Bee Network gains its first new bus route

Saturday 2nd November (No 999)

This week has seen big Bee news in Greater Manchester. Mayor Burnham has been trumpeting the first new bus route added to the network since he took back control in September 2023.

Except it’s not really a new route, more the reinstatement of a route withdrawn in 2020. I’ve not been able to ascertain whether it was a Covid casualty but it does seem a strong likelihood it was, with the pandemic dominating everything that year.

Pedant note – it actually started on Monday 28 October

Whatever the reason for its demise it’s certainly good to see route 615 back on the bus map. It links Wigan and Aspull (north east of Wigan) with Horwich Parkway railway station and the large Middlebrook retail park with its many warehouse type outlets, Tesco Extra and Asda, a stadium (Bolton Wanderers) and an arena.

Journey time for a full round trip from Wigan back to Wigan is an inconvenient 63 minutes (including a two minute pause as the bus encircles the retail park) making for a 70 minute frequency for the one bus working which operates the route.

There are noticeable gaps in the timetable between 07:19 and 08:53 and between 14:38 and 16:25 on Mondays to Fridays when the bus obviously undertakes a school journey making for an efficient and economic proposition, if slightly unattractive for passengers. No service operates on Sundays.

The first and last three journeys on Mondays to Fridays divert into a business park called Parklands by the retail park.

The route is operated by Go North West for Transport for Greater Manchester.

As you can imagine there was much self congratulatory praise at getting the service back up and running after its four year gap by the Mayor and Councillor David Molyneux MBE, Leader of Wigan Council in the media. Andy Burnham hailed the 615 as an “important milestone …. boosting access to jobs, retail and leisure opportunities”. The latter two are definitely true but the absence of peak hour journeys in the morning makes the 615 pretty useless for retail workers needing to be at work by 09:00.

Local Ward Councillor Laura Flynn was “excited and proud” to ride the very first bus on Monday morning.

I took a ride on the route yesterday morning to see how the first week is going.

There must be a problem getting the timetable uploaded in the Bus Open Data System (BODS) as no details are available on the normal reliable Bus Times website nor are Traveline or Google maps acknowledging its presence. The Bee Network website is worse than useless for seeking actual timetables too – it only wants to let you have departures from a particular bus stop.

On the plus side there were printed timetable leaflets available in Wigan bus station…

… if you knew where to look, and the main departure boards included a reference to its presence with a message at the bottom that it departs from stand U.

This was helpful as the printed listings on display…

… hadn’t yet been updated…

… although information at stand U had.

Out on the road bus stops had also been updated including flags with the number added…

…. including along the section of route exclusively served by route 615 on the B5239 where it’s good to see shelters back in use after a four year gap.

The electronic departure listing at Bay U was showing a three minute delay for the 11:16 departure when I arrived …

… but the bus actually arrived at 11:16 (six minutes late from its 11:10 scheduled arrival) with four passengers alighting and a quick boarding of four new passengers, a route learning driver and myself saw us away again only one minute late at 11:17.

No passengers wanted us as we left the town centre and it wasn’t long before the reason for the late arrival became apparent.

Temporary traffic lights on the B5238 towards Aspull caused a five minute slow crawl to get through…

… after which we picked up a passenger who travelled to Aspull where another boarded for Horwich Parkway and two of the Wigan bus station foursome alighted at the retail park with the other two staying on the bus, as I did, for the return journey – I wonder if they were blogging about their journey too.

As you can see Middlebrook is dominated by the car so it’s good to see another bus route added to the two routes which have been serving the area (127 and 516) neither of which link it to Wigan, nor, incidentally Bolton, which is just as close, so the 615 certainly does open up opportunities for Wiganites to have an alternative shopping destination.

As we continued around the one way loop we picked up four returning passengers from The Linkway bus stop…

… and two more by Tesco Extra…

… and headed back to Wigan spot on time, indicating there’s a bit of slack in the timings at this end of the route. Indeed we had to wait three minutes in Aspull as we arrived there early.

We picked up a couple more passengers, including one on the exclusive section of route served by the newly reinstalled 615 (which was good to see), and then waited time for two more minutes just before the queue for the roadworks again – which seemed an odd thing to do, knowing we’d lose five minutes in the slow moving traffic ahead – which we did.

Back in Wigan we arrived into the bus station at 12:24, five minutes late…

… but a slick change of drivers saw the bus depart only a couple of minutes down at 12:27 with two fresh passengers boarding.

