Sunday 24th September 2023
Cheshire West and Chester Council was awarded £1.075 million from the DfT’s Rural Mobility Fund as long ago as March 2021 for a DRT scheme in the Borough.
You’d hope in the two and a quarter years since then it would have learnt lessons from the many DRT schemes introduced and withdrawn around the country to apply to its new itravel branded scheme which began on 31st July.
It didn’t look like it from the information available online so I popped up to Cheshire on Friday to give the service a try out.
One great advance compared to other schemes is for once, there’s a decent map online showing very clearly the geographic boundary where itravel buses go. Far too many schemes make it hard to see on the app where the line is drawn of where you can and can’t go.
As you can see itravel serves the rural area bounded by seven railway stations on four different lines which must be a unique achievement. Acton Bridge, Cuddington, Delamere, Mouldsworth, Ince & Elton, Helsby and Frodsham.
There are no major towns within the area with Chester, Ellesmere Port, Runcorn, Northwich and Winsford all over the border and requiring a change to rail or a conventional bus route. This probably limits the potential usefulness of this scheme albeit it certainly fills a gap for residents of the villages and hamlets eg Kingsley in the centre of the area served which hitherto has only seen the D&G Bus five-journeys-a-day route 48/A between Frodsham and Northwich.
The software is provided by Padam which seems to have become market leader for DRT apps in the UK and is to its well established formulaic layout with bus stops marked on the app grouped together until you zoom in to see the detail.
itravel is another scheme operating only on Mondays to Fridays over a 12 hour day between 07:00 and 19:00 so it’s not going to be any good for evenings and weekend travel.
Stagecoach operate the service with former Little & Often Mercedes Sprinters from the failed Ashford trial in 2017. Two of these are in a itravel branded livery with a third in standard Stagecoach livery acting as a spare which, as bad luck would have it, happened to be the vehicle on which I travelled on Friday.
I’d booked a journey the previous Friday prior to travelling for an 11:00 departure from Acton Bridge rail station – convenient for a 10:49 train arrival. As per Padam’s software it offered me journeys in later time segments including one at 11:15.
I booked a ride right across the area over to Helsby rail station which was estimated to take 23 minutes. As you can see from the above screenshot when using the app, ironically, the boundary of the operating area isn’t shown.
Fast forward to Friday a week later and it was reassuring to see from the app the bus making its way to the station as my train approached slightly later than scheduled at 10:52 …
… and it was exciting to see who would arrive first.
I thought I’d easily do it but hadn’t reckoned on the slight time delay in displaying the position of the bus.
In the event it was a dead heat with the bus pulling into the station car park just as the train doors opened.
I met Joe who’d just transferred over from conventional bus driving at Stagecoach’s Chester bus garage to operate itravel this week. He’d joined three colleagues on the four line rota and was looking forward to his new duties.
On Friday he’d started his duty at 10:00 so was on a ‘late’ turn and had already picked up two passengers in the first hour – who’d shared a ride in DRT style as it’s meant to be – before coming to Acton Bridge for my journey.
We had a lovely rural ride over to Helsby including a narrow road to avoid Frodsham and arrived in Helsby after just 19 minutes.
I bid my fond farewells to Joe who turned off down a side road to turn round.
itravel is funded for three years. The fare is currently £2 (rising to £2.50 next month) even though the service started after the DfT fares cap scheme began but the funding is coming from a separate pot of the Rural Mobility Fund.
There’s a call centre to ring for those who don’t want to use the app or the facility to book online.
All the usual caveats about DRT apply. Like many rural bus routes, there’s no hope of it becoming a financially sustainable proposition but hey, no-one worries about that when it comes to DRT.
Roger French
Blogging timetable: 06:00 TThS and the occasional Su DRT blog extra as today.
Comments are welcome but please keep them relevant to the blog topic and add your name (or an identifier). Thank you.
BusAndTrainUser 
Thanks for this addition to the DRT epic. Maybe one positive to be learned is that DRT is perhaps the best use for these minibuses, which were not very well suited to the Ashford scheme: they were not comfortable when full. Though my own impression of ‘Little & Often’ was that it didn’t extend far enough into Ashford’s suburbs: only a very few routes had real turn-up-and-go frequency, the rest being hourly or half-hourly, meaning that for many journeys you still had to have recourse to timetables. Unlike, for example, route 7 in Brighton, which used frequent minibuses to prove the concept, but had many other frequent routes at connection points to all over the area.
