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.