… but there are in parts of Nottingham. Not for the first time, there comes news of the commercialisation of a flagship airport bus service. That news is that Trent Barton is commercialising the soar-away Skylink service currently operating by Nottingham City Transport. With it comes the inevitable reaction from passengers who, from 25th March, will miss out.
Skylink will no longer operate direct along the A453 between Nottingham & East Midlands airport, a route designed to offer an attractively fast service between the two. In order to ensure its commercial sustainability, henceforth Trent Barton will operate not via Clifton centre, as does NCT, but on a slightly less advantageous route via Beeston and Long Eaton. This adds between 10 and 15 minutes to the journey (depending upon time of day).
The main problem, however, will be that it will place a number of passengers in detriment: those who live on the current route who work at East Midlands airport, in particular. But, to compensate, there will be new journey opportunities along Skylink’s amended route, one that sees a higher population density.
Passengers have not been backward at coming forward in blaming NCT for the change, even though it’s nothing to do with the current operator. They heap scorn on to NCT on its Facebook page. Ah, the joys of social media.
What passengers haven’t yet realised is that the new commercially sustainable Long Eaton route will bring Trent Barton into more competition with its rival Premiere. New Skylink will operate over the existing Premier Red 5 road, which also sees up to nine Trent Barton Indigo buses an hour. It can’t be long before disadvantaged airport users draw the conclusion that deregulation isn’t working for them: why is their bus being withdrawn when there are already at least 12 buses an hour on the proposed new Skylink route? Doesn’t seem fair, they will argue.
Yes, but. What this change means is that there’s no longer any need for public subsidy. That can’t be a bad thing, surely, in the current climate, especially for a 24-hour route. Currently, in spite of strong air-related growth on the route, Nottingham council supports the service. Passengers will now need to exchange time and in Clifton’s case an inward journey to the city centre first for this public saving. This will seem like a fair trade for all but those who currently live in Clifton. Not that Clifton is particularly short of buses to Nottingham.
The service is safeguarded at 30-minute intervals for much of the day and hourly for the remainder of the 24 hour period. There’ll be no reduction in frequency. Outgoing NCT goes to great lengths on its website to explain the situation and it has to be commended for that. Not that everyone seems to have read let alone understood it.
Skylink started in 2004 as a dedicated airport express bus service. It has benefited from £2.4mil in investment and from air-related passenger growth. Now, it seems, these nursery grants have paid off.
As for usage, there are various conflicting statistics being bandied about. NCT states over half a million p.a. Presumably quoting press releases, the local newspaper quoted nearly 100,000 or 113,000 in 2004; 700,000 in 2006; 540,000 in 2008; either 553,000 or 1.3mil in 2009; 492,000 in 2010; 1.15mil from April 2007 to March 2008; 1.3mil from April 2008 to March 2009; and a total of 1.9mil passengers in the five years from 2004 to April 2009. Take your pick.
It would seem that Trent Barton is taking over the world. Trent Barton’s holding company Wellglade is part of a consortium that later this year will usurp the current tram consortium that includes NCT. This will be for a 23-year concession. Meanwhile, last month, the government announced the release of funding for Nottingham tram line 2. This will see a Wellglade-operated tram into NCT heartlands at Clifton and eventually Beeston. No tears at Trent Barton? Other than tears of joy, that is.
Monday, 16 January 2012
No Tears at Trent…
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22 comments:
Perhaps Premiere will take up the original NCT route.
I'm surprised you couldn't justify both routes.
I'm wondering if the nightbus part of Indigo will be affected. Is there demand for an hourly indigo and an hourly Skylink at night between Nottingham, Long Eaton and East Midlands Airport?
indigo will no longer serve the Airport, however skylink will run to Loughborough every hour, also serving Kegworth, Sutton Bonington and Hathern. Pegasus Business Park will also be served on demand in the alternating half hour.
I expect this means Indigo will be hourly in the early hours just to Long Eaton?
Surely Wellglade has already taken on the tram concession ?
Wellglade now runs the tram.
From my experience of skylink it picks up very few passengers to or from the airport after leaving the station. The biggest loosers are thelarge number of people who arrive ordepart by train who now have towalk to Broadmarsh bus station having to cross a main road instead of beingpickedupoutside.
"But, to compensate, there will be new journey opportunities along Skylink’s amended route" - this statement is untrue - the new Skylink route replaces the current Indigo service along the same route but will now run as limited stop between Nottingham and Long Eaton so passengers like me who used to board Indigo for the airport at stops no longer served loose a direct link and so are disadvantaged along with many others that used Canning Circus as an interchange for the airprt bound Indigo. I will now need to change buses at QMC.
