It’s funny how people seem at best to have a grudging acceptance of their bus service. Even when that service’s actually very good, they can’t bring themselves to say so, in public.
I was speaking to a woman from Bristol today (that fact in itself was rather strange but there you go). She’d been forced from her car owing to a crash. She was using the bus.
Said she, referring to the bus service operated by First, “It’s not bad”. I felt this was undervaluing First’s service. So I dug a little deeper. How far did she have to walk to a stop? About three or four minutes. How frequent was the bus? Often there was one within a couple of minutes wait. Was the bus punctual? Yes, so far as she could tell—at her inbound stop, at least. It might get delayed further in. Was there a shelter? Yes. Did it have real time? No.
Were there usually seats available on board? Always going into town. Even though going home was sometimes full, she never needed to stand. Were the drivers friendly? They were OK, polite. Was the bus clean? Always in the morning but a few items of litter in the afternoon.
I told her that it sounded to me that her service was a little better than “not bad”.
“Well, yeee-ssss” came the grudging response, I suppose so. “It’s a bit expensive, though”. It turned out to be £4. I wasn’t sure whether this was a single or a return. In Bristol, First has certainly been accused of costly fares, some of which are a throwback to the notoriously high fares charged all the way back by antecedent Bristol Omnibus Company.
I wondered how much it cost to park her car in Bristol. She sometimes managed to get a space at work but otherwise it was £8 a day, apparently. £8! QED said I. I estimated that the cost of a week’s travel ticket would be no more than two day’s parking and that’s without any petrol or diesel (or hassle, come to that).
The package as an alternative to the car seemed far better that “not bad”. Why can’t people work this out for themselves?
Wednesday, 4 March 2009
Better than Acceptable
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7 comments:
because, as kiwk fit famously siad - it's not about satisfaction - it's about delight. nothing in that service dleighted her - now if the driver had been 'nice' not just polite and if the bus was particularly well designed/clean etc maybe she would have had other comments to make - and tell her friends too!
I find travelling on buses a delightful experience.
But then maybe that's because I'm an enthusiast.
But that aspect aside, I do feel that bus design has made vast progress compared to the boring boxes of say the 1980s. Liveries maybe, have in contrast got a bit silly. Customer focus and quality of information, however, have definitely improved by light years since then.
Things can always get better, but there is too much focus on the negative. A lot has been acheived.
I'm currently feeling uncharitable towards (some) bus operators after the worst journey I've experienced in a long time. Correction: worst wait.
Sister company to First Bristol. Bus runs every 30 mins (was every 15 mins 10 years back but that is another story). Two in a row don't turn up (17:50, 18:20) so I get another operator's bus which doesn't go so near my home, or the rest of the village, but is much cheaper, more reliable (never known one of their buses to be more than 10 mins late and I use them daily) but less frequent (hourly). Funnily enough they have a better reputation in my village.
We were overtaken by the First bus, number displayed on a piece of paper. Just the right way to alienate customers (funnily enough it appeared to be near-empty).
This negative experience not only outweighed the excellent service run by the independent but also all previous good experiences with First. That is why there is a poor perception - one let down = all buses are rubbish.
Had the service provided been under a nationalised operation, then her response, I'd infer, would have been different.
I suspect that the first anonymous contributor makes a valid point about 'delight' - in the sense that there was nothing that the woman found exceptionally good about the service.
Psychologically, you also probably need to allow for the fact that she was only using the bus because she could not use the car - in other words, bus was already second choice, and now the preferred choice was denied to her. Her attitude would no doubt already have been negative, given the combination of circumstances - so the bus service was probably going to have to be perfect to earn real praise from her.
Here in the South East of Cornwall it is much the same story about First Devon and Cornwall. Though when passengers take a trip with A-Line Travel then there reaction is much the oposite. Many many people who use A-Line's service comment to the driver on how briliant the service is. The combination seems to be with the much much cheaper fares, the very nice drivers, the services themselves and the punctuality the company has in keeping the buses in good order and most importantly on time! A-Line is quite a model example on how a service should be run and many of the smaller companies are like this. Though people always do seem to have a much greater oposition to the bigger bus companies.
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