

   Walk the Wight is nearing and this is probably our first big movement of the year.  We provide all the transport for the Earl Mountbatten Hospice’s famous and spectacular sponsored walk across the Island as part of our sponsorship of the charity.  As well as enabling walkers to use all our normal services free on the day to get to and fro for their walks, we also supply an additional seventeen buses and coaches for dedicated transport across the Island from about 0630 until 1900.   We’ve planned all the journeys and vehicles, but need to spend time this week finding seventeen volunteer drivers to give up their Sunday.  This isn’t a problem, and many of our Head Office staff are happy to come out for the day and drive.

   Meanwhile, IW Festival is creeping up on us too.  We mapped out all the staff and buses we needed a while ago, but now is the time to start filling in the names and the vehicle identities.  We have a yard full of double deckers that have recently been replaced ready this side of the water, and our sister companies Bluestar and Wilts and Dorset have a yard filling up on the mainland too.  Our non driving staff are all now arranged, performing a multitude of tasks such as ticketing, crowd and queue control, supervising drivers and buses, manning gates and traffic lights, and even cooking for our army of staff.  We’re working on finalizing engineering and cleaning staff where we need extra cover, and this week we’ll be trying to finalise all the drivers we need.  We’re then onto practical issues and infrastructure.

While all this is going on we’ve still got lots of ongoing projects that need seeing through.  Publicity and information are at the heart of our philosophy of delivering good services, and we still have things we need to make progress on…

   The website is due for a tidy up, with improved navigation.  We’re also on the verge of launching our on line payment service for tickets and are just testing it now.  In addition we’ve got lots more content to add, and need to create much more too.

   Ryde Bus Station is not yet finished and we need to find a few hours to get a team down to finish off the final painting, and get the final bits of signage up after the paining.

   Newport Bus Station is lacking basic information, and this is something we must get on with, especially outside for early and late when the information and waiting areas are closed.  Once we’ve done this we want to put information up at other busy shelters across the Island.

   We’re also planning to start up our ‘Community Panel’ soon, giving us a forum in which we work with representatives of the people and organisations who we serve.  The initial focus will be on our action plan to deal with those areas where our audit by Bus Users UK said we could improve.  That in itself is a task, as we put in place a range of measures and systems to address all the weaknesses that were identified.

There are still more things that I haven’t mentioned yet – there’s always so much to do, but so much more that we want to do!

The last couple of weeks have certainly been busy ones.

We took a day out to tackle as much of the painting work at Ryde Bus Station last Thursday.  Customer feedback suggests that the redecoration has been very well received.  The majority of the new information boards and signs were up by Tuesday night, with a few more still to follow in the next week.  We still have some more painting to finish off, but have been bogged down with time critical jobs elsewhere needed for the timetable change on Sunday gone.

Friday was a busy day with new bus stops erected in a number of locations – quite a time consuming process.

Saturday was undoubtedly our most hectic day, with a team of staff busy from early until late evening changing bus stop timetables across the Island.  About 1000 needed changing, and this time we managed to have them all done before the changes came into effect on Sunday morning.

Behind the scenes we are now busy moving buses around.  All our new Scania double deckers and Mercedes single deckers are now with us.  All our regular bus routes are now operated by low floor easy access buses, but we now have the job of finding space for 14 older buses that they have replaced, but which we need to hold onto until after IW Festival.  Finding space for them all, and ensuring we can get them in and out as we need is a logistical challenge.

We are now into week one of school holidays, and along with next week these are the first two busy weeks of the season.  Once we are in the weeks following we hope to be able to finish off the painting in Ryde Bus Station.  Our next visible task will be to provide more information in Newport Bus Station, then to look at other key bus stops across the Island too.

Saturday was the six monthly public meeting organised by IW Bus Users Group.

Their meetings are rarely quiet affairs, and often attended by groups of bus users unhappy with decision of ours or the IW Council.

As ever Mr SV turned out for an ear bashing, this time about the changes to route 4 between Ryde and East Cowes.  Route 4 has been struggling to meet its costs of operation for a while, and the continuing reduction in the payments we receive from ‘free’ passenger journeys has made the situation worse, especially as this route carries a very high proportion of ‘free’ customers.

The long winding route, taking in Haylands and Binstead Estate in particular, has made the route particularly unattractive to people, especially full fare high value customers, travelling from Ryde to East Cowes.

So, drastic surgery is required.  From next week the route will run directly from Ryde to East Cowes along the main roads, also missing out the Hefford Road area of East Cowes.

This does two things.  Firstly, it reduces the time taken so that we only need to use two buses to operate the route instead of three.   This is the equivalent of a six figure saving over the year.  But secondly, the fast direct route should also attract back customers wanting to travel between the two towns.

We have put in place a replacement route between school times for Haylands and Binstead Estate, but unsurprisingly local users are unhappy with the extent of the timetable.  This is viable because it uses a school vehicle already in our operation.

Hefford Road is difficult to serve as it isn’t practically near enough to any other bus routes that could be diverted without costing an additional bus.

Residents of all three areas were at the meeting today.  Some understood the difficulties we have, others didn’t!    It’s not really surprising though that some didn’t want to hear what we had to say.  Many people, especially pensioners, rely on buses as a public service.  The thing is that in the UK buses aren’t run as a public service.  In the mid 80’s the then government decided to sell off the state owned bus companies and create a system where bus companies job was to run profitable services.  The idea was that local councils should determine and fund non-profitable routes that were socially necessary.  Despite different political governments, that hasn’t changed

It actually works really well on profitable routes.  Bus companies have the incentive to provide high levels of service, attracting people out of cars and onto buses in high numbers – look at our main routes such as 1, 2/3, 5 and 9 to mention the most frequent.

The problem is that there simply isn’t sufficient money for Councils to pick up the tab for all those areas that need bus services but where they are not able to be provided profitably.  For many years the island did have a very comprehensive network of bus services in all of those areas, funded by the Council.

The irony is that it is free travel that has really killed that off.  While free travel is a great idea, and is great for those who live on profitable bus routes in busy areas, the contrast elsewhere couldn’t be different.  With bus companies being paid only around half the fare they used to get, unless passenger numbers double then the routes become unviable as the income drops.  At the same time as the payment to bus companies has fallen, so Councils have found that they have been underfunded by the government for free travel.  The result is that Councils are quite literally running out of money to pay for unprofitable bus routes.

One good thing came out of Saturday’s meeting though.  The Council Leader came on behalf of the Council, and we agreed on the need to look at how the Council’s Wightbus operations could better be coordinated with our network of profitable routes.  Hopefully this will allow more communities to have access to ‘feeder’ bus services.