[hisimp-chat] Citi 7

[Paul Malpas]

We have found the citi 7 to be an insufficiently reliable service as a daily commute into cambridge.  It's the uncertainty about waiting up to half an hour for a late bus (an hour, on one occasion!) added to the overcrowding on a school day. The dawdle around h&i just seals its fate.  Much better we find to use the new milton p&r - we can actually aim for and reliably catch a particular bus, know it will be there to the minute, and then get to the far side of the city centre fairly sharply with only limited stops.

It seems Stagecoach might be applying the p&r model to both the citi 7 and the busway, omitting any stopping service for those that need the interim journeys, as described here by others.  Clearly this would leave a hole in the service provision.  Perhaps there is a case for an interleaved service that alternates express and stopping routes.  The mix could be tailored to the time of day, if that was manageable by the operator and easy to follow for the passengers.

Of course, these are the considerations for the commercial operators to contemplate, which leaves the usual difficulty of how to align social advantage with commercial attractiveness. 

On that subject, and perhaps even more daft at a customer's face value, is the fact that your ticket on the busway will EITHER be for a Stagecoach OR a Go Whippet bus and will not be cross-compatible for your return journey!  So your commute home may be longer than you thought while you wait for the appropriate bus to match the one you bought your ticket on in the morning!

Plus if getting on on the guided section you'll need to buy the ticket from a machine on the platform and not on board. Imagine the scene of a dozen commuters poised with change ready, waiting to catch sight of the next bus' livery before committing en masse to one of the 2 ticket machines on offer!  We should sell tickets to watch the scrums that will result!

Paul
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

-----Original Message-----
From: John Dover <jjdoverhiston at yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Wed, 21 Oct 2009 21:57:13 
To: Chat about Histon and Impington<hisimp-chat at the-hug.net>; <hisimp at the-hug.net>
Subject: Re: [hisimp-chat] Citi 7

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