Between 20-23 August, unless you inhabited a windowless & sound proofed cellar, anyone living in Poole-Bournemouth can’t have failed to notice England’s, nay Europe’s biggest free air festival.
The event’s major sponsor was Wilts & Dorset who, like last year, pushed its More Bus sub-brand. It’s perhaps a little curious that a bus company should again be the sponsor of seemingly the most unsustainable festival ever seen in the south. Added to which, many will be one-off visitors and the majority will still arrive by car (where they found a well executed though eclectic Go South Coast festival park & ride fleet).
Transdev Yellow Buses gets in on the act
And, Transdev Yellow Buses slightly spoiled the party by booking double deck duplicates largely on its 3s, over More Bus’ m1 Bournemouth-Castlepoints. TYB already operates double decks on the 1b/c from Poole to Bournemouth, alongside W&D’s m1 & m2 single decks (though there were W&D festival decker workings here, as elsewhere).
All this good publicity for W&D suddenly unravelled itself three days after the last aircraft had flown home and the last stalls had packed away. The Echo printed a negative story on the result of the July 2009 public inquiry when, on maintenance grounds, the traffic commissioner reduced the number of W&D’s discs from 330 to 300. As seems to be custom & practice these days, such a reduction will have no detrimental operational effect.
What it does is put W&D on the back foot, having to defend a slightly sticky position. The rather inelegant introduction to the article reads, “Safety on Wilts & Dorset buses has been put at risk by poor upkeep of the vehicles, it has been claimed.” Not at all helpful.
W&D vehicles attracted 27 prohibitions in five years. Serious, but there was no balance. We were left wondering:
- Whether the prohibitions were delayed, immediate or ‘S’-marked (not that the public know or care);
- How many vehicles were checked;
- Whether the prohibitions they were found on the road or in a garage [it was the latter];
- What systems W&D has in place to go forward;
- Why the Echo failed to mention the significant new vehicles investment over the same period.
What damage done? On the one hand, people may associate the success of the air festival with More Bus. On the other, the detail of the public inquiry story will soon be forgotten but the gist may remain lurking somewhere at the back of passengers’ minds. Passengers may yet recall that W&D’s been before the commissioner before, albeit for traffic rather than engineering issues. But will this all reinforce negative rather than positive perceptions?
6 comments:
It may well be a hangover from the previous Engineering Director- as the current one has been in post some two years. Salisbury in particular went through some vehicle availability issues at that time.
Maybe the faults were confined to the Optare Spectra fleet which is being withdrawn- aside from structural concerns that may be a be a contributing factor.
It's good that Salisbury has retained some contract work though. Wilts could maybe try harder with their northern operation, unless they identified the growth market in 2006 and went for that-surely there's 'more' commercially they can do there?
It doesn't help that the Echo are seriously biased against W&D, and seemingly do their best to print as much negative press as possible while TYB get away with it.
I suppose you have to ask, why does TYB “get away with it”? TYB has its share of Echo bad press—the bus industry’s always fair game—but TYB manages this process well.
I feel that W&D has its engineering issues well behind it now. Salisbury doesn’t do so bad when it comes to marketing investment. Witness X3 and Pulseline.
Go South Coast engineering has been an issue since the group was formed - there was and to an extent still is an issue in Salisbury that any vehicles from BlueStar or Vectis cannot be as good as the native fleet, with the result that imported vehicles just get parked up and ignored - witness the many smartly repainted all Leyland Oly's which were quickly cast aside whilst native Spectra's which have never seen a paintshop since new continue to present a down at heel image.
The latest example is MPD 300 - sent from the island as a forerunner of more to follow but quickly abandoned as unfit for use.
Apparently there is a plan for replacing hard worked native step Spectras with similar aged but lower mileage Olympians from the Isle of Wight, but it seems to be awfully slow in its implementation
From my understanding the actual issue was not the actual maintenance of the vehicles so much, but more that the company was failing to keep its own laid down procedures operating correctly - particularly with respect to the driver defect reporting system and specifically the driver first use check. A VOSA check at Salisbury found a significant number of vehicles leaving the garage first thing in the morning where vehicles had defects that the drivers simply had not bothered to report, let alone get fixed which then led to a wider check generally, including staff at Salisbury for sure (and possibly the whole company but I cannot confirm that) undergoing retraining in the procedures to ensure they were doing their checks properly.
Yes, a lot of this was down to procedures and systems. But then again, it usually is...
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