GHA Group (Bryn Melyn, Vale Travel + Others)

[knutstransport]

RE: GHA Group (Bryn Melyn, Vale Travel + Others)

(27/09/2016 17:49)djb Wrote:  Id have thought the 2 go hand in hand. To be able to enhance the service to hourly, the revenues on the current service will have to merit it. If the current service is only borderline commercial, it's hard to see anyone offering anything better than ghas hourly (outisde school peak) operation.

What I was getting at is you said "The fact that gha managed to run a commercial hourly service should not be construed as evidence that the 27 is commercially viable at that frequency"

Saying whether a service is viable to run commercially to an hourly frequency or whether it would be viable for the operator of a contracted 2 hourly service could justify enhancing the service to hourly isn't the same thing as for the latter there's the revenue from the subsidy as well as the fares.

Quote:People between Macc and monks Heath will use a lower frequency service if it's reliable. The 130 currently is not reliable towards Macc due to its length, although the short journeys short help this.

That depends whether the lower priority service meets your needs or not. If you start work in Macclesfield town centre at 8am or finish at 6pm, you can't use the 27 as it doesn't start early enough and finishes too early. On the other hand the 130 does have a pre-8am arrival and a post-6pm departure. However, with different people having different starting and finishing times it's impossible to meet the needs of all potential passengers using 1 vehicle.

When Bakers operated the 27 they used to run a Congleton-Macclesfield-Astra Zeneca- Knutsford service in the morning and one from Knutsford-Astra Zeneca-Macclesfield-Congleton in the evening. If anyone from Congleton used the bus to get to Astra Zeneca I imagine they would have chosen the Bakers service over using Arriva and changing even if the Arriva services were more frequent.

Quote:Out of interest, when was the last time the 27 had an all day hourly commercial offering?

Apart from the GHA Saturday 27 service I'm not sure it's ever happened. Macclesfield to Knutsford was served by two routes under North Western/Stevensons with a 26 service being Macclesfield to Northwich via Knutsford, which I think later got cut back to Knutsford meaning 26 finished up as the direct route and 27 as via Over Peover. The contract awarded to Bakers was a major revision where the 26 disappeared and an hourly 27 started (with 27A and 27B route variations) and it started serving Zeneca for the first time (they weren't Astra Zeneca yet) and some peak time services continued to Congleton as I mentioned.