Catching up on DRT

Saturday 4th January 2025

There are quite a few recent developments on the DRT front to catch up on so here’s an update to keep blog readers informed.

ting begets TIGER

As reported in my year end review, at the end of November the West Huntingdonshire based scheme funded by Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority known as Ting was reborn as Tiger on Demand. It will be one of a number of DRT schemes across the Authority (others are being planned for Fenland, East Cambridgshire, as well as two in South Cambridgshire) so has been given a route number of T1.

Ting began in October 2021 with Stagecoach operating it for the first year using standard Optare Solos…

… after which Vectare took over for two years using smaller vehicles…

… but now the new look Tiger uses smart new Ilesbus 31 seat (29 with a wheelchair) minibuses operated jointly by A2B and Dews Coaches with the call centre and coordination provided by the expanding WeMove and an app from a company called Spare.

I took a ride from St Neots over to Cambourne, following in the footsteps of Mayor and DRT enthusiast, Dr Nik Johnson, who also travelled that journey to test out the service first hand last month.

It’s a straightforward ride, mostly along the A428, and which could also be done by a Whippet’s route 18. It’ll be interesting to see future Tiger developments in the months to come as the four new schemes are introduced.

LinkUp begins in Lichfield

Next up in Lichfield, an unusual development sees the District Council using some of its allotted £3,285,310 through the last Government’s UK Shared Prosperity Fund to provide a six months “pilot scheme to connect residents in rural towns and villages across the locality with urban centres in Burntwood and Lichfield through an on-demand minibus service”. The objectives go on to state “residents will be able to pre-book journeys from rural areas into population centres or to connect with current bus/train services”.

Journeys can only be booked from one of the highlighted ‘virtual’ bus stops in the listed villages to and from either Lichfield…

… or Burntwood so as not to abstract from traditional bus routes serving the area.

The contract was awarded to WeDRT (aka WeMove) with the actual minibus operation subcontracted to Diamond Bus East Midlands. Two pink coloured Mercedes Sprinters provide the Monday to Saturday facility between 09:00 and 17:00 (extended to 19:00 on ThFS).

There’s a £3 flat fare with free travel for children (but only aged 11 and under, which seems quite young for an upper limit) and concessionary passholders, although there was no check when I boarded and I was specifically told not to place my pass on the ticket machine with the assumption I didn’t need to show it as I’d declared I had one when I booked.

Passengers can book journeys up to seven days in advance so on Christmas Eve (Tuesday of last week) I booked a ride for Monday of this week (30th).

The service only got going in mid December so with low awareness, it was easy to book a ride at the time I wanted. But annoyingly despite one of the objectives being to be able to “connect with current bus/train services” the software wouldn’t let me book a pick up at Lichfield Trent Valley railway station but instead insisted I walk the mile into the city centre and be picked up in the bus station. I tried various destinations but each time it insisted on a 26-29 minute walk into the city.

This doesn’t exactly encourage “integrated transport” and restricts users from villages to use Lichfield City station (which is closer to the bus station) rather than Lichfield Trent Valley with its direct trains to London. With a train arrival at 12:17 I asked for a pick up from 12:50 to allow for any late running and enough time to complete the mile long walk. In the end I booked a relatively short ride to the village of Wigginton – the closest village to Tamworth from where I planned to walk another mile into that town for onward travel.

All looked good as I waited on the platform at my home station of Hassocks in Sussex on Monday morning except when I checked the latest information on the LinkUp app it showed my pick up time as 12:30 from the bus station and an assumption I’d leave Lichfield Trent Valley railway station at 12:00 – 17 minutes before my train was due to arrive.

This is the trouble with DRT and the ridiculous claim it makes for “seamless integrated travel”. It’s complete nonsense and just shows those that peddle such claims never use the service they purport as being the magical solution to “the rural transport problem”.

I couldn’t risk getting to the bus station in 13 minutes even if taking a taxi, assuming one would be available, so tried to book another journey at a later time but the software wouldn’t let me so I had no option but to cancel my booking and try again.

Luckily demand is obviously still very low so the software enabled me to book again with my desired time of 12:50 (including a walking time that had increased to 33 minutes) – don’t you just love DRT?

The train journey went well and as I was walking into the city centre I saw a LinkUp branded minibus pass me heading towards the station with a passenger on board and guessed that would be my bus after that drop off so annoyingly it was travelling past the very station it wouldn’t pick me up from.

