First of all lets have a look at the timetable as it stands at the moment. Plymouth to Exeter as from May 2010
A nice easy to remember timetable with a bus pretty much every hour.
So lets see what we have from 11th April:
Wow!
Half the service with a bus every two hours. Its all a far cry from the days when there was just the one stop at Drumbridges Roundabout on the A38 apart from the main stops in the two Cities.
Remember when they thought the service needed these?
They didn't stay that long and the reduction to every 90 minutes bendy bus was soon put back to a standard coach every hour.
The one thing I have just noticed is that the day return fare advertised on the back of this bendy coach back in 2001 is £5.95
Ten years later and a Day Explorer ticket is still only £6.50 so only a 55 pence increase in ten years. (There was a time when Explorer tickets were not valid on the X38 as they were cheaper than a day return, but no such restriction seems to apply today.)
The next post looks at changes to the X80 from April and then later in the week I will show you how First is much better than Stagecoach in one aspect at least!
Related Links
- Timetable X38 11 April 2011 Stagecoach
- Stagecoach X38 Plymothian Transit Extra
- Sunday Best Plymothian Transit June 2009
- X38 Bendy Years Plymothian Transit May 2009
- Stagecoach in South Brent Plymothian Transit October 2008
Elsewhere on the net
- Yesterday, surprisingly for the first time, I took a trip on FDC's 6 from Penzance to Mousehole. PTOTPA
- The recent radio silence has been in aid of a good cause: I've been building a bus museum. 270KTA
- Stagecoach is certainly receiving a bit of a battering in the media, of late. A public inquiry following an old historic wheel loss incident, a bus last week with suspension problems stopped by police and a bus carrying school pupils careering down an embankment Omnibuses
Have passenger numbers really dropped off that much? It doesn't seem that long ago since Stagecoach had to base a coach at Milehouse to run duplicates.
ReplyDeleteThis is an absolutely ridiculous change and what's worse is that there isn't a clear reason as to why they've cut so much out. My regular trip in the morning has gone and now I'm forced to take a later one.
ReplyDeleteAdded to that the return trip back to Plymouth in the evening says it will stop at Ashburton at 5:35pm yet doesn't arrive until 6pm. 30mins late everyday? How can that be justified?