Strong arm tactics in the bus industry? Poor result for the customer!
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2010-10-03 13:42:13 - Graham Ellis
It's sometimes frustrating - really frustrating - to start to see something clearly only after the event. Looking back to the bus service changes from Bath through Melksham to Devizes and Easterton of a month ago, I think I'm now seeing more clearly what I think has happened.
• A couple of months ago, First were the incumbent operator on the route - an hourly service from Bath through all those other places to Easterton, which loaded more heavily out of Bath than along other sections of the route. Faresaver were offering a competing service, Monday to Friday only, Bath to Melksham only, daytime only ... to "cherry pick" revenue from the most lucrative section of the route.
• In an effort to increase their income from the route, First said they would cease to run the services on the Melksham to Easterton section on a commercial basis - that they would require a subsidy if the service was to continue. They probably felt confident that these tactics would result in a quick decision by Wiltshire Council to subsidise what is a strategically important service
• When they heard what First were going to do, Faresaver made a decision to extend their Monday to Friday daytime service from Bath to Melksham through to Devizes, and also to run a daytime service on Saturdays.
The total service as now provided is degraded from what it was previously. In particular, there is a gap in service from Melksham to Bath of two hours in the evening commute-home-from-work time, and there are missing buses in what was a regular hourly service from Devizes to Bath and vice versa. Faresaver have improved the quality of their buses on the Bath to Melksham (extended to Devizes) route, but they're still not up to the quality of the best of First's buses. And the competing buses during the day on the Melksham to Bath section continue to run within a couple of minutes of each other, then there's a gap of nearly an hour, and crossticketing is only very slightly improved on what it was - I hear of people being turned away from a First bus and wait for the next one (as the next one is subsidised) when presenting a Faresaver ticket.
Observing First's bus passing Well House Manor during the day, it's gone from being well loaded to being virtually empty, and I do wonder if the company's strong arm (but legal) tactic of threatening to withdraw part of the service unless given a subsidy has backfired on them. If the Bath end of the route was making enough of a profit to keep First's bosses in Aberdeen happy, I doubt that it's doing so any longer, given the total loss to them of the through traffic from Bath to Devizes and beyond that probably made it viable.
And I find myself wondering if in a few months time we'll find that the remaining commercial buses run by First are withdrawn ... which when you think about it might be no great loss. After all, they're now just duplicating the Faresaver offering, aren't they? And once First are gone, a single operator in the form of Faresaver would be well positioned to adjust his service to maximise the utility and passengers carried without having to keep one eye over his shoulder looking at the competition.