A few weeks ago I wrote about concessionary passes and the burden they place on Local Authorities. Ever since then I’ve been stewing on the injustice of these passes. Every weekday we pick up commuters destined for the rail station and the commute to London where they probably earn +/-GBP90,000 per annum but because they’ll only be working for another 5 years (and earning GBP450,000 in this time) they travel free of charge! On the same bus there can be unemployed school leavers who are travelling to a job interview but they’ve got to pay full fare. How can that be fair?

The route I normally drive from Winchester to Salisbury is one that no bus company would run as a commercial service because the cost of operation would outweigh passenger revenue, hence it is subsidised by the County Council. Today, on one trip, I had 26 passengers onboard and every single one was travelling on a concessionary pass! So the County Council are paying Stagecoach to run the service and then paying more for every passenger on the bus!! It would cost Council Tax payers less if the Council only paid the subsidy to Stagecoach and told them to run the bus run empty!!

I had a chuckle to myself yesterday when a concessionary pass holder boarded in Winchester and I told them that Winchester passes only allowed free travel after 09:00. “What choices do I have?” asked the intending passenger. “You can either pay the 80 pence fare for the journey from the rail station to the hospital or wait for a bus after 09:00”. “I’ll wait” was the response without any hint of a Scot’s accent :-)

I decided that my wife and I would have a day out in London on Tuesday 29th September traveling on the Southampton to London service. I put the date into the Greyhound booking site and entered the number of passengers as 2. The 07:10 from Southampton was offered at GBP6.40 for two seats i.e. GBP3.20 per person.

I don’t know why I tried it before booking but I then put in only 1 passenger and it came up with GBP1.00 for 1 person! This got me curious so I tried several passenger numbers.

Three passengers totaled GBP11.80 i.e. GBP3.93 per person.

Four passengers totaled GBP17.20 i.e. GBP4.30 each.

Five passengers totaled GBP26.20 i.e. GBP5.24 each.

I therefore made two separate bookings (same e-mail address, credit card etc.) for this journey at GBP1.00 each which presented no problems.

A regular commentator here, Dennis Dash, took the Greyhound to London yesterday. Here are his initial impressions of Greyhound.

I travelled on the 0910 from Southampton this morning on 23315 Sweet Caroline – on time from all stops in Southampton then a good smooth run with driver Paul via the M3, joining the M25 at 1030, then via the M4 bus lane and Hyde Park Corner to arrive 4 minutes late at 1133. There were about 8 passengers on this trip. I think Earls Court would have been quicker, but you never know for sure do you.
 
I had booked on the 1930 return tonight, but on seeing the weather forecast last night took the opportunity to check fares on earlier departures – the 1730 was a bit pricey so booked on the 1530 for £1, in case London was wet and miserable. Sure enough, as soon as we arrived at Bulleid Way this morning, the heavens opened, so after a trip to the Ian Allan bookshop and two Routemaster rides (East London RM 324 and First ‘SRM 3’) I returned to Victoria for the 1530. The surprise here was the 1445 Portsmouth departure – an 8 seater Ford Transit Taxibus with a Portsmouth phone number emblazoned on it. Not quite what the 7 passengers expected, but I suppose they had probably only paid £1 each, like me.
 
My 1530 Southampton departure was on 23319 Sherry, with 12 passengers and two drivers, Debbie being at the wheel. She started professionally with her announcements,
but soon got herself very tongue tied and declared herself a dippy brunette !
 
The route was the reverse of the morning – exit from London was good as after a 1533 departure we passed the Natural History museum at 1543 and Hogarth roundabout at
1555. The M25 was a bit congested but the M3 was reached by 1630. However, time was lost after that with traffic on the M3 past Winchester and in The Avenue, resulting in a 15 minute late arrival in Southampton.
 
Overall a good experience – I have already booked two more round trips (including a Portsmouth), and found the leg room and comfort on board to be excellent. The leather
seats with 3-point seatbelts are nice, there are curtains and power points for laptops as well as wi-fi. The free newspaper was the Southern Daily Echo going up and The Evening Standard coming home – The Standard included a double page write up of a trip on Greyhound yesterday whilst The Echo also mentioned yesterday’s launch on the business pages.

