Buses: easter weekend 2024

[whole diary]

[Mark A]

Travelling on three buses on Friday and had sight of several more, despite buses in Bath being slightly few and far between.

Bath's park and ride was busy,

Faresaver's services in and out from Wiltshire full and standing during the day and well in to the evening, ditto a bus out of Bath to Frome at around two, while another I saw to Wells also filling alarmingly well.

At the bus station, a couple of the automatic doors between the bus station building and the buses seemed to have an issue: the driver of the one I caught to Frome, ten minutes late in leaving, found himself repeatedly needing to leave his cab to operate the external push button for it as a series of pleading faces appeared behind the glass, so I volunteered to alight and stand by the button so that he could get the constantly reforming queue onto the bus and that way we managed to escape from the bay - even then as we'd left the stand the face of the unluckiest-passenger-in-the-world (TM^‡(resolve)) appeared miserably at the closed door. We were then further delayed as a visitor had decided to sit on the ground by the barrier, blocking the bus exit to the bus station and needed to move. It didn't appear to be a welfare issue - she seemed to have just decided that the kerb there would be a good place to sit.

Buses serving the city were not so busy - though there were still people travelling. First had a Sunday service so the routes that used smaller buses either weren't running or were running infrequently - the 6a in from Larkhall, hourly and making its infrequent and irregular appearance down at the railway station (but not the bus station) not much used as a lot of people have forgotten what it does / expect it to be packed and so do not consider it at all, so it runs empty.

Mark

[bobm]

stagecoach West in Swindon were running a Saturday service on Good Friday.  That allowed me a solo trip out for the first time in a while with time in Cheltenham, Cirencester and Cricklade - all for £8.

Buses were well used but not uncomfortably full.  My first one, the 07:00 off Swindon, took healthy loads of workers to an industrial estate on the outskirts of town before then picking up more who looked to be on their way to work in Cirencester and again on the last leg to Cheltenham.    Coming back there were a good sprinkling of shoppers and day trippers like me.   There didn't seem to be that many using ENCTS^▸ (English National Concessionary Travel Scheme) passes.

[LiskeardRich]

Stagecoach Devon was a Sunday service on Friday (and today).

Every service I drove was well loaded (50+ on a double decker) on Friday

Sunday reminded me of being back in lockdown it was so quiet!

[bobm]

Sunday reminded me of being back in lockdown it was so quiet!

Refreshing in a way.  Reminded me of the days when almost all shops were regularly closed on a Sunday.   We all coped!  (Well Tony Hancock struggled)

[JayMac]

With the car off the road it would've lovely to hop on the bus for a bank holiday jolly. Not here in deepest darkest Somerset. Buses of Somerset hardly run any of their ever dwindling number of services on Good Friday and Easter Monday.

[LiskeardRich]

Stagecoach Devon was a Sunday service on Friday (and today).

Every service I drove was well loaded (50+ on a double decker) on Friday

Sunday reminded me of being back in lockdown it was so quiet!

Monday was very quiet too,

Was a funny weekend, with Friday and Saturday full loads and Sunday and Monday lots of fresh air transported