Forty Twos confusion

The latest set of timetable changes for Plymouth Citybus were mostly fairly minor timetable amendments rather than anything major but the main City Centre – Derriford Hospital – The George Park & Ride corridor did see some big changes including the loss of the popular PR3 service. Now I know its early days and things will settle down quickly but there was plenty of confusion for passengers this evening on the  42 that I caught from the Seaton Business Park to Derriford – The George and Asda. It was a few minutes late when I got on but when we got to Derriford it was all a bit of a farce. There were plenty of passengers all waiting for the Park & Ride bus – but when they asked the driver if it was the Park & Ride service she initially said no although this was corrected to “I have no idea where I am going” She knew she went close to the Park & Ride but she wasnt going into the site and didnt know where the closest stop actually was.

The ned result was that we were sat at Derriford for 10 minutes and ended up only taking a few of the passengers who were brave enough to risk it, leaving all of the others for the 42C or having to pay again for the Stagecoach 100. The driver was very friendly and apologetic that she did not know the route, but if she didn't know how on earth were passengers going to know?

For me this latest changes opens up another route to Asda without the need to change bus at Derriford but the vast majority of passengers just wanted to get from Derriford to the George.

The biggest problem I think is that the 42s are now incredibly complicated going off in different directions from Derriford which can cause problems. The resulting timetables are far too complicated for most passengers to understand. Add in the school days / school holidays variations to times in the evening and it gets even worse. Trying to work out when my bus was due using the timetable on my phone was a real pain as I had to keep scrolling up and down to work out which bus I was looking at – on school holidays each bus was 5 minutes earlier. This is not very clear at all. I consider myself as being quite good at reading timetables – and I was struggling to work it all out. All the new buses they throw at a service wont help if passengers cant work out where they are going or when they are going to turn up. How many of the passengers who were turned away from the 42 on Monday will be getting their day return from Stagecoach on Tuesday?

I am not an expert in timetable design or bus scheduling but there is no doubt that the current set up on the 42’s is very much designed for the convenience of the bus company rather than for the passengers. Can it really be that difficult to have a simple timetable with buses at set times which dont change for school holidays,where its very clear which service number goes where? Would the service work better if there were different numbers for the 42A 42B and the 42 42C split?