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Title: First West of England - Saturday service from Mon 23rd March during working week Post by: grahame on March 17, 2020, 12:07:37 From First West of England (https://www.firstgroup.com/bristol-bath-and-west/news-and-service-updates/news/first-west-england-responds-governments-stay)
Quote First West of England is making plans to run a Saturday service during the working week from next Monday (23rd March) to ensure it sustains services for those needing to travel across the region. The announcement comes as the Government has advised against non-essential travel and contact as it introduces new measures to deal with the rising number of coronavirus cases. Recent days have seen bus passenger numbers continue to reduce as people choose to stay at home or walk and cycle to their destinations. This is reflected in other transport and customer-facing sectors worldwide, including commercial aviation, rail and tourism, all of which have had to review and reduce their operations in view of the fast-moving coronavirus outbreak. First has written to the Local Traffic Commissioner about its intentions as well as West of England Combined Authority Mayor Tim Bowles and Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees. James Freeman, Managing Director of First West of England, said: “The Government has made it clear that it now wants people, wherever possible, to work from home and avoid any non-essential travel and contact. “The number of people travelling has reduced significantly and is continuing to diminish, making this an extremely dynamic situation which is changing day to day, hour to hour. “By way of bringing some order to the situation we are looking to reduce our Monday to Friday services to a Saturday timetable. This will mean that about 10% of our fleet will be stood down. “Where we can, we will add extra buses into the morning rush hour to ensure that workers are catered for. “It’s important to emphasise that this is a fast-moving and unprecedented challenge and we are monitoring new developments as they happen and will respond accordingly and keep all of our customers informed of any further changes.” “This is not a decision we take lightly,” continued Freeman. “However, with more and more people choosing to stay at home, this is our best option to ensure services continue running and are as close to ‘business as usual’ as we can possibly make them. “In addition, we are working closely with our trade union leaders and will do everything possible to deploy staff across our operations with a view to minimising the impacts for everybody. “One way or another, we will endeavor to keep services running through this unprecedented time of uncertainty.” First of many announcements, I expect. Title: Re: First West of England - Saturday service from Mon 23rd March during working week Post by: Robin Summerhill on March 17, 2020, 14:44:09 Faresave hasn't made any announcement - yet...
Title: Re: First West of England - Saturday service from Mon 23rd March during working week Post by: chuffed on March 27, 2020, 17:35:49 This has now been updated to Sunday services tomorrow, and from 30 March, with a few extra early morning services for keyworkers/ early doors shopping.
Title: Re: First West of England - Saturday service from Mon 23rd March during working week Post by: bradshaw on March 27, 2020, 18:56:07 From Sunday running a daily service
First Wessex X53 Bridport to Axminster four return journeys daily X51 cancelled 1 Weymouth Portland every 15 mins, 0500 - 0011 2 Weymouth Broadway and Littlemoor every 20 mins 0545 to 2300 10 Weymouth Dorchester every 30 mins, 0600-2100 6 Bridport Crewkerne cancelled Title: Re: First West of England - Saturday service from Mon 23rd March during working week Post by: bradshaw on April 03, 2020, 10:49:58 First Wessex altering Jurassic Coaster. The X53 withdrawn and replaced with X51 doing key worker timetable. 0725 Bridport to Dorchester. Then two round journeys Dorchester, Bridport and Axminster and finishes with 1730 Dorchester to Bridport Mon to Sat only
https://www.firstgroup.com/uploads/node_images/PUBLICITY%20X51%20from%20Monday%206%20April%202020%20%28v2%29.pdf Title: Re: First West of England - Saturday service from Mon 23rd March during working week Post by: grahame on April 03, 2020, 11:31:30 First Wessex altering Jurassic Coaster. The X53 withdrawn and replaced with X51 doing key worker timetable. 0725 Bridport to Dorchester. Then two round journeys Dorchester, Bridport and Axminster and finishes with 1730 Dorchester to Bridport Mon to Sat only As I understand it, that makes sense in relinking Bridport with Dorchester for a working day, and providing essential shopping / travel trips along the route during the day? Title: Re: First West of England - Saturday service from Mon 23rd March during working week Post by: froome on April 17, 2020, 21:36:28 I assume all of the south-west now has much revised timetables with most services, if they are running at all, running on severely reduced frequency. Though one improvement will be that they are able to run on time, due to much reduced general traffic levels.
With such a reduction in demand to use buses, running severely reduced timetables makes sense, but there are consequences. One reason for keeping some sort of service going, apart from providing for key workers, was to allow people to make their necessary shopping trips, and indeed the time constraints on using the elderly persons pass was removed specifically for this. However, whereas before, if you were going shopping, you could reasonably judge how long you might take to do that shopping, so be able to judge which buses you could catch on your return, going to the shops is now vastly different. Now, going shopping involves joining a queue outside the shop, which may take any amount of time to reduce, so it has become impossible to judge shopping times. So whether you can catch a return bus is now pot luck, and you may end up having to wait a very long time. Title: Re: First West of England - Saturday service from Mon 23rd March during working week Post by: bradshaw on May 16, 2020, 08:31:50 First Bus of Somerset reintroducing Yeovil Bridport service from 10 May. One bus from Yeovil depot will operate the service.
0855 Yeovil to Bridport 1030 Bridport to Beaminster and return at 1058 1230 Bridport to Yeovil and return at 1625, thence empty to Yeovil depot Yeovil to Bridport via Mosterton and Broadwindsor First Wessex were going to stop their service on May 1 but the virus led to it ceasing on March 23. I believe Buses of Somerset continued their element of the service but have now come up with a modified version which allows travel between the villages to Bridport or Yeovil This page is printed from the "Coffee Shop" forum at http://gwr.passenger.chat which is provided by a customer of Great Western Railway. Views expressed are those of the individual posters concerned. Visit www.gwr.com for the official Great Western Railway website. Please contact the administrators of this site if you feel that content provided contravenes our posting rules ( see http://railcustomer.info/1761 ). The forum is hosted by Well House Consultants - http://www.wellho.net |