Bristol, Bath and the West

Outcome of public consultation on Services 75, 75A, 76 and 77

Last month First asked customers for their views on proposals aimed at improving the punctuality and reliability of services 75, 75A, 76 and 77.

More than 300 people took the time to respond to the proposals, which included a number of route changes and a suggestion to split the services in the city centre to give drivers time to catch up from delays.

Some customers were positive about the proposal to split the services in the city. However, we also heard from many people who were worried about the potential loss of the cross-city link to, for example, St Mary Redcliffe School, Southmead Hospital and Bedminster.

Most people were concerned to find the best way to improve the reliability of buses. Having considered all the responses, we have reviewed our plans about the best way to achieve this for customers:


* We will not split the services in the centre of Bristol

We will:

* Simplify the routes, renumbering some services to create two services with no loss of frequency
* Add extra buses and drivers into the operation " an investment of more than £600,000
* Put more time into the timetables to help catch up from delays - this will improve the reliability of the services

What does this mean for customers?


Service 76 - Henbury - Broadmead - Centre - Hartcliffe

Journeys on Service 77 will be renumbered as Service 76. This means Service 76 will be extended from Southmead to Henbury on the current Service 77 route.

As detailed in the consultation, we will re-route the new Service 76 so that all buses serve Southmead Road, Doncaster Road and Greystoke Avenue. There will be no loss of frequency - in fact some parts of Southmead, Henbury and Brentry will benefit from an improved service with a bus up to every 10 minutes instead of every 20 minutes at present. To enable us to give this increased frequency, we will no longer serve a short stretch of Pen Park Road, where only one bus stop will be affected.

Service 75 - Cribbs Causeway - Broadmead - Centre - Whitchurch Lane

Based on comments from the consultation, we are improving Service 75 on Saturdays to Cribbs Causeway. Currently every other bus on Saturdays terminates at Royal Mail in Filton but in future these will continue to Cribbs Causeway, doubling the frequency from every 20 minutes to every 10 minutes.
Service 75 will now terminate at Cribbs Causeway bus station instead of going on to Asda. This will enable us to build in extra turnaround time at the end of each journey to allow any late buses to catch up and then leave on time for the next journey.

Patchway:

Regrettably we will no longer run along Rodway Road, Durban Road and Bradley Road due to the reliability problems and incidents of damage to private vehicles caused by the sheer number of parked cars lining these narrow roads. Instead we will re-route Service 75 to run along Coniston Road.

As part of the consultation First met with residents and the local authority to look at ways of keeping these roads clearer but unfortunately no short-term solutions were available. We understand some people will be disappointed with this change and we will look at the issue again if the situation changes, but we have to take action now to deal with delays on the route.

Hartcliffe Way:

As outlined in the consultation, we will withdraw the poorly used service 75A. These journeys will be merged into the timetable of Service 75, which will still serve Somerfield HQ.

Commenting on the outcome of the consultation, First Bristol, Somerset and Avon Managing Director Justin Davies said,

"We are grateful to everyone who took the time to give us their views. The main concern people had was that we find ways of making their services more reliable. I believe that by simplifying the routes, adding extra buses and putting more time in to let services catch up from delays, we can achieve real improvements without needing to split the routes.

"We know that some people will be disappointed by some of the route changes but we believe these will significantly help reduce delays. We are committed to running reliable services, which is demonstrated by our investment in putting extra buses on these routes."

First is also investing heavily in services 76 and 77 (which will merge into the new Service 76) with the introduction of 16 new buses, along with 30 more on routes 1 and 54 at a total cost of £7.8 million.

Other changes:

Also from February 2009, we will be withdrawing services X62, 74 and X74 (totalling just 15 journeys a day) due to extremely low customer demand. For example, we fill on average just 20% of seats on Service X62, despite a marketing campaign and fares promotion with reduced-price journeys. These services represent a small percentage of our total services in Bristol, just 15 daily journeys from a total of more around 3,000 (0.5%).

The changes will be in place from 1 February 2009, with timetables available from mid-January.