Every route 100. 10 of 26.

Saturday 11th May 2024

My latest ride on a bus route numbered 100 is one of three to be featured in this fortnightly series operated by the closely linked bus companies of Centrebus, Chaserider and D&G Bus; all having ownership interests by bus entrepreneur Julian Peddle.

This time it’s the Centrebus operated route between Syston (on the north eastern edge of Leicester) and Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire.

It’s very much a rural route linking small hamlets with the towns of Syston and Melton Mowbray including providing a local town route in Syston by nature of an anti-clockwise loop around residential areas to the north west of the town.

The timetable comprises just four end-to- journeys a day with a short late afternoon return journey from Melton Mowbray to a third of the way along the route. One of the four journeys in each direction is timed to bring school children into and out of Melton Mowbray.

I wasn’t expecting the bus to be very busy when I took a ride on a Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago and I wasn’t disappointed.

Just one passenger travelled with me from Syston to Melton Mowbray. It was on the 14:12 from Syston which takes a slightly different route cutting out the hamlets of Burrough, Somerby, Pickwell and Little Dalby.

I had hoped to get the preceding journey leaving Melton Mowbray at 13:20 but Cross Country let me down by cancelling the train I needed to catch from Leicester. I’m sure it was busier taking Saturday morning shoppers home.

When the bus arrived into Syston there were only two on board, one alighting in the centre of town and the other staying on until alighting as the bus did its circuit as already described.

It takes 15 minutes to get back to the centre of Syston before turning right and head off through the Leicestershire countryside.

Bearing in mind there are only three journeys after the school journey that do this loop, I can’t see it serves much purpose and much of the area seemed to be car dominated.

There’s not much to tell you about the journey other than it was a pleasant and enjoyable ride. I did notice we passed a fair number of over sized churches along the way and I wondered if they struggle to attract congregations as route 100 does for passengers.

Centrebus had dutifully displayed timetables along the route …

… while bus stop plates were in various stages of fading but with some exceptions including this gem.

This route 100 has probably reached both its potential and just ticks over with Centrebus doing its thing.

Roger French

Did you catch the first nine ‘Every route 100’ blogs? Here’s 1 of 26 (Stevenage-Hitchin) 2 of 26 (Crawley-Redhill), 3 of 26 (Lincoln-Scunthorpe), 4 of 26 (Glasgow-Riverside Museum), 5 of 26 (Campbeltown local), 6 of 26 (Guildford’s Onslow Park & Ride), 7 of 26 (Warrington-Manchester), 8 of 26 (Chatham-St Mary’s Island), 9 of 26 (St Paul’s-Wapping).

Blogging timetable: 06:00 TThS.

Comments on today’s blog are welcome but please keep them relevant to the blog topic, avoid personal insults and add your name (or an identifier). Thank you.

20 thoughts on “Every route 100. 10 of 26.”

  1. The only notable point about this route 100 is that post Covid passenger numbers have only been 50% of pre Covid numbers and have stubbornly stayed at that level, the worst performer on our network. Most others are back to pre Covid levels with many 20% up.

    Why the 100 has done so badly will remain one of life’s mysteries

    Julian Peddle

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Interesting to hear from JP that ridership figures are recovering on many other services. How sustainable that is, or how it may fare without a £2 cap, is the bigger question.

      BW2

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  2. I rode on this route on a Saturday in September 2012, when it operated as a cycle with Route 128 (Melton (100) Leicester (128) Melton. My journey was the 1330 ex Melton, and my memory is of being alone on the bus until Syston, when we picked up a decent-ish number into Leicester.

    Like a lot of routes around Melton, passenger numbers weren’t especially good, even in 2012, as the steady reduction in the network since then will attest to. Having truncated the route at Syston won’t have helped . . . a lovely route to travel on, but hopeless for passengers now. Perhaps a shopping trip three times a week would now be adequate?

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  3. You know, people visiting from overseas would pay a small fortune to see rural England with historic churches and red phone boxes. The biggest single issue UK buses face is no coordinated simple to use website that shows how routes link together and where to board. The nearest is bustimes.org, which is superb, yet I believe is operated on a voluntary basis. Surely some monies from the BSIG could build an equivalent to the national rail site. People don’t want to see the UK stuck on some cramped minibus tour. They want to live it with the locals a bit, and bus routes like this are just the thing….

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    2. In my experience visitors from overseas use google maps. It does a lot of what you suggest and in fact makes a lot of other/separate websites redundant. Used in combination with bustimes to track the vehicles can get people a long way.

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    3. There is a national information service, Traveline, so there’s no need to reinvent the wheel (although it may need some tweaking). And there’s always Brendan Fox’s excellent BusAtlasUK for network maps, covering much of the country.

      I’m not sure of the current financing arrangements – in the past, when more inquiries by phone, operators were expected to pay towards inquiries about their own services (with the rest coming from the premium phone charge).

      The Traveline website states it receives no public funding.

      KCC

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  4. With all the other changes it’s been very difficult to isolate the effect of the £2 fare from the background of reviving passenger numbers from Covid. However the passenger increase on more local services, such as within Leicester or Stoke, which have not really benefited from the £2 fare cap particularly as weekly tickets are around £20, have increased at similar rates to longer distance services, if not more.

