YourBus to ditch Y36 in February

Last month I posted a blog asking how long it would be before the Y36 was withdrawn by Yourbus?

Yesterday I got my answer from the Nottinghamshire County Council webpage which publishes a monthly list of forthcoming changes to bus servives in the county. YourBus are withdrawing the Y36 as from 12 February 2017 and introducing a 'revised route' for their Y5 service from the same date. I suspect the change will be through Beeston. As yet there are no details of how the route will be 'revised'.

There can be no doubt that the arrival of the Y36 in 2010 made both Nottingham City Transport and Trent-Barton improve their services, especially in the case of the former (remember the often overcrowded single-deckers which we used to have on the 36?). We will have to wait a few weeks to find out how the going of the Y36 will effect the Y5 and, in time the 36 and Indigo services through Beeston.

I believe urban public transport services should be frequent and operate every day of the year. Rural services should run at least hourly. If you want people to use public transport it has to reliable, frequent, modern, cheap and if you make a profit doing this, then you should regard it as a bonus.

I will be sorry to see the end of the Y36 because YourBus has made a big contribution to the fact that we enjoy good bus services in Lenton, Beeston and Chilwell.  

Changing times for the Y36

Below are three Y36 timetables, showing weekday journeys from Victoria Centre to Beeston and Chilwell for 2013, today and from this coming Monday (21 November), but first some background.

I admit to having a love-hate relationship with YourBus. They originally took advantage of de-regulation to offer a bus service in competition with Nottingham City Transport's route 36 between Nottingham Victoria Centra and Chilwell via Lenton, the QMC and Beeston c2010. At the time NCT were operating a crap service with single deckers, often full and with passengers standing for long parts of the journey. I know. It happened to me often enough. Their arrival on the scene also affected Trent-Barton.

How YourBus chop and change timings and routes is something I have written about before (see here for a post I made in May 2015)

Some readers might remember the first buses, branded 'yourcity', with orange fronts and destination displays saying 'Orange Line 36'. I took the above picture in 2010. NCT quickly took action and got this sharp practice stopped and the buses changed colour, branding and became the Y36.

Both NCT and Trent-Barton responded after a few months, introducing better buses and more buses per hour.  YourBus then got new Citaro single deckers, which they still use and I think are the best buses in Nottingham for comfort and quality of ride. Being a bus nerd, I also like the throaty sound of the engine.

YourBus were also the first Nottingham bus operator to introduce a Boxing Day bus service after an absence of a good few decades (I took the above picture on Boxing Day 2013). 

For a while they were such a threat to NCT's 36 that NCT positioned staff at the Victoria Centre terminus outside John Lewis to chase away Y36 bus drivers if they arrived too early or overstayed their departure time. When this didn't work, they got the bus stop arrangements changed, so that the NCT 36 and YourBus Y36 used different stops (as they still do and the same has happened at the Beeston Interchange).

YourBus have always indulged in sharp practices, timing their buses to run within a couple of minutes of NCT 36s. Instead of buses every five minutes, we got two buses coming together most of the time (bus 'headway' allows buses, when running on time, without obvious holdups, to run two minutes either side of their timetable times, if I understand the regulations correctly). At first YourBus were content to cream off day-time passengers, then they introduced evening and late-evening journeys.

YourBus tried to challenge NCT and Trent-Barton on other routes and failed, with the exception of the Y36 and Y5. The latter follows the same route as Trent-Barton's Indigo service, except for a small section in Beeston (the Indigo goes via Broadgate and the Y5 via Queens Road). I could go on, but this a Beeston blog and a good few of you will know about these things already.

The point of this blog post is to share extracts from Y36 timetables for 2013, the present timetable and from the new timetable which begins on Sunday.

Click on the timetable and you will enlarge enough to read the times of Y36s Monday–Friday:

2013: 0502–0010

Today: 0500–2130

From Monday: 705–1815.

YourBus is no longer competing with NCT. It is just trying to cream off day-time passengers. In August it withdrew buses between Beeston and Chilwell (Bramcote Lane, Inham Nook and Field Lane loop), diverting the route to run in a one-way loop around Beeston via Wollaton Road, Broughton Street, Park Street, Cator Lane and Chilwell Road to Beeston Interchange. 

This is a case of history repeating itself, especially if you use the YourBus routes Y28 and Y4 as recent examples. NCT and Trent-Barton learnt the lesson from failing to tackle the first Y36 incarnation and immediately upped the competition and this year saw the demise of both the Y28 and Y4. All the evidence suggest the Y36 (and probably the Y5) will go the same way.

Now I should say that I am in favour of bus regulation and have had articles about Nottingham public transport published in Buses and Nottingham Post, plus my own blog of course. I love the fact that NCT is Britain's second largest municipally owned bus company (only Edinburgh is larger), and believe that we need London style public transport controls in Greater Nottingham (ideally the entire joint Derby-Nottingham conurbation), with public funding to match.

I'll leave it to you to make up your mind about YourBus. All I would ask you to do is to look at their Y36s and Y5s as they run through Beeston and the number of passengers you see on their buses. You do not have to be a genius to ask the question 'How long?'

What do YourBus cutbacks suggest?

From next week, the last Y36 on Sundays will leave the city centre at 10.30pm instead of 00.10am and the evening service on the Y28 to Bilborough will be withdrawn completely. I found this information on the YourBus website:

Today I came back to Beeston from Nottingham city centre on a Y36 and there was no information about this change on the bus. This is not good news. YourBus may be embarking on a slippery slope which will lead to the eventual demise of the Y36 (and Y28). Who in their right mind is going to buy a YourBus travelcard when Nottingham City Transport and Trent-Barton run more routes and operate late-evening services as well?

The arrival of the Y36 service a few years ago made NCT re-introduce double-deckers and a more frequent service on its 36 bus route between Chilwell, Beeston and the city centre. Before the Y36, the 36 was operated by single-deckers, which were often full to the point of bursting.

YourBus operate the most comfortable and quietest buses, so I would be sorry to see them go. 

If YourBus was successful, then they would be expanding their services and increasing the number of routes they operate — not withdrawing evening services.

I am not a fan of a 'free market' when it comes to bus services, but I have to acknowledge that the arrival of YourBus a few years ago, did improve local bus services between the city centre, Lenton and Beeston.

In March I wrote about how the Tram might impact on bus services in and around Beeston (The coming transport war in Beeston). Right now, my aim is draw attention to a little publicised change which may be of some significance in a few months time

A FOOTNOTE.

Below is a photograph from February 2010, about the time the first version of the Y36 appeared on our streets. The buses were painted orange and showed the route number as '36'. The buses were old and the drivers would stop at every stop trawling for passengers. A little later they changed the route no. to 'Y36', dropped the 'Orange Line' description and changed the colour of their buses.

The then competition between YourBus and NCT was fierce and, at the time, I expected YourBus to crumble and I have to admit to becoming an admirer of their tenacity. Their drivers were friendly and welcoming from the start. Back in 2010 NCT drivers were, generally speaking, a miserable lot and I am sure that we have YourBus to thank for the fact that most NCT drivers are now, for the most part, as charming as their rivals.