As you say. the itravel area has no major towns, so to get to Chester, Manchester, Liverpool etc. a train connection is needed, and this will be even more important on the return trip. I think it would be better to have one or maybe both minibuses waiting at say Frodsham station guaranteed to meet specific trains. Or Cuddington might be better, with trains to and from Chester and Manchester at almost the same minutes-past-each-hour for much of the day. Better still if through tickets were available to at least those two destinations.
Rick Townend
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’ve just become aware of an expansion of the Surrey Connect DRT service, now serving Cranleigh, West Guildford, Cranleigh, Longross and Tandridge, in addition to the original Mole Valley as six separare areas. The new services started on 4th September. Again the software is by Padan.
MotCO
LikeLike
Had an enjoyable day riding three of them yesterday and another last week. Blog to follow when I’ve done the fifth.
LikeLike
This scheme shows how an app should be able to book journeys to connect with onward travel. Allowing a field where users can provide the time of their connection, eg arriving on 1049 train, reduces delays to both passengers and buses.
Gareth Cheeseman
LikeLike
Lessons are never learned when Politicians (of all shades) are involved. The DfT will go on blindly introducing these subsidised taxi schemes until the money finally runs out quite regardless. Pot of money allocated and MUST be spent somehow/anyhow is the mantra. With fuel prices rising again, that money may run out a little sooner rather than later.
It would be wonderful if just one of these schemes became successful, but the problem today, unlike fifty years ago, is that absolutely nobody ever goes to live in rural areas relying solely on their local bus. And this scheme, if some of the D&G 48 passengers become “app-savvy”, is more likely to do more harm than good to the 48.
I notice frequently that the “new” Drivers for these schemes have migrated from the bus roster, which is hardly helpful when most Operators are acutely short of staff.
But Heh-Ho, what’s another £million wasted!
Terence Uden
LikeLike
For some context, itravel isn’t a new brand as such. The council had iTravelSmart in 2015ish and was set up for the local sustainable travel fund.
Shame that you didn’t check on the map on the app properly as you’d see that you can’t actually book to most of Cuddington, it only lets you book the train station so the map online and on the leaflet are actually incorrect at the moment.
Also, the bus can only be booked to places where there is a pre-existing bus stop in NAPTAN. You’ll notice that Delamere Park for example you are only offered 1 bus stop for the whole estate. That bus stop is in the same places as the normal bus stop. If people struggle to get to the existing bus stops, they have no chance getting to the DRT stops.
Finally, the app happily lets you book trips over conventional bus services. There’s no care at all for the viability of conventional bus service which need to remain viable.
Absolutely awful scheme. I’ve reported to the council who said blame Stagecoach and Stagecoach in their usual usefulness with Chester depot, didn’t reply. No one cares. Just yet another case of wasting taxpayers money on stupid schemes. All overseen by a councillor who refuses to acknowledge any contact. Councillor Karen Shore works for herself, just happens to be paid with taxpayers money.
LikeLike
These DRT routes financed by the DFT continue to amaze me particularly as conventional services are being reduced due to the shortage of money.
Talk about the lunatics being in charge of the asylum..
Matarredonda
LikeLike
The Robin Update
The low uptake of a demand-responsive minibus service in the Cotswolds being trialled has sparked concerns. Gloucestershire County Council launched a bespoke minibus service operating in selected areas of the Forest of Dean and the Cotswolds.
So far it has proven to be a real success in the south of the Forest of Dean and in July just under 700 people used the service. But in the Cotswolds only 165 hopped on The Robin during the same month. County Councillor Paul Hodgkinson (LD, Bourton-on-the-Water and Northleach) is disappointed with the Cotswolds’ figures and has called on Shire Hall chiefs to do more to promote the service.
I think the services have been going for about 12 months so I do not think either can be regarded as a success. 700 equate to about 3 passengers a day and the 165 equate to about 1 passenger a day
The mystery with all these DRT services us what do they so when the money runs out as none of these services come anywhere near even breaking even and I doubt the councils pockets are deep enough to jeep then going when the government funding runs out
Fares revenues look to be a couple of thousand pounds at best. Even if the buses were full they would never come anywhere near breakeven and that ignore the fact that if the buses were full you would bever be able to book a trip
DRT in my view simply does not work
LikeLike