It’s good to see route 615 back in the Bee Network and I hope numbers increase especially with the Christmas retail season approaching. If it does become established again perhaps those peak hour gaps could be infilled so it becomes useful for that “access to jobs” Mayor Burnham desires. Which leaves me wondering whether, prior to 28th October, the bus sat doing nothing during the off peak period.

Roger French

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.

48 thoughts on “Bee Network gains its first new bus route”

  1. This sounds like a useful development. For me, the missing school time journeys are less annoying than the 70 minute frequency. Such a shame this route cannot be integrated with another so that an hourly frequency can be achieved. If this was a tendered service then it would definitely be a good initiative, so perhaps expectation is higher.

    Wigan is a long way from Manchester, so the Bee Network branding is not particularly appropriate. Pie network might be more apt.

    Glad that blog 999 is not an emergency posting.

    Gareth Cheeseman

    Liked by 1 person

  2. How to find a bus timetable pdf on the TfGM website:

    • Select the search function (magnifying glass icon) at the top of the page
    • Type in your bus service number
    • Select bus service
    • Select ‘View timetable’

    Liked by 2 people

    2. West Yorkshire Metro likewise expects you to know the service number before you seek the timetable. I do wonder if the reluctance to provide printed timetables is a response to a belief that people can’t understand them, but I do object to what are really departure lists being described as timetables. On the other hand, online information does sometimes allow you to see times from every bus stop, not just some of them.

      John

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  3. I don’t think waiting for time before getting stuck in a queue for temporary traffic lights is an odd thing to do. If I was boarding at the timing point I’d expect the bus to wait there and not depart early. The delay caused by the subsequent queue needs to be mopped up after, not before. And it seems efficient boarding and driver changes are helping – well done to the operator for that.

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  4. Thanks for this at least partly encouraging report. Re the lack of professionalism which seems to dog much of the bus industry’s publicity work – or lack of it, could there be something similar for bus people to the rail people’s ‘Chartered Institute of Railway Operators’? – or even an ‘integrated’ one for both bus and rail?

    Liked by 1 person

    1. The railway’s CIRO is, despite its self-congratulatory puff, little more than a social organisation for managers to pat each others’ backs. It’s long since lost its original intention of ensuring continuation of professional railway operations lost at privatisation when many of the operators were removed by the new owners and has gone native, become just another element of the privatised railway.

      I’ve been an “associate member” (the highest level paid for by my employer, full membership I’d have to pay for myself which would be a waste of money) since IRO started and I’ve sadly watched it devolve from its initial high aspirations and promise to mutual backslapping and justification of the status quo.

      The bus industry already has its own professional organisation in the Institute of Logistics and Transport, which subsumed the old, dying Chartered Institute of Transport after deregulation when the bus industry threw out much of its institutional knowledge in the same way the railway did after privatisation; both industries almost threw their babies out with the bathwater.

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  5. Was the demise of this service back in 2020 a cancellation of a commercial service by the operator. Or cancellation of a subsidised route funded by TfGM? If the latter does this make it the first service formerly under “local control” to be brought back under local control?

    Liked by 1 person

  6. Finding things on the TfGM (aka Bee Network) website is not always easy. The search box method does not work for me, I just tried putting in 615 and all it came up with were departure times for the 391 from Macclesfield! What does work is selecting Travel Updates on the top menu, then Live Departures, route number in the search window and it will give an option to download the pdf.

    It is good that they have updated the maps, which are available on the website but since 2015 they have not distributed printed versions.

    It is odd that none of the rhetoric from TfGM about this “new” route makes mention of the fact that it restores service to Dicconson Lane. My understanding is that it was one of a number of TfGM contracted routes withdrawn during the pandemic and never reinstated but not sure that it was exactly the same route.

    Wigan is a bit of an outlier in Greater Manchester terms. Of course it was not part of the original SELNEC PTE but only came in when it became the County of Greater Manchester in 1974, it is said that it was a toss-up as where Wigan should go – Greater Manchester, Merseyside or remain in Lancashire.

    A Henthon Stott.

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  7. I am actually reassured by the 70 minute frequency and school

    gaps. My fear with the public sector taking back control was that decisions would lack commercial consideration. You could imagine less enlightened bodies suddenly given control of bus services saying let’s put out a tender for someone to run it hourly across the same operational hours and receiving costs back which are 3 times as high for not many more journeys.

    On the whole question of clockface frequencies, looking at how my own kids find transport journeys – a google maps search for the time they want to travel – never once did any of the 3 of them consider whether that was a given amount of time before or after the last or next one. The world has changed.

