Go North West

[transportdsn]

RE: Go North West - FLEETNEWS ONLY - NO STRIKE TALK!

(14/03/2021 01:38)Solo40336 Wrote:  While its good to see QS expand onto some smaller routes. The branding thing is absolutely ridiculous. Three buses being branded for a Mon-Sat daytime route. Reducing the fleets flexibility even more. Each night and Sundays those buses could have been quite nicely used to cover Free Bus services as well as some of the quiet evening services when short of buses.
99% of the passengers using the 415/129 could not care less what colour it is as long as it shows up.
While I'm sure they no doubt have the best intentions, the numerous colour schemes just seem to be something for managment to play with unaware of just how much trouble numerous branded routes cause for the routing end engineering departments.

Hey, I'm the marketing manager at GNW, thought it might be useful for me to wade in here with an explanation of why we've decided to brand these particular buses.

These three Solos have been brought over specifically for the 129 and 415, having deemed the 129 unsuitable for our current fleet, with the added advantage of releasing Enviro200s from the 415. The idea - in theory at least - is that these buses should never stray from their routes around Middleton. These are not buses that we want to appear on other routes, or on Free Bus as you mention.

With that in mind, why wouldn't we brand them with a local identity? We surely want to make public transport as attractive as possible, and to stand out to passing trade. There are schools of thought which say that customers don't care what colour their bus is, as long as it turns up. So should we just paint them all white and have done with it?

Our engineering, commercial and performance teams are fully on board with this strategy. It only works if everybody is on board. Sometimes, for reasons beyond our control, buses do stray from their intended routes. But we have trackers amd monitoring in place - every instance of a bus straying 'off route' is recorded and analysed, with changes made to our internal processes (or even bus boards and duties) accordingly.