Every route 100. 16 of 26.

Saturday 3rd August 2024

Welcome to the second of only two bus routes numbered 100 in Wales which, as mentioned last time, are both to be found in the south. This one is in Barry in the Vale of Glamorgan. Of all Britain’s 26 bus routes numbered 100, this one is unique in that it only operates on Sundays.

And for reasons I’ll explain shortly, it’s the only route so far in this fortnightly odyssey series of riding all 26 that I’ve partly failed in that mission.

The route is operated by Adventure Travel and follows a complicated routing on a circular figure of eight type of layout linking different residential areas of Barry with the town centre and Barry Island.

Here’s a map showing the route taken from Adventure Travel’s website with no directional arrows indicating which way round the loops the buses go or whether they go in both directions.

It’s a one bus operation which cycles around all sections of the route in an hour and a half making for a rather sparse frequency between 11:30 and 20:22 together with a break between 16:20 and 17:06 indicating it’s probably a one driver duty operation too.

During the week some of the residential areas are served by Cardiff Bus routes as well as route B3, also operated by Adventure Travel, which I’ve featured in previous blogs about the infamous Barry Docks Transport Interchange.

Route 100 doesn’t follow the same pattern as the B3 having its own unique twists and turns. It misses out Morrisons and the Transport Interchange and instead does a double run to serve Barry Island with its popular seafront and amusements especially during the summer.

Imagine if you’re a bus driver unfamiliar with Barry and are given this duty to do for the very first time with no prior route learning and no map to follow.

All you have are a few scribbled notes in illegible handwriting from a colleague.

That’s exactly what happened when I attempted to take a ride a few weeks ago on a glorious sunny Sunday morning in June.

I arrived in the centre of Barry ready to catch the first journey from what’s affectionately called Barry Town Centre 3. There’s no number 100 on the bus stop plate, nor a timetable in the display case which isn’t particularly reassuring but there is an electronic departure sign showing scheduled departures (not real time) which at least did mention the upcoming departure at 11:52.

The bus had begun its day’s operation at 11:30 in Barry’s northern area called Merthyr Dylan before running south easterly across to Cadoxton followed by a circuit of an area called Palmerstown before reaching Cadoxton again and then down to Barry town centre. The bus was due to arrive at 11:47 with a five minute pause, giving time to take a few photographs and work out with the driver what ticket he was going to sell me which would include a complete round trip circuit.

The bus appeared on both the Bus Times tracking website as well as Adventure Travel’s own tracking part of its web page and I immediately sensed there was a problem.

The bus appeared at the terminus late and as it progressed along the route had a large number of long pauses and got later and later until it finally arrived into Barry Town Centre at 11:57, 10 minutes late, with four passengers on board, two of whom alighted but in the process of doing so were chatting to the driver who was showing his gratitude to them for showing him the route to be taken.

I was the only passenger boarding and the two old ladies alighting explained how the driver was very unsure of the route and could I show him the way round which started to feel as though this was going to be the blind leading the blind.

The driver was so occupied with trying to decipher the scrawl on his aide memoir on a scrap of paper that he didn’t trouble me about paying a fare being only too pleased to think I’d be able to help him keep to the correct route.

We set off at 12:02, still 10 minutes late, with the other two passengers alighting at the next stop and one passenger and a dog boarding, which was a relief as she looked like a local resident who’d be sure to know the route to take.

Sadly, it turned out not to be the case, as at the next roundabout the driver started to panic, and in his hesitancy wondering which exit to take, kept stopping to give way to traffic wanting to enter from the left, amid much hooting from behind, then did a complete circuit of the roundabout twice with grunts of anguish coming from the cab.

The dog owning woman intervened to tell him to turn left for Morrisons which I knew was wrong (we should have gone straight on) but it was too late, as we were now heading towards the supermarket where she explained ‘this is where all the buses stop’ at which point I intervened to explain ‘all the buses except route 100 on Sundays’ and he needed to make a 360 degree turn at the roundabout ahead and retrace the route back to the roundabout where he already done those two circuits.

Thank goodness the dog owning woman didn’t tell him to go on to the Transport Interchange as that would have added another five or so minutes on top of the five minutes we’d just wasted making us now over 15 minutes late.

We were now back on track but our ‘first-time-on-this-route’ driver (he told me he’d been with the company for two years) who continued to show a worrying sense of complete bewilderment and almost overcome with the worry of it all. That may have been just a front as he did keep saying it was “either completely courageous or complete stupidity to be doing this duty” that day.