The good thing about the old skylink route was it's flexibility allowing it to divert around notorious congestion hotspots. The new route will not be able to do this so will be less reliable.
There are now more details available on the Airport website at http://www.eastmidlandsairport.com/emaweb.nsf/Content/NottinghamSkylinkChanges . This includes the comment "The new route will avoid the A453, which is likely to be adversely affected by congestion for around three years during the much anticipated widening scheme."
As far as I can gather from various websites, during daytime the revised Barton service between Nottingham and Long Eaton will be, per hour, the existing 9 Indigo plus 2 limited-stop Skylink. There is currently one Indigo to Loughborough via the Airport, which will terminate somewhere in Long Eaton. Skylink will run all stops from Long Eaton, with one journey taking over the existing Loughborough service, the other being a short working to the Airport. It's not yet clear to me what will happen on Sundays or for the rest of the 24 hour service.
Regarding passenger numbers - I've some Airport figures on these, but only in hard copy, so I can't link to them. East Midlands Airport has seen a reduction in passenger traffic from a peak in 2007-08. It has dropped more, proportionally, in winter than in summer. Usage of the Nottingham Skylink service has closely paralleled this. The "rolling annual passengers" graph for the bus service shows a peak of just under 600,000 in autumn 2008, a minimum of just under 500,000 in mid 2010, and a slight growth to June 2011. I don't think (most) fares have changed in that period, so revenue has dropped at a time of increasing costs.
No great surprise. Only a very small proportion of the total 500k or so annual passengers were actually going to and from the airport. The vast majority looked like they just abstracted from NCT's commercial network from Clifton to Nottingham, on a "first available bus that came along" principle . And it took a huge amount of public £ support to do so.
TB now gets an excuse to run against Premiere's Red 5 even more.
Anonymous @ 17:51, as an ex NCT driver who occassionally worked on Skylink I have to disagree with you, very few passengers used the service to travel between Nottingham and Clifton as it doesn't actually go through the estate.
Not surprised that you mentioned Facebook.
Many of the people seemed to blame NCT rather than the council which has recently been stupid with their decisions in the transport network.
As for Trent Barton, I feel they have snatched Skylink under NCTs noses and this is something that Trent Barton wouldn't do years ago... I care to think what Alex Hornby is thinking at the moment! The events seem to happen under his management.
I think what is most annoying people is that the large number of easyrider card holders will no longer be able to purchase the £1.50 add on ticket with Trent Barton
It's not clear to me in all this whether the local authority subsidy was under threat, or whether this is an initiative by Trent Barton. It will be a worse service for people travelling between Nottingham and East Midlands Airport as it will take about an extra 15 minutes. However, it appears that people in Sawley will get the benefit of an extra limited stop service to Nottingham via the more direct route used by Premiere Red 5.
Presumably, there will be fewer Indigo journeys out of Nottingham via Derby Road, because the journeys to Loughborough will no longer run, though I'm not 100% clear if this is the case, as these journeys might just run short. But it seems that Indigo will be slightly diminished.
I can't avoid the feeling that this is as much about Trent Barton striking back at Premiere's Red 5 as it is about improving the service. If this is unfair (which I'm willing to accept it might be), can I ask Alex Hornby to please explain the background for us? We know he reads this blog, and in many ways, it's an interesting development.
It's going to be an interesting situation. How indigo will be reorganised will be interesting in itself. But the latest twist in the saga is premieres latest Facebook announcement :-
" Some big changes coming up on the Nottingham skylink which means that people living along the current route will not have direct access to the airport. We have received several phone calls and emails asking if we are going to replace the current service.
The answer is we hope so, we have meetings with the airport and council to see if we can work together on a solution. We are currently hoping to provide an hourly coach service along the current route.
More news on Friday. "
Let's wait and see what Premiere will have to say.
One more thing, why oh why didn't the skylink run via the new East Mids Parkway Station. The station built for an airport without any public transport to link the airport! Yes that's right, buses whizz passed every half hour without calling! Unbelievable when this could of been an advantage to Clifton, Trent University & airport passengers alike.
Anonymous at 18.09. The point I was making was that Skylink was not primarily used as an Airport service. Only a small % of the journeys made were/are to/from the Airport. Part of the attraction though, was that the bus is properly kitted out for luggage etc, which I presume the new one won't be? (As it's a frequent stopping service?) TB aren't "stealing" it form NCT, they are using the "airport link" angle to strengthen a commercial corridor. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that it runs along the Red 5 route too.