After writing this Dennis Dash followed up with:-

We now know that breakdowns are dealt with by First Rail Support, who are based in Lancashire but have a huge database of taxi and coach operators from all over the country, hence why the 8 seat Transit appeared.

Apparently the 0910 from Southampton broke down on the M3 today whilst Alex Warner was on board being interviewed by Peter White for Radio 4 !!!

The breakdown he refers to is covered here. Seems like it ran out of fuel!!!

This is the BBC South report on the inaugral Greyhound Southampton to London service.

And this from the Daily Echo website.

Britain by Bus is a blog which sadly passed my notice at the time. It records a six day odyssey from Thurso to Brighton by the humble service bus. The ‘humble’ service buses in this case all being Stagecoach buses. Postings may now have finished but it’s a very interesting record of the trip.

PS Bus spotters must make sure they page down to the bottom of the the homepage. There’s a listing of every bus he took by Fleet number together with links to a photo of the bus.

I’ve been meaning to mention Greyhound’s arrival in the UK for some time now. First Bus own Greyhound buses in the US and are introducing the brand into the UK starting with the Portsmouth and Southampton to London routes. And at virtually the same time Megabus are abandoning the routes! Not that Megabus would have been any threat to Greyhound anymore than they were to National Express. Megabus started these routes promisingly with 3 trips per day in each direction. Although relatively infrequent the service was heavily booked and despite running double-decker buses, each with a capacity of around 90 passengers, duplicate buses had to run quite frequently. Then Megabus cut this back to 1 bus per day in each direction. Passenger numbers fell dramatically but at least the one up and one back each day were timed to allow a day trip to London. However, further ‘tinkering’ with the timetable ended up with a day trip only giving you from 12:40 until 16:00 in London – pretty useless. Now the last Megabus run to London from the South coast is on Sunday 4 October. The problem with Megabus has always been Megatrain! It seems that Megatrain is the preferred operation of Stagecoach PLC and that Megabus is restrained from competing with Megatrain where the routes clash. Megatrain offer cheap TRAIN fares, that’s for certain. But a cheap train fare is much more expensive than a COACH fare! For example a return to London from Southampton is GBP22.00 with Megatrain on 14 September, whilst National Express is GBP8.00 using the same departure times. As I observe it Megatrain pick up those travellers who are looking for budget rail fares whilst those who wont pay Megatrain prices use National Express because there has been no viable Megabus alternative. It’s this illogical type of management decision which has made me purchase shares in First Group rather than the company I work for :-(

Greyhound, however, seem to be entering the market in a much more positive way with the service to London being run hourly in each direction. They’ve certainly provoked a response from National Express! My bet is that they’re going to be very successful. This is based on the premise that unless you want to get to Heathrow Airport the Greyhound bus will be much quicker. Quicker because it’s not having to go into the airport to drop off and pickup but even more importantly when the top of the M3, M25 or M4 snarls up the options into Central London are numerous compared with being forced to Heathrow first. For example it only adds about 20-25 minutes to the Southampton – Victoria journey time by missing the M3, M25, M4 totally and going via Guildford and then in on the A3 and into London from the South over Vauxhall Bridge. If the M3 is OK but the problem is on the M25 or M4 then just take the A316 from the end of the M3. Lots and lots of alternatives not open to a coach which must call at Heathrow before going into London.

The only problem I see for Greyhound at the moment is how potential travelers will find the site and be able to book. Do a Google using terms such as “book a Greyhound coach to London” brings up 217,000 results but www.greyhounduk.com doesn’t even make in the first 5 pages. National Express comes in on page 1 in 4th place for this search! I found www.greyhounduk by going to www.firstgroup.com and finding the link there. I don’t think many potential bookers will think of going to the First Group site in order to get a booking link. Either the Press Releases Greyhound sent out omitted the website address or those writing about the service all chose to omit the web site URL :-(