    But to give an example of the variation, if March 2024 figures for our Leicester depot are compared to Pre Covid passenger numbers , the change is from 50% of Pre Covid to 284% for fare paying passengers, and 45% to 88% for concessions. The low return of concessions still gives cause for concern. For the depot as a whole the figures are 128% for fare payers and 75% for concessions. All the figures are like for like, only for routes that have seen no significant change over the period.

    Julian Peddle

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    1. Hi Julian, You’ve increased fare-paying passengers by 284% compared to pre-COVID. Wow. If the Department for Transport ever has an external advisory panel on how to increase bus passenger numbers (and spend BSIP monies wisely), you should be on that panel. What is the main thing, in your view, that has got usage so high?

      CH, Oxford

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      1. Presumably Leicester depot has benefited from Julian and Nigel carving the network up between them in the back room of a pub and First pulling off the 22.

        Significant percentage increases would also suggest a very low starting point, which from my observations would generally reflect Centrebus’s operations.

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  5. I dislike pouring cold water, and will be very happy to retract this comment, but 284% does seem rather high. is this comparing a random month in 2019/2020 with March 2024 numbers?

    An increase to 128% for fare-payers and a decrease to 75% for pass-holders sounds more likely.

    I can only assume that the 284% figure is distorted somehow by the £2 fare impact on longer routes (where a pre-Covid single of say £6 for a long journey is effectively reduced by a factor of 3 at £2).

    Any DfT figures are so aggregated as to be meaningless . . . only a route comparison from (say) September 2019 and then annually would give a true picture. I do understand that such figures are commercially sensitive, though.

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  6. To answer both of the previous comments as I advised the variation in the recovery of passenger journeys since Covid is huge. This particular route is a Leicester Local service, unchanged timetable and as far as I am aware no significant changes to other routes in the area. Of course all services in Leicester have benefitted from the City Councils Leicester Bus plan. So I have no idea why farepayer use has increased so much.

    The increase is March 2024 to the same month in 2019. It’s a Leicester local so the £2 fare scheme has had minimal impact, but the service has benefited from the reduction in price of the all operator day and period tickets.

    And working down from the 284% increase, is 261%, 256%, 162%, 146%, then lots around the 120% for other Leicester depot routes

    Perhaps it’s the opportunity to travel on the 5th best operator in the country for passenger satisfaction, according to Passenger Focus.

    Julian Peddle

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    1. And maybe that’s the rub—great support from your City’s bus plan has likely contributed to these exceptional growth numbers. Department for Transport officials should maybe make a research visit to Leicester to see what “best practice” is.

      I’m convinced we are going to end up with two types of regions—almost binary. One set of regions will experience amazing growth, an expanding system, and stability for existing routes, while a second set will just experience ongoing decline and decay.

      Well done though with those numbers.

      CH, Oxford

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    2. The all operator day ticket has not reduced in price Julian. Maybe best leave this to Mr Brookes…

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  7. Thanks to Julian for that explanation …. that makes much more sense now. It is good that other Leicester routes are showing pretty good increases as well.

    As you commented about numbers on Route 100 … sometimes there is no logical reason!! We’ve all had routes that buck trends … !!

    Thanks again.

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  9. Others may already have told you, but the Leics 100 used to run from St Margarets bus station a few years ago. It was altered, l believe, to replace another route that served the greater Syston area and to enable a cut in subsidy by expecting Leicester bound users to transfer to Arriva’s services ( at extra cost l suspect ). Dennis Hemsley

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    1. The only people who have ever used the 100 are pensioners, who travel for free anyway.

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  10. My efforts to provide some background to Rogers interesting blog seem to have provoked a number of negative comments about Centrebus. Constructive criticism is always welcome, but when it’s based on ignorance then it really does not add to the debate. Perhaps anonymous at various points on 13/14 May should reveal him or herself?

    The comment that Centrebus lost money in the financial year ending April 2022 is correct, although I don’t see the relevance to the blog . But Centrebus is still around and thriving, unlike several operators who lost money that year. And anonymous does not seem to regard pensioners who travel free worthy of having a bus service provided for them? Why are they different from farepaying passengers?

    Clearly anonymous has not bothered to read the Leicester Big Bus Plan, where routes have been swapped between Stagecoach,First,Arriva and Centrebus. Presumably we all sat in a pub and carved up the network? That might have been how anonymous did it in NBC days but now operators work with an enlightened City Council to provide a better integrated bus network that has increased passenger numbers. First were quoting 20% plus six months ago, and since then I would have expected that to increase further. A key part of the plan has also been the all operator ticket becoming the standard priced ticket, proving that all operator tickets are vital to increasing patronage. And I’m happy to confirm that the 284% passenger increase will have been aided by inter operator ticket availability.

    If anonymous’s observations suggest a low starting point for passengers numbers that might be true for tendered services but they obviously have not looked at Hospital Hopper(HH) or the 22 service. HH is so little used that we have recently increased to 6 the number of journeys that require a duplicate bus.

    It is correct that 100 used to run into Leicester, it was part of a three bus service over two routes 100/128 that connected the villages between Melton and Leicester, and was cut back to just one bus on the 100 when subsidies were reduced some years ago, and cut back to just Melton to Syston.

    As Roger says Centrebus is still ‘doing its thing’ in Leicester

    Julian Peddle

    Liked by 1 person

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