As to why it didn't stop at the Parkway, I have no idea... A fair question.
One reason why the current Skylink doesn't call at E M Parkway is probably because the long tortuous entry, with two roundabouts, a string of road humps and a tight U-turn would, seriously, add about 10 minutes to the journey time.
Possibly for little benefit, as it always seems to me that, for all the trouble and cost of building the station, the number of stopping trains is relatively small.
East Midlands Parkway has undoubtedly turned out to be a bit of a disaster.
Would be better off linking the Midland Mainline to EMA using Loughborough station.
The only time East Midlands Parkway seems to have any passengers are when the megabusplus services from yorkshire are picking up and dropping of there passenger between the coach and train. This is not helped that both trains to London stop within about 5 minutes of each other
East Midlands Parkway used to have a 'raillink' service every half hour between the station and the Airport, run by small minibuses. It was withdrawn due to low usage, and replaced by a £5.75 taxi offer. However, I don't know whether it actually connected with the trains or not (wouldn't surprise me if not). I suppose not many people actually travel to East Midlands Airport from outside the region, much of which is served by skylink buses. The station is primarily served by trains from these same places or places that might look to Luton as their airport. You would never have used it in preference to skylink due to the significant extra cost and, if connections were poor, journey time. It is a bit daft on the face of it though, especially considering that the airport accessibility was mentioned as a plus point of building the new station.
I wouldn't be surprised if there is some truth of this being used to attack Premiere, although TB's previous attempt at a 'Long Eaton Xprss' during the day failed.
I am somewhat staggered by the attitude of the blogger though it isn't much out of step with the industry at large. Why should anyone, least of all the passengers, be happy about a significant increase in advertised journey time (which is already a bit pessimistic outside rush hours), just because it reduces public subsidy? There is no suggestion that the subsidy was resented or threatened. As you observe, current evidence suggests they aren't happy. All it will do is push people into cars which most people use anyway. The through-ticketing with NCT (with their wider network coverage) was far more useful to most people in the Nottingham area than that proposed for TB, which won't benefit airport passengers at all. The new route will only benefit a very small number of people living along it due to the limited stops, whilst taking away the airport service currently open to many more people along this corridor in the form of indigo.
Whatever Trent Barton's motivation here, it isn't helping airport bus passengers.
Also, it seems a bit silly to criticise passengers for not being familiar with the complex and arcane structure of the industry when they simply don't need to be. They know that, by and large, operators decide on everything and so its perfectly logical for them to assume that it's an NCT bus, it's their service. Perhaps these sorts of attitudes are linked with the industry's wider problems.
I have become aware of the news that the Skylink service in Nottingham, as we currently know it, is to stop. As a graduate who studied at Nottingham Trent's Clifton Campus, I can only see this news as negative.
The Skylink bus is/was an included service when students pay £300+ each academic year to use NCT bus services 24-hours a day. The Skylink acted as an alternative to the often heavily-congested UniLink 4 service that shared the same route from campus. I think that the withdrawal of the Skylink service will result in more UniLink 4 buses (and potentially other new services) having to run throughout the daytime from Nottingham to Clifton. The loss of the Skylink therefore may cost more money to the people of Nottingham in the long-run.
The Skylink provided a safe route home from nights out for students at an affordable cost. On the nights of Sunday - Thursday (the nights students commonly go out); the last bus from Nottingham centre in the direction of West Bridgford/Clifton was at just after midnight. That is, except for the Skylink, that ran every hour through the night. The Skylink bus was therefore usually busy at all times of the day. The retraction of the Skylink service means that thousands of students who live on Clifton Campus have no realistic means of getting home after midnight now, except for forking out on an expensive taxi journey on the existing Skylink route. This is not a feasible expectation and I am sure a night bus of some kind will be commissioned; at whose expense I can only guess.
On a potentially more serious note - many of the students/residents who live in West Bridgford, I predict, would prefer to save money and walk home after a night out from Nottingham instead of paying for a taxi - the only realistic alternative to the Skylink service after midnight. This is not a particularly long walk (30-45 minutes), however the common walking route does take the person through an area advised by some to avoid after nightfall. I am aware of incidents occurring on this particular walk and by stopping the Skylink service; many more people are at risk of becoming victims of crime. I therefore think an expansion to the night bus service is required, so that it runs throughout the week.
These are some of my initial thoughts on the consequences that the retraction of the Skylink service will have on the people of Nottingham and the surrounding areas that its route goes through.
Premier have registered the route.
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