Before the Bee Network came to Stockport, most of the buses (with the honourable exception of the 385 and 199) that I used were run by Stagecoach.
This hasn't actually changed that much since January (except on the 385 route where the service has declined since being taken off D&G and given to Diamond) because the 199 is a cross boundary route (ie it goes to Buxton, which is in Derbyshire, not Greater Manchester) and all of the other routes I use have remained with Stagecoach.
Stagecoach were one of the companies who took the GMCA to judicial review in order to try and stop the Bee Network from happening. Admittedly they only did this once (as opposed to Diamond, who did it twice) but, with this in mind, I am forced to conclude that, after all the legal challenges were defeated, Stagecoach must have put in some seriously hard graft when it came to charming the pants off the people awarding the bus contracts as they have basically been allowed to keep what seems like almost all of the bus routes they had previously. Aside from ones like the 375 where they were clearly taking the piss.
Given that Stagecoach, pre Bee Network, had the monopoly on all routes between Stockport and Manchester, not an awful lot has changed. We are still dominated by the buggers.
Given that reliability on the 385 (Diamond) has gone south since January (particularly on the 4:30pm bus) I have been increasingly reliant on the 383 (Stagecoach) to get home from work. Aside from the long established problems with overcrowding on the 4:25pm service, this was largely working OK... Right up until a couple of weeks ago when, across several days, the 4:25pm service failed to turn up.
While this is annoying - especially given how hot the weather was at the time, and that the stop doesn't have any shade - at least you only have to wait another 20 minutes for one to turn up, as opposed to an hour for another 385 to arrive.
On each occasion the 4:43pm 383 did turn up, but it was of course massively overcrowded and stopped at every stop, what with the previous one not having turned up and everything. This doesn't put anyone in the best of tempers, especially when it's ridiculously hot.
This series of events reminded me of the bad old days of using Stagecoach to get around, specifically the number of times when the 383 has done this before, as well as the number of times it's happened to me on both the 191 and the 42A. What I think happens is this:
Phase 1: Buses get delayed and drift increasingly away from their scheduled arrival times because of heavy traffic, or accidents, or similar.
Phase 2: When they get really late, it is informally decided by Stagecoach to pull one or more of the ones running particularly late in order to ensure that the bus timetabled after it (in this case, the 4:43pm 383 service) arrives either on time or, within 5-10 minutes of when it should have arrived.
This means that they get back on track more quickly in terms of buses turning up on time but, in the short term, no one bothers to tell the passengers waiting for the earlier service that it isn't coming.
Inevitably, it also leads to more overcrowded buses. Especially at peak times.
I had thought that the 383 had improved in terms of reliability since last year, but I realise now that it might have been a temporary blip. Reliability definitely hasn't been as good as it was over the past three weeks and, while road conditions definitely have had a part to play in that, unofficially cancelling buses in order to try and get ahead of roadworks and gridlock doesn't encourage trust in passengers. It just builds resentment, and an increased feeling that the bad old days of bus travel are not as behind us as we would like.
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