New Timetable
July 2nd, 2009We’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.