I was rapidly concluding it was complete incompetence of Adventure Travel to allocate a duty like this one with a fiendishly complicated route to a driver who’d never done it before with no route learning or map.

As we approached each junction both the woman and myself were shouting out direction instructions as I followed our progress on Google maps and kept consulting the ‘real time’ map on the Bus Times webpage, and as we turned left to do a circuit to serve Barry Island seafront we immediately hit an inevitable long queue of crawling traffic as hundreds of motorists had the same idea of enjoying a lovely summer’s day on the beach.

The woman and dog both alighted as we did a loop around Barry Island by the railway station and I made a snap decision to abandon the journey. By the time we arrived outside the station our timekeeping had deteriorated to being half an hour late and I had a strong premonition this was set to get worse as the driver continued to fumble over the complex route ahead – and I wasn’t confident I could fulfill the task of being a mentor on the more upcoming tricky parts of the route.

All the more so as I was on a tight schedule for the day, originally planning to get a train from Barry Docks having completed the full route 100 circuit at 13:22 and then catch a series of trains up to Preston to arrive at a reasonable time in the evening ready to take a ride on another route 100 in that town the following morning. I said my farewells and bid the novice Barry route 100 driver good luck.

As I travelled north I kept monitoring progress (or lack of it) as the bus continued its uncertain routing around Barry. By 14:00 it was running 50 minutes late, which on a 90 minute frequency is worse than useless. I’d have missed my train and onward connections if I’d stayed on the bus.

This was not Adventure Travel’s finest hour (and a half).

Next time’s route 100 is from Preston (while it’s still running) and can’t be any worse …. surely?

Find out in a fortnight.

Roger French

Did you catch the other fifteen ‘Every route 100’ blogs so far? 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, 10 of 26 Syston-Melton Mowbray, 11 of 26 Wellington-Telford Sutton Hill, 12 of 26 Hanley-Stone, 13 of 26 Burgess Hill-Horsham, 14 of 26 Aylesbury-Milton Keynes, 15 Pontypridd-Royal Glamorgan Hospital.

Blogging timetable: 06:00 TThS with Summer Su extras.

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.

38 thoughts on “Every route 100. 16 of 26.”

    1. Adventure Travel are a godawful operator. If it wasn’t for the fact they were cheaper than other operators, no one would ever award them work. They can’t sort their website, can’t sort roadside publicity. Drivers tend to do what they want, when they want.

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      1. You say that but Adventure lost a depot’s worth of work earlier this year (presumably as they weren’t cheap enough)?!

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  2. A sad tale – unfortunately not unfamiliar to regular bus users. The biggest single thing which would improve bus – and train – services would be for managements to really mean and care about it when they say ‘putting passengers first’. A rosy vision for the future would be where some of the managers who really do know how to do it are promoted to senior positions, and convince their boards/committees that money for more staff training, and more staff to keep bus stop information up to date etc. will indeed win more customers and more revenue. Re-designing bus networks with simpler more frequent routes, with reliable, well-signed interchanges, would mean that complex squiggles like this route-100 are just not needed.

    It can be done – and has been. I remember the introduction of route 7 in Brighton: a useful addition to the network, partly peripheral, but serving two main stations, a hospital, the popular marina, and several stops ‘where all the buses stop’, connecting with many other frequent services. It started with good publicity and minibuses every 6 minutes; it became double-deckers every 6 minutes!

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  3. Why is the Sunday route different?

    My guess is it is subsidised by the council and the route is more about how little it will cost rather than does it provide a useful service

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    1. Sundays and the Mon-Sat routes are tendered by Vale of Glamorgan Council. VOGs transport team are awful and couldn’t organise a kids party at soft play! The 100 tries to cover everywhere but for no reason at all. It does a 7 minute diversion around Palmerstown to serve an area which has no Mon-Sat service and then duplicate over 2 buses per hour from Cardiff Bus. Barry to Barry Island to Barry Hospital it duplicates over Cardiff Bus 96 which runs hour. VOG are just wasting money left, right and centre.

      All the gear but no idea. Typical example of staff employed within local authorities who have no accountability and simply no clue what they are doing.

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    2. It’s quite common for a Sunday service to combine several routes into one. The 100 covers elements of the B1, B2, B3 and some other routes as well by the looks of it, using 1 bus instead of the 3 or more needed during the week.

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      1. I went on one of those mystery day trips once. A sweepstake was organised whereby everyone threw in a pound along with a guess at the destination.

        The driver won the pot.

        Roger G, Oxford

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  5. Adventure follow in the footsteps of other infamous operators. First came Clayton Jones and Shamrock travel and then Veolia.