At 12:50 a LinkUp liveried minibus arrived into the bus station and I asked the driver if he was expecting me only to be told he was on his break so he assumed “the other minibus will be arriving soon”.

Sure enough the app was showing my bus on its way (coming past the railways station I’d walked from) and pulled into the bus station at 13:00.

It was the driver’s first day on the service and his mentor alighted from the bus when it arrived and wished him good luck. We headed off towards Wigginton, obviously with with just me on board, and an interesting 20 minute ride including a slight detour when the driver misread his satnav and took a wrong turning.

We travelled around the northern edge of Tamworth so rather than continuing north to Wigginton I asked the driver to drop me on the edge of the town rather than continue on to the village and thereby save some walking time. He was reluctant at first saying there was no safe place to stop, but then kindly agreed to do so and then continued on to Wigginton without me.

It’s a nice idea to try and provide a bus exclusively for village residents currently poorly served by bus, or in most cases not at all. But to do it for just six months is not going to prove anything other than a waste of public money from the UK Shared Prosperity Fund which was all part of the previous Government’s ‘levelling up’ agenda. The problem is, people living in rural areas without public transport must have long established independent means of travel and are not going to readily give them up for a minibus that’s only running on a temporary basis, and won’t take them to and from the railway station anyway.

Quite why councillors at Lichfield District feel the need to give this a try when others have had a go and failed miserably (eg in Cheshire East where the Council’s ‘go-too’ branded scheme serving a similar rural area carrying an average of 1.3 passengers per journey is coming to an end in the Spring as reported in my last DRT update) is a complete mystery.

The six-months pilot will simply prove it costs a fortune to provide a DRT service in a rural area for around one passenger per hour giving a ridiculously low cost-benefit ratio.

Other DRT news

In other DRT news ….. while Arriva’s Click scheme in Ebbsfleet came to an end on New Years Eve due to passenger numbers “sadly not at the level needed to ensure it can be cost-effective for us as a business” being replaced, for now, by a new fixed bus route operated by Go-Coach Hire (see next Tuesday’s blog), enthusiasm for DRT among local authority officers and their consultants is alive and well with another new scheme starting on Monday in Leicestershire with neighbouring Rutland committed to replacing all the county’s subsidised bus routes over to DRT operation (except the R1) on a phased basis during 2025 so expect more blog reports from those areas in the coming weeks.

In Hertfordshire the original HertsLynx scheme operated by Uno is being brought in house (as the other schemes have always been) but for reasons I’m struggling to work out this means that “there will be a temporary reduction in service availability ….. throughout January 2025” Apparently this enables “a smooth transition” and “seamless operations” as well as “maintain high standards”. Even more drastic there will be no service at all for three days between Friday 31st January and Sunday 2nd February – so if you’ve become dependent on HertsLynx and need to travel on those days – tough.

Finally it’s interesting to see Milton Keynes Council is in the process of re-tendering its MK Connect branded scheme with the aim of issuing a new contract from April. The current scheme introduced in April 2021 is operated with taxi style vehicles by Via but crucial to the new contract is the Council’s decision to cut and limit the funding. Whereas the original contract model has seen the Council specify DRT performance indicators (eg maximum wait time between booking and arrival) with tendering operators asked to submit a price thereby taking the risk of having to source more vehicles if demand increased so the performance indicators were met, the new model for 2025 sees the Council specify an annual budget (which is fixed for two years with a year’s extension possible), and the tendering operators must compete on service design and performance indicators using that budget with the operator keeping fares revenue.

Pertinently the annual subsidy is reducing from £2.4 million to £1.8 million and even more interesting is the revelation that out of that original £2.4 million, £2 million was section 106 funding. The Council acknowledges there is “limited section 106 funding going forward and the new contract will need to take this into consideration”. It’s also interesting to see the Council’s Executive Report trumpet the fact MK Connect “has grown into a successful on demand service during its operation from 273,178 trips per year initially, to a projected 500,000 trips for 2024/25”. But elsewhere it also states “in 2019 8,763,000 single trips (one way) were completed on the bus network, of which 1,223,422 were on the supported bus network”. It’s my understanding MK Connect replaced the supported bus network (in 2021) which means the number of annual trips has reduced by almost one million per year.

The joy of DRT funding and operation.

Roger French

Blogging timetable: TThS.