In which case, I take back 'enthusiast ran'. Even to say enthusiast tolerant then, the company is largely deemed a good operator because it is more welcoming to enthusiasts. Any operator who is quite friendly with enthusiasts seems to be deemed a better operator.
I think the first question here is to ask whether you have actually been to Sevenoaks and travelled on their services. That enthusiast-friendly operators are deemed "better" appears to be your opinion - it may well be true, but not all users are enthusiasts to even care how friendly they are. Those I speak to of both varieties (and to quote
@Phatcontroller who actually uses the services), would say it is because they
are a good operator.
There's a few on the S routes. S7 is similar 1 route but diverts to the schools, easily a supplementary journey to fill gaps in the timetable. S3, runs like a 3 but diverts to the school, the S3 is even promoted on the 3 timetable leaflet. S5 is the 5 route but extends to the schools. S6 is the 6 route but diverts to the school Fares are £3 normally but if you dare to step on an S route, even where they are supplementary to a core service, it's £5 single upto with normal day tickets not accepted (I don't think they do returns). You call that a good thing? The 'Confusing' bit is the fact that the fares change depending on the day that you make the journe. For routes where the S buses are supplementary to the normal buses (after all, many areas have a prefix/suffix to show that there is a variations such as to serve a school), the fact that there is a premium price for that is just barmy. If you get the 15:35 6 Monday-Friday School days, it's £5 cash single. Get it on a Saturday or school holidays, it's £3 single. Same departure time, to 95% of bus users, it's the exact same trip (except school days it diverts slightly), why should it cost more depending on the day of travel? If that is what Arriva was doing, people go ballistic yet double standards kick in for the selected enthusiast tolerant operators.
It appears you aren't aware that a number of operators in Kent have in the past, and in some cases still do, have a no child fare before 9/9.30 policy, and Stagecoach used to have afternoon restrictions as well without an ID card. It simply isn't an issue for most users. It may not be an issue for any user, given the whacking great posters at Sevenoaks bus station, printed timetable leaflets and a website. I estimate the number of people confused by the fares policy to be somewhere in the region of zero, and the number of users desiring to share a double-decker bus with a legion of school children to be at similar levels.
There is good reason why more and more services are being reduced to Mon-Fri off-peak only across the country... that's where the use is. I know of numerous people who actively seek to be home by 3pm to avoid travelling "with the kids" even where there is no fare differential.
It wasn't really an idea, they went through with it. Go Taxi Hire was a thing. From what I've seen it is one of the better schemes but given how poor DRT schemes are, especially where they replace scheduled services, the bar for being one of the better schemes isn't exactly high. It's the best of a bad bunch, doesn't make it a good scheme though.
It's not helpful to refer to the small element of the company that ran Demand Responsive services as a "taxi division", which implies private hire/hackney cabs - it's a little like referring to East Kent having cars because of their trading name! One minute it's failing, the next it's the best of a bad bunch, and "can't be bothered to run buses", as per your first message, couldn't be further from the truth. Having heard a talk on the origins of the scheme, it's clear you're throwing brickbats rather than actually speaking from knowledge (and if I could remember the details, I'd quote them, but it was an oral presentation some months ago, so I won't run the risk of getting it wrong).
If you are charging a child £5 single, you'll find a lot more people driving their child to school. Just because people have the money to pay for it, they will still make a comparison on time and cost and if it works out cheaper or not much different to drive, you start pushing people into their cars.
It's never going to be good bus territory when you are charging such different prices depending on the trip you get on and the buses are generally only useful if you only want to travel between 9am and 2pm. There are small villages in Wales with a better service than that, and that is saying something!
Cart before horse. The fares are that high because that's what it costs to transport students, and for various other reasons
@M803UYA explains. Once again, Sevenoaks is the most affluent area in Kent. Parents could easily afford such fares if they wanted to, but they choose the car instead. There is circumstantial evidence that school bus use through Kent but in West Kent in particular declined during the last academic year whilst parents were working from home, but has increased again this year, with some services overloading.
Strong opinions are great (I have them too, believe it or not), but sometimes the strength of them does show when you don't appear familiar with the area or operator you have them on.
So once Arriva had completely fouled the lot up, Go was left in a position where it was the one to fill the vacuum. Having some smaller vehicles such as Transits running over a wider area could be a means of catering for the whole area rather than a part of it but DRT has proven costly and profitable for the makers of the software....
Quite. It was a valiant effort, and has been revised a number of times to focus a better service on where most demand lies. To give the example of the one occasion I used the service, myself and two friends took one vehicle out of the Sevenoaks town area for easily more than an hour, to provide a 5 minute journey up the pavement-less, 40+mph limit road between Penshurst village and Penshurst Station, for which they earned something like £6. Useful for us, but a complete waste of resources to the scheme at large.
(The remainder of your commentary I snipped from the quote was also very interesting - I never understood the bonkers choice of W-reg ALX200s either - older than most cars in town!)
I'm finding (as someone who's worked in this part of Kent for a few years) this merger rather strange. Hulleys record under it's new management to date is one of needing to improve. There seems to be capital and cashflow issues which are obvious by the high turnover of the fleet and high frequency of service changes. Targeting school flows might provide a stabler stream of income for Hulleys rather than this chopping and changing, whilst some capital can be raised from the Go Coach fleet.
To bring my comments back to Hulleys and thus on topic, this is the key. It's not so much that Go Coach have sold, or indeed how they've gone about it (why sell to someone who'll run off with your assets, whereas at least this seems to allow past staff to "keep an eye on things"), but to the operator they've chosen. Who knows how it came about. A few loaned vehicles and a discussion brewed? An offer that couldn't be refused? Approaches elsewhere, but nobody suitable? And why have Hulleys purchased? A supply of loan buses? Cash flow issues? We'll never know, but there's no guarantee our speculation will be remotely correct.
Sorry to the mods if I've strayed OT and posted in the wrong location. Feel free to relocate me
Likewise. But unless we have a new thread specifically for merger topics, hopefully we'll be indulged to a certain degree!