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    1. Adventure was set up by Kevyn Jones, as New Adventure Travel who is Clayton’s son. They had a falling out and father and son competed with one another in Pontypridd during the demise of Veolia. It may have been better run then as Clayton’s company fell apart within a short space of time. Adventure seems to have struggled since Kevyn sold

      out to ComfortDelgro.

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  6. Similar experiences on Sunday only services, and of course, if the Driver hasn’t had the required route learning, particularly on a complicated town service such as this, chaos ensures. Similar experiences recalled when doing Council survey checks many years ago, and four consecutive Drivers (sourced from Borough Green on Sunday alone) on a 70 from Maidstone to Larkfield taking no less four entirely different routes! It is totally down to poor management. There is absolutely no excuse for Adventure Travel as they are owned by ComfortDelGro, supposedly “global leaders in the public transport industry” and about to take over a chunk of services in Manchester under their Metroline banner!

    The comment from “Anonymous” about the Vale of Glamorgan transport team may be true or not, but it certainly was at one time, where they boasted (privately) about always doing their bus surveys in inclement weather and at the “quietest times possible”.

    Terence Uden

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  7. A new route 100 now operating in Norwich. Called City Clipper run by First. It’s an open top circle around the city.

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  8. It was suggested before reinstatement after Covid that the 100 was revamped and removed from Barry Island as it duplicated the Cardiff Bus 95/96 inter working which was ample capacity. The 100 could then mop up other areas and provide an hourly service serving Morrisons and where appropriate a half hourly frequency with the 95 in certain parts.

    Fell on deaf ears as they want to discuss with local members

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  9. Aside from the operational shambles here, a Sunday service starting as late as 11:30 feels like something which hasn’t been updated in decades and has completely failed to move with the times. The days of no-one going anywhere on a Sunday morning are long long gone.

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    1. That service appears to have been designed to be a one-driver working to minimise the cost; if it started earlier it would have to finish earlier too.
      Which is preferable?

      Personally I’d go for shopping hours and run it roughly 10 ’til 4, but I assume the council had their reasons for specifying it to start later and run into the early evening.

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      1. The correct answer to that is shopping hours, plus maybe an hour on each side so shop-workers can use it as well

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      2. There is definitely considerably more demand between 0900 and 1130 than between 1800 and 2030.

        Services not starting until late morning or lunchtime on Sundays used to be commonplace several decades ago (before Sunday trading) and I wonder whether the council’s reasoning for specifying it like this is any more sophisticated than “that’s the way it’s always been”?

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        1. I don’t know if they have finally changed them but when I was scheduling buses in West Yorkshire a lot of the Sunday contract services didn’t start until lunchtime before running into the evening. I always assumed a legacy of when everyone went to church in the morning and then out in the afternoon for leisure – possibly the same reasoning here as 1130 is late for shops opening (in some places it can be they don’t open until 1100 to close at 1700 rather than 10-4 or the much rarer 9-3 alternative but I haven’t come across anywhere opening at 12). The fact that this structure had lasted into the 2010’s still doing the same is the epitome of “that’s the way it’s always been”.

          Dwarfer

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          1. I think 11-5 Sunday trading is mostly found more in bigger cities, where presumably footfall is skewed later due to people making longer journeys to get there plus a greater proportion of the city centre attractors being entertainment or leisure which are more afternoon-type activities for most people. Also a greater proportion of the footfall being young people who no doubt tend to start their day later at weekends.

            12-6 trading can be found quite widely in Central London, (presumably due to a further extension of all of the above logic) but I’m not aware of it anywhere else.

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  11. The nub of this is that ‘Adventure Travel’ is no better than ‘New Adventure Travel’ or the sort of operation that their forefathers ran I.e. Shamrock, despite being acquired by a multinational in Comford del Gro.  I do wonder if they realised what they bought, but then the restating of accounts and valuation of assets after purchase answers that one!  You can’t run that style of operation with the systems and processes a proper organisation requires. It can’t bear the costs.

    Plenty of comments about how their operations performs form staff and customers are available for all to read….  The vehicle quality and presentation standards are questionable, without their drivers happily answering their phone driving around….

    Their oft quoted MD (a title he really wanted without maybe understanding what it involves), who has a lot of time for penning comment articles in the Trade Press goes right against what you have experienced here….. or is the reality your observations are more the day-to-day state of the operation and his articles relate to a work of fiction.  Again, most will know the answer.  He ought to try a cage of career to fiction writing and brooding his scope! Didn’t also work for Veolia during their brief folly in Wales, he doesn’t like to mention that one!