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    1. It may improve reliability between Lymm and Warrington though, the X5/CAT 5 can regularly be over 30 minutes late due to severe traffic congestion in the TfGM section.

      Agree, no good for cross Lymm journeys though!

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  9. I was thinking about this last night. For me, a less frequent network with full day coverage (eg 0500-2330) and timed ‘pulse’ connections with buses which wait for late running connections is better than higer frequencies. At least you can plan your day and appointments and have some assurance of reliability rather than having long waits through missed connections or poorly timed ones in the first place.

    Stephen H

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      1. It’s perhaps not conventional thinking currently but they are workable with modern communication systems between vehicles and control, as long as recovery time is built in to the scheduling.

        But I accept that this is the way to do ‘coverage’ rather than ‘ridership’ as per Jarrett Walker’s Human Transit principles (website currently out of action so I won’t provide a link).

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        1. And I should have said ‘better than higher frequencies where there is a poor day coverage (eg 0700-1900 only) and no attempt at scheduling connections. Connections are less of an issue at high frequencies such as every 20 mins or better, but at 30 mins or worse they can make or break a two-bus journey.

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      2. Put simply you decide where your pulse points will be, bus stations, transport interchanges, or other major destination points. Then you timetable your services to meet there at the desired minutes past each hour to enable connections.

        There are working examples to research, and I’m sure transport planners and consultants with the relevant experience/knowledge.

        Peter Brown

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        1. What you are suggesting is transport hubs. They have been suggested for DRT where the DRT service run into a hub and you transfer to a regular bus service there. In practice they do not work due to poor reliability of both DRT and the regular bus services. People are not going to travel to a hub only to end up waiting an hour or two for a connection

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          1. “People are not going to travel to a hub only to end up waiting an hour or two for a connection”.

            You’re describing a transport hub WITHOUT the pulse bit. People will travel to a hub if all the connecting services arrive at the same time to make the pulse, they simply change services and are on their way. Swiss practice is to have pulses every 15, 30 or 60 minutes. Bus routes are designed so buses can do a round trip to meet each pulse point. Additional services can be scheduled to supplement this to meet demand for those not making connections if required.

            https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0967070X16301469

            A franchised bus network such as Manchester should have the ability to design such a system, and influence the highway authority if appropriate priorities are required to ensure service reliability l.

            Peter Brown

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      2. @Michael – anything beyond the anecdotal to support this? Previous studies (albeit pre internet and pre mobile devices) suggested there was a definite demand uplift associated with a clockface timetable, above and beyond pure headway effects.

        Also, if Mayor Burnham wants his integrated transport network, running buses and trains round at random low headways isn’t going to achieve this!

        Miles P

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        1. @Miles – anecdotal but observational, including my family, work colleagues and everyone I ever see who mentions needing to travel somewhere. I would agree that it used to be so much more convenient to remember clockface timetables, but that was in the days when you had to remember, as mainly the nearest timetable was at the stop! That was, as you say, pre internet and pre mobile devices, but that is a huge change and actually quite a long time ago now. It’s an even bigger change than stops showing departure times from that stop instead of full timetables.

          I’d be interested to see a study which shows where people do now get their information from. I’d be very surprised if “I remember the times because it’s always x past the hour” is very high on the list. I’d question whether many services could really offer that, reliably at least, in any case.

          Regards

          Michael

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          1. I can’t recall seeing anything and it’s not covered by the otherwise pretty comprehensive Transport Focus Priorities for Improvement research. Also much of the evidence is conflated with other changes, e.g. in the example below my post asking the same question you’d need to disentangle the effects of increasing the number of journeys / adding a school time service and the hourly headway before you could begin to answer the question.

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    2. Is there actually any evidence that a regular 60 minute headway would attract more traffic than a 70 minute one, especially if the former is achieved at the basis of compromised timekeeping?

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      1. Yes, though I can’t reveal the location. Indeed the route was similar to the 615, in that we dropped the schooltime journeys so that it didn’t cost a peak vehicle. We’ve seen around 15% growth since the restoration of the hourly headway. And it was achieved by linking the working to another hourly service that only takes 40 minutes for a round trip.

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  11. A service with a very low frequency is bever going to attract many passengers,. All it will really get are the occasional shopper

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  12. It is good to have timetable leaflet produced. But just so plain in b & w for the timetable and display, does it make any commercial sense as a product to be attractive?

    KS

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    1. Bee Network corporate colours are yellow, black and battleship grey. Short of printing on yellow paper, I’m not sure there’s much else that could be achieved?

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    2. The design of these timetable leaflets basically dates back to GM PTE days – 1980 at least, which must be something of a record!

