Great Western Coffee Shop

just found this:

http://www.thisisbristol.co.uk/UWE-service-expands-locals/story-13039002-detail/story.html

Nice idea from UWE, it's a bit like UNO up in north London (Hopefully we wont get pink buses in Bristol).

I know the swansea university bus network is used regulary by local people as well as students. service 82A runs every 10 minutes during term time & term holidays but over the summer period and weekends is cut to every 20/30 minutes and hourly on sundays.

I noticed a UWE branded bus all the way down in Weston-super-Mud the other day!

Southamptons 'uni-link' service isn't altered much out of term times, as plenty of local use it. The U1 is every 10 minutes throughout the year.

A similar (but superior type of service - better frequency) has been operating in the Oxford area for 5 or 6 years. At first it was operated by Stagecoach but the contract was subsequently moved to Oxford Bus (Go-Ahead Group). Whilst it is a public bus service with several routes, the service is known as "BrookesBus" and operates between various Oxford Brookes University locations in and around Oxford and when it was first introduced all Brookes students had to pay for a season ticket as an addition to their fees. The idea was to discourage students from bringing cars into the notoriously congested Oxford City.

Incidentally Oxford is the most heavily bussed town of its size with a very high proportion of bus users brought about by car parking pricing persuasion of charging up to ^30 a day to park a car in central Oxford. There are many complaints from non-bus users about the number of the buses on the roads of Oxford, many on competing Stagecoach/Go-ahead services. Until recently, buses could only compete (under the Transport Act 85) but only in the last week (under new regulations) competing bus services have been allowed to co-operate allowing a return ticket issued by one company to be used on the other company's buses. It makes great sense because as a result the number of buses have been reduced but the frequency of service increased up to something like every 7 minutes around the city! However some complaints are now coming in that some buses are now standing room only as they near the city centre! Success breeds success and its own problems!

They're cropping up all over the Wessex Connect area at the moment. I've seen them on Park-n-Ride and the 517/518 Shirehampton-Emerson's Green. As it is summer the U-Link fleet is being less intensively used. I guess its an opportunity to get the other buses in the fleet in for maintenance, heavy cleaning etc.

I'm not sure that the Transport Act you mention prohibited such co-operation. For instance, there have been numerous "joint service" examples of return tickets issued by one company being valid on another company's buses over the years since in my part of the world.

I found that quote very interesting too, CLPG. Whilst it's true that there are the cooperative elements mentioned by Lee, there are all too many cases where I've had folks (including the owner / MD of a bus company) tell me that he can't work with another company for the common good of the passengers because of the various rules governing buses. 

I suspect there are elements of truth in limitations that have been placed, and also that the laws / rules / limitations are (or have been) used as a very conveneint excuse for taking an approach which is competitive between operators to the detriment of the good of the passengers (and then ultimately to the number of passengers and the income of all operators on a route).

Where do I find more about the amended regulations, what's changed, and what the changes mean?  Could they also have implications in syncronysing trains to buses too?

I can see that you could read the Competition Act as outlawing any discussion on fares between companies.