    Having lost the vast majority of the tenders they held or declaration of their former commercial services no longer being so in April makes you wonder how deep the CDG pockets are.  

    Apparently their tendering was based on some rather interesting application of common sense!

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    1. Why would you expect Adventure Travel to be better than New Adventure Travel when it’s exactly the same company? A bit of rebranding changes nothing.

      Ultimate ownership is irrelevant unless senior management is changed, and as we all know that hasn’t happened, whether you’re talking about Veolia or Comfort del Gro. The company is to me still what it always has been: the spiritual successor of the Shamrock company whose antics helped to destroy National Welsh after deregulation.

      The UK government did Welsh bus passengers no service when they removed the county level of government in south-east Wales and devolving public transport provision to the perennially under-funded unitary authorities.
      The Welsh government has subsequently done their bus passengers no favours by spending all their time playing at buses with the TrawsCambria ‘network’ while ignoring the ever-devolving provision of the local bus services which provide the essential daily service for local people.

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  12. Roger French, I have an idea for next year’s fortnightly series. Why not do an A-Z of National Rail stations and I have some stations you can do.

    A – Aberdeen

    B – Bedford

    C – Cheadle Hulme

    D – Doncaster

    E – Etchingham

    F – Fairbourne

    G – Grindleford

    H – Hexham

    I – Inverness

    J – Johnstone

    K – Kettering

    L – Llanfairpwll

    M – Milton Keynes

    N – Norwich

    O – Oxford

    P – Peterborough

    Q – Queensborough

    R – Redditch

    S – Scunthorpe

    T – Tamworth

    U – Uckfield

    V – Valley

    W – Wolverhampton

    X – Idridgehay

    Y – Yate

    Z – Canada Water

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    2. L could be Lympstone Commando.

      Lympstone Commando was once unique on UK Rail network as you could only use the station if you had business at the Royal Marines Commando Camp, but is now open to the public since the Exe Estuary Trail opened & runs between the platform & the camp.

      Although the sign on the platform still remains stating “persons alighting here must have business with the camp” the MOD have accepted the station is the property of Network Rail and as such they cannot prohibit members of the public from using the station, however, persons wishing to take photographs from the platform should inform the guard room at the Commando Training Centre beforehand.

      SM

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  13. Possibly a stupid question, as I’m only a passenger. But given the sophistication of ticket machines these days (and including GPSs in them), why can’t they be loaded with the route and act as a Sat Nav? “Next roundabout, take the second exit” etc. Someone new to a route can just turn on that capability. CH, Oxford

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    1. Because the capabilities of bus industry IT systems, and the embracing by operators of any capabilities that the systems do offer, are both usually about a decade or two behind any other industry.

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      1. This is the same industry that is still very inconsistent in making use of vehicle tracking capabilities for effective service control, has only recently moved away from drivers having to copy down their shift times from sheets of paper on a noticeboard, generally can’t be bothered to inform waiting passengers if a trip has been cancelled despite numerous technological means now existing to do so, and is happy for its websites and journey planners to keep churning out normal timetables and bus stops for dates when there is actually a planned diversion.

        Compare and contrast with the railways on those last few points. The railways often come under fire for their information systems too but my goodness they are lightyears ahead by comparison.

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  14. I can’t comment on Adventure Travel but back in the 1990s Essex County Council had enough money to provide some summer Sunday only services. As these were designed for tourism purposes rather than residents they often didn’t bear much relation to weekday services and also tended to change from year to year so route learning could be an issue.

    One spring day I decided to travel on some of these routes. One journey was operated by a company well known and highly respected by its peers and by enthusiasts. Some way along the journey I realised that we were actually following the previous years routeing rather the revised route recently introduced. By then it was too late to advise the driver so we had to stick with the old route.

    The bus’s legal lettering helpfully included the name of the managing director so any aggrieved passengers would have known who to complain to. However this company’s Sunday services were driven by volunteers rather than being on a rota. If there were no volunteers then the senior management would draw the short straw. On this occasion the driver was the gentleman named on the side of the bus! I have to admit that I did enjoy telling the story to a couple of his staff that I knew.

    Nigel Turner

    Liked by 1 person

  16. I used Adventure (or maybe it was New Adventure then) while on holiday in the Gower peninsula a few years ago. “Adventures” included arbitrarily missing out Reynoldston, colliding with a dustcart on the approach to Rhossili and taking out someone’s gutter with the nearside mirror, only stopping to adjust the mirror when well out of sight of the afflicted building.

    Philip Whitehead

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