A combination of predictable and depressing!
Some real positives in Rotherham (an eight minute cross-town service from Parkgate to the Hospital, an eight minute cross-town service from Maltby to Meadowhall).
The X74 group of services looks a good use of resources (given that Midland Road closed, so there’s a lot of light running from Olive Grove to/from Rotherham – why not use those vehicles to provide a contra-peak service to the office parks and Advanced Manufacturing Park in the land between Sheffield and Rotherham?). There’s currently the 22a/22c/72, but the new timetable looks beefed up in comparison. Edinburgh has a few peak expresses to employment centres on the edges of the city (Bush, Gyle, RBS, Gas HQ) but most other cities lack these.
Dinnington gets its best service to Sheffield in many a year (four/hour) – probably the highest frequency since Wigmores/ Northern Bus came off the road.
First serving Hoyland for the first time since (their predecessor) SYT/ Mainline provided some journeys on the (Yorkshire Traction) 227 to Barnsley?
First keeping up the nonsense of using the same number (X1) for both termini in Maltby (Salisbury & Quilter).
Some nostalgia (the old Wigmores/ Northern Bus 208 comes back as a Sheffield – Brinsworth – Dinnington route).
First’s Dearne Valley adventure (the big fight back against Stagecoach’s incursions in Sheffield), previously cut back from a ten minute service to Barnsley to a fifteen minute service that doesn’t go beyond Wath – now reduced to a half hourly service on a Saturday. Seems a long time since the 55-plate B7RLEs (ex-Glasgow) brightened up Barnsley Bus Station with yellow ducks painted on their side.
Some “positives that aren’t quite as positive as they look” (e.g. the X78 came down from ten minutes to fifteen minutes but now goes up to every twelve – but I thought that part of the justification for a fifteen minute service was to co-ordinate with Stagecoach services from Conisbrough to Doncaster?). A bigger priority would be double deckers replacing the Streetlites. Going from fifteen to twelve is an improvement but makes it harder to remember the times and to co-ordinate with other routes.
(for those outside the area – the X78 used to be operated by Rotherham Geminis/ Streetdecks; that allowed shifts to be concentrated on the route – e.g. a driver might do Rotherham – Sheffield – Rotherham – Doncaster – Rotherham – Sheffield – Rotherham as a duty… but then Midland Road closed and the route had to move to a depot at one extreme of the route – so Doncaster operate it but that means a return to Sheffield is too short for one duty but two returns to Sheffield are too much, so it interworks with local Doncaster services to bring driver duties up to a reasonable level – but Leger Way don’t have sufficient double deckers to facilitate this so the once-busy route gets mainly single deckers because Donny lack bigger buses – even on days of the regular Northern Rail strikes, they’ve been using single deckers)
So Sheffield – Meadowhall/ Rotherham goes from a current ten minute service (X1) and a fifteen minute service (X78) to a fifteen and twelve minute service (Monday to Friday) with a ten and twelve minute frequency on Saturdays. Bit badly co-ordinated. But then I understand why the X1 to Sheffield has been cut because the PTE won’t want too much competition with their TramTrain…
It’s probably hard to argue with the thinning out of the Rotherham local stuff – classic Death Of A Thousand Cuts stuff – how much longer until First give up on all the dead mileage and abandon the town to TM Travel/ Powells etc? But then First seem to be taking on bits of services that TM are scrapping (31, 227), so if a low cost operator like TM can’t break even running Solos then how long will First keep these services going?
There are some areas that bus companies just don't know what to do with. Brinsworth/ Catcliffe is one of them. It's less than ten miles from Sheffield City Centre but with a golf course/ airport/ marshalling yard/ industrial estate/ Police HQ*/ motorway in between (depending on your vintage), so there’s no one obvious route (and the complication of whether to divert via Meadowhall).
So the operators (SYT, Mainline, First) chop and change the routes every few years between west of the golf course (in the 1980s it was the 24 and 208, later the 130, the 68, briefly the 74, now the 208 returns) and route east of the golf course (the SYT 221, the Sheafline 134, the Mainline 100, the First A1, the 132, the current 72/74). It’ll change back in a few years though – it always does.
Generally a negative set of changes (with the usual First trick of disrupting existing services to cover for the withdrawal of another service – e.g. diverting the 114 and 115 to cover for the cutting of the 111/112 in East Dene – inconveniencing everyone), but I guess the biggest loser is Waverley – First seemed to have a good arrangement with the 72/74 providing a decent frequency to the new housing developments there – but the frequencies are being reduced (and the Meadowhall link cut) before they’ve had a chance to settle down.
Shades of Endcliffe and the UniversEighty (where they started a route with a high frequency as the Uni flats were being built, but then reduced and reduced it once they were open with thousands of Students living there). Good ideas but not the staying power to see them evolve.
* - for those outside the area, the Police building is genuinely on Letsby Avenue