      AHS

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  13. Historically, I think that the 615 was originally Bolton to Ladybridge ( a fairly modern suburban estate out west) circular, then was extended to Wigan.

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    1. I think the 615 (originally the 15) was a joint route between Wigan Corporation and Selnec (and so possibly Bolton Corporation before that). It ran from Wigan to Bolton via Aspull, Wingates and Ladybridge Estat. The 6xx numbering means it was a former Wigan Corporation route. If I remember correctly there was also a 515 route which just went from Bolton to Ladybridge (5xx = former Bolton Corporation rout). The former Lancashire United route also tended to get renumbered into the 5xx and 6xx series, depending where they ran near. Leigh Corporation route also got numbered into the high 5xx numbers.

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      1. The 615 has existed in various guises over the years including Wigan – Aspull / Wigan – Horwich / Wigan – Leigh.

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  14. Clockface timetable can work with high frequency service but in the rural low frequency areas in general they do not work, In many cases the service have to vary to fit around school and collage hours

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  16. Interesting that the route is operated by Go North West and in the light of Mayor Burnham’s earlier assertions that franchising is a ‘partnership’ with operators.

    For those readers of Roger’s excellent blog who may have missed this video, Nigel Featham, Managing Director, Go North East & North West, discusses the challenges and successes of operating as a major franchise winner in Manchester’s Bee Network…

    Franchising in the Real World – Nigel Featham [Key Buses, 27th September 2024]

    (The page also includes links to two other important perspectives on franchising.)

    Different challenges, but same energy, organisation and attention to detail as when Go South Coast reacted swiftly and effectively to the collapse of Yellow Buses in Bournemouth, Poole & Christchurch and, with more time to plan, the withdrawal of First from Southampton.

    One wonders if the initiative for route 615 came from TfGM or GoAhead?

    (Apologies if this comment appears multiple times; there were interface/Wordpress issues.)

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  17. Not sure if the timetable was online when you first posed this yesterday, but it is now: https://assets.ctfassets.net/nv7y93idf4jq/4FQcE8lPY6WJzUHbNDYMWi/266aecb30d8f9072ac24691d00ce9c9f/615_24-SC-0494.pdf Compared to the Transport for London website, the TfGM website is imo much better designed, and easier to navigate, even if the route timetable PDFs are not where you’d think they’d be. Not sure why I can’t load it on Bustimes.org or BODS though, probably down to either TfGM or GNW?

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  18. Merseytravel website is one of the easiest sites to navigate & they list all the routes in the Liverpool City Region, most have PDF timetables as well as having a route search function, the Merseytravel bus maps however are horrific they don’t have the tendered services, like the 204 on them.

    SM

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    1. In general I find the GoAhead Web sites are easiest to use, finding timetables is simple unlike most. Many seem to make finding information as difficult as possible

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  19. Shows how pathetic the public transport provision outside the capital is that even in Manchester people are celebrating and applauding the introduction of a service that runs a maximum of 11 times in a day and not on Sundays.

    MKIan

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    1. This simply reflects the fact that there are not so many people in Greater Manchester as in London. London has three times the population and, more importantly, two and a half times the population of Greater Manchester. So there is no way GM can have the same level of bus service overall, although some major routes, e.g. 192, do have “London-style” frequencies.

      AHS

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      1. Granted but 11 times a day is nowhere near proportionate to the service level that would be provided in London.

        Of course here in Milton Keynes we would be grateful for any buses at all in some areas. We must have the worst service of any UK city of a similar size.

        MKIan

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        1. Here here as a Woburn Sands resident who had a bus every 30 minutes when we moved here 12 years ago. Now we have 4 buses per week!

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  20. A quick glance at Bustimes.org reveals the bus operating the 615 is the 947 school bus hence the gaps in service on Mondays to Fridays.

    BusTimes shows data for 615 journeys that have yet to be uploaded but can’t be clicked on. This is last Fridays.

    https://bustimes.org/vehicles/gonw-gonw-3107?date=2024-11-01

    There are other instances of “missing routes” on Bustimes which can usually worked out by trawling fleet numbers.

    Looking at back data for Go Ahead North West vehicles the 947 morning school bus on occasions operated 948 school bus in afternoon then providing resilience to route 607. It’s good to see sensible interworking remains in the franchised environment.

    If you want to contact TfGM use this link https://tfgm.com/help-and-contact-us/contact-form

    You can attach supporting evidence. When I contacted TfGM I immediately received a reference number followed by a timely response.

    John Nicholas

    Like

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