Cheshire East Local transport engagement

[knutstransport]

RE: Cheshire East Local transport engagement

(25/11/2020 12:44)iMarkeh Wrote:  Quite often, people calling for these sorts of integration are people on free passes. They complain because it makes it harder to get to places and because by and large, they become 'entitled' and believe they deserve a bus to run where and when they want it and they don't want to change buses.

There are pensioners in Holmes Chapel who bemoan the lack of a bus to Knutsford, which there hasn't been since Tomlinson Travel stopped running the 47 Holmes Chapel to Warrington a number of years back. At the time it was withdrawn the council said it was possible to get between Holmes Chapel and Knutsford with one change at Chelford (at that time the 27 bus was hourly) and if you didn't want to risk a missed connection in Chelford you could do the longer journey via Wilmslow (at the time the 88 bus was half-hourly.) Obviously that's a journey harder to make by public transport now, so it may put people off making it unless they absolutely have to make it but then if they do have to make it then they have to use a combination of bus+train or make a very long, indirect and expensive train journey.

Quote:if 5% of passengers use the bus, the laws of scale show that Wilmslow will have a lot more passengers interchanging onto the bus than Handforth for example

I doubt it's that simple.

For instance, Mobberley village is a long walk from Mobberley station and the two points aren't connected, so that may mean some people from Mobberley travel to Wilmslow for the train. However, Mobberley is also an affluent village so those passengers may prefer to go by car or taxi, opposed to the bus. I doubt someone from Chelford would get a bus to Macclesfield to get a train to Manchester because Chelford station isn't a long walk from the village. For other villages there is no station, not even a long walk away.

Wilmslow and Macclesfield both have Intercity trains, maybe that results in more bus journeys to those stations or maybe it results in less, as perhaps long distance passengers are more likely to be business travellers who can put a taxi or car parking on expenses unless there's a bus every 5 minutes.

Also, Wilmslow didn't have a local bus service in the evenings even before the bus cuts, while Knutsford did. Perhaps if people feel less comfortable walking home from the station late at night they are more likely to use a bus.

You could also compare level of rail usage at Knutsford, Poynton and Buxton and see that for similar sized towns the level of rail usage can be vastly different.

Quote:For councils, they feel it makes buses look more attractive but they don't understand the cost or operational implications which come with it. For example, buses sat around waiting for trains means a less frequent service so people who want to travel locally or connect between buses are disadvantaged as the buses are less frequent so those very few which do connect between modes, can do so.

Buses sitting around waiting - see any timetable for a D&G Bus service for an example of that. D&G will timetable a bus to take 15 minutes to get from A to B if it takes 8-12, depending on traffic conditions, for longer routes that can mean a bus taking 65 minutes for a journey possible in 55. That means either there's long layovers, inter-working (which can mean an accident on one route can affect punctuality on multiple routes) or a reduced frequency e.g. a service every 90 minutes instead of one every 60.