Quote from: Tony on March 31, 2022, 07:13:56 PM
The X15 is being included into the running boards covering all these routes as well. NXWM instead of bidding for all the different routes put one combined bid in to cover the X15, 77, 167, 168 & 604 which will all be run by Walsall garage
You couldn't make it up.
Tony I love your website and will always thank you for beginning it but there is a career waiting for you somewhere in PR.
I apologise in advance for the long post incoming, I'm sure it won't be to every one's taste but here goes.
So Sutton Coldfield and Erdington are to have the privilege of paying public money to National Express to cobble together a load of pretty useless and unviable services and timetables that are of little use to anyone and will do nothing to generate extra use of bus services. And they will be operated by Walsall depot. What could possibly go wrong? A traffic maelstrom with parachuted in buses and drivers with no back up when it all inevitably goes tits up, something NX can't even currently deal with when the depot is round the corner. Remember Arriva in Stafford anyone?
But let's remind ourselves of how we got where we are today. 15 years ago I remember getting into a long discussion on here regards the wanton vandalism that NX inflicted on this area with the carving up of the 68A/C. At the time we were told that the service wasn't being withdrawn due to passenger numbers (any fool could see it was viable, having a useful route and practical frequency) but due to 'reliability issues'. The issues? NX had been trying to run the Sutton and Erdington circular route from Lea Hall (sound familiar?) the result being that if or when anything went wrong no bus or driver was anywhere near the situation to put it right. When Lea Hall was finally closed without replacement (a huge mistake that has well and truly bitten them on the arse since, and continues to), and NX set about scattering its work to far flung, unsuitable homes, alas there was no room anywhere for the 68. So off it came.
What did we get? The 115, then the 15A/C, the 111, the 38, the rehash of the 966 and then 96, the 71E and the extension of the X4 to Minworth and then Centro having to reroute fairly useless services like the 167, 168 and 604 into even more useless services just so that places retained 'a bus'.
The irony of course is that all this saved barely any resource from the 68 workings, it was all done to accommodate the NX estate. The resource barely any lower, but the end result spectacularly less commercial and naturally all utterly counterproductive.
Look at how many of those services NX have since removed? Blaming low passenger numbers? Of course they were low! The frequencies and connections offered weren't a shadow of the 68. Cue more chopping and changing of the tenders to pick more abandoned roads up, making them even less efficient and viable.
So once NX had finally disposed of these apologies for the 68, what next? The only service remaining from it all, the 96, was rerouted to target the only sections of the tendered services that actually picked anybody up, as well as also targeting them in Mere Green and also another tendered service in Kingstanding, the 89. These tenders were marginal as it was. What happens to a marginal tender when you remove a few hundred concessions a week from it? You don't need my answer....
So, having thrown the three tendered services into basket case territory and therefore destabilising an independent operator that was already struggling with lower numbers due to COVID, what's their next trick? Goodbye 96!! As I said, you really couldn't make it up.
The Fort, Holly Lane, Penns Lane, swathes of Boldmere and the adjoining parts of Erdington, Minworth and Castle Vale..... some of these areas that previously had a 15 minute frequency service that was actually useful now either have a shadow of it, or in the case of the first two, no NX service atall!!
People in Castle Vale and Minworth can't even get to the Fort. What a joke.
How the commercial folk at NX have managed to make such a complete bugger's muddle out of a viable virtual monopoly absolutely beggars belief. And even what they have left, which isn't much, doesn't do what people need or want it to.
And now we are expected to congratulate them for 'rescuing' the useless set of garbage that has somehow managed to survive on the other side of it now that they have managed to force another operator off the road. As Nan would say, what a f***** liberty!!!
The alarm bells should be ringing for NX. With Diamond settled nicely on the 96 and soon the 94 alongside a lot of existing east Birmingham services and NX's network beginning to look like a heavily retreating fossil, their golden goose, the Travelcard, may start to look very unappealing to folk when you consider the links that are no longer available to them and the constant reliability issues.
I'm all for that.