Stuck in traffic

Encouraging people to use the bus and leave their car at home is Government policy, among other Active Travel measures. Yet the bus service in Hastings leaves much to be desired. Anna Sabin has been finding out what needs to change.

Hastings is a town impressively rich in transport campaigning groups because transport in Hastings is currently not working well. And if it is working for some people, it’s not working for the climate.

Hastings Sustainable Transport Forum, Hastings Urban Bikes, Hastings Greenway Group, Hastings Cross Party Transport Group, Friends of Hastings Station and Hastings Bus Users Group is quite a lineup and they’re all wondering why we can’t have reliable frequent electric buses, cosy bus stops, smooth wide pavements, pedestrian priority crossings, safe protected bike lanes, more trees and an end to contributing so prodigiously to the climate crisis.

The latest of these campaign meetings I’ve been to is HABUG, the bus users one, where I heard some amazing things.

Joel Mitchell, managing director of Stagecoach South East, was there, sounding as passionate as anyone in the room for buses to be available to everyone for (almost) every journey.

But we’re living in the here and now, the bus service is patchy and HABUG members have some memorable bus stories to tell. Like ones about buses passing unlucky schools just before the end of the school day so children and carers have to wait not knowing when the next one will come because there’s no information at the bus stop and often inaccurate information on the app.

Who controls the bus information boards?!

Mr Mitchell tells us this is how it goes – there are printed timetable information panels at most bus stops. These are produced and maintained by Stagecoach where Stagecoach operate the buses.

There are also digital ‘Real-time Information’ displays at bus stops which are owned and managed by East Sussex County Council using data fed from on-bus tracking systems…which would be fine if they always worked. They do work when buses’ on-board GPS tracking systems feed the digital displays with their en route positions as they should.

Unfortunately there are reasons why sometimes they don’t. When a cancelled bus (of which there have been plenty recently because of driver shortages), or a bus with malfunctioning tracking, fails to send live information, the digital displays revert to showing the bus as it was planned in the timetable – as if alive, well and on time, regardless.

So, when you see a digital countdown of minutes to arrival time, it may be accurate because it’s picked up the bus’ real location on approach, or inaccurate because it’s counting down to the timetabled arrival time without knowing where the bus really is – and you have no way of knowing which is which until the bus shows up…or doesn’t.

Stagecoach says they are working with ESCC to refine and improve. It can’t happen too soon.

The paper bus stop timetables aren’t easy either. Stagecoach says it has over 4,000 timetable panels across the region and its ability to quickly update and replace them is limited. When timetables change it’s a big task to generate the new panels, get them printed, delivered and posted up – all as closely as possible to the time when the change occurs. The good news is that the vast majority of paper information panels are now up-to-date and correct and Stagecoach are looking at ways of speeding up the process in the future.

What about the old buses?

Stagecoach says they have 70 buses in their Hastings fleet with an average age of 12 years. The newest buses are ‘ULEZ’ compliant and there are currently 15 of them in the local fleet. There are a further 37 which are ‘LEZ’ compliant – which means they meet the ‘low emission zone’ requirements. So overall, nearly three quarters of the bus fleet meets at least the former London LEZ standard.

Mr Mitchell explained that there are some older buses still running (up to 18 years old), kept on the road with hard-to-find spare parts and a can-do maintenance engineer.

The truth about the bus network

Buses are getting slower. There are more and bigger cars and vans on the roads so everyone’s road journeys are getting slower. As a rule of thumb, for every hour a bus spent on the road 12 years ago, it now needs an extra 12 minutes to cover the same distance. When you factor in the extra running time, pay, fuel and maintenance – the effect this has on operating costs is massive.

There is also the proliferation of uncoordinated roadworks which Mr Mitchell rails against for their detrimental effect on bus users and stifling effect on economic growth. And cable is likely to be superseded by satellite anyway!

On the up side, however, ESCC has recently swapped out their not-so-good road maintenance contractor, Costain, for the better Balfour.

Mr Mitchell worked with East Sussex County Council on the stupendously successful BSIP, Bus Service Improvement Plan bid, and found them a joy to work with. They won a £41.4m Government grant. The challenge now is how to spend it wisely.

A proportion is being invested in subsidising DDRT, Dynamic Demand Responsive Transport, in some of rural East Sussex, and there are now special fare offers including “day rider” tickets for £5 or less, £1 single fares for independent young people and free travel for accompanied children – possibly all devised in the hope they will bed down bus habits beyond the life of the subsidy? Go to the Stagecoach website and see if they can tempt you on board.

In the meantime, passenger numbers are down around 20% since Covid and the cost of living is up 20%, and not all routes are equal. The 99 is at 100% ridership and route 100/101 buses are doing OK. The town network however is really struggling commercially – for every £1 in, only 70p comes back to Stagecoach. The 29 to Tenterden doesn’t cover all its running costs and, unless more people can be persuaded to use it instead of driving their car, may ‘need to be revised‘.

Where is the marketing?

So why are the services running nine parts empty but not being widely advertised?

Stagecoach hasn’t felt ready to go all out on marketing when there’ve been service cancellations because of driver shortages. They now have enough drivers but there are still the challenges around sourcing parts and of course the road congestion…Nonetheless, outdoor advertisements will soon be deployed and the Freedom Ticket and other offers for young people will be advertised in the colleges.

The irony is, said Mr Mitchell, often there is vehement local defence of existing services even if they’re barely used. But, if, for instance, recent driver shortages caused grim passenger experiences, people can’t be blamed for deciding it’s better to endure a hideous traffic jam in a car than endure it at a bus stop for who knows how long.

Mr Mitchell conceded that the promise of cheaper, more frequent buses is not being fulfilled. The answer, he said, is bus priority measures and restrictions on private cars – there can’t just be pull factors like modern clean buses if they can’t arrive on time. A HABUG member asked the county councillor with us to put that very point to the ESCC Scrutiny Committee. Better bus experiences would be easier to achieve with wider pavements, School Streets for children to play while they wait and bus-only lanes. (Those we can all ask for through the ESCC Local Transport Plan 4, LTP4 Consultation – open and listening till 25 February.)

Then a thwarted, would-be bus riding councillor asked Stagecoach: reallocation of road space would be nice, but in the meantime, is the Network Review going to be brought back to improve the over-complicated bus systems? Mr Mitchell agreed improvements could be made – Hastings has the basic requirement for transport from Town Centre to Conquest Hospital and back with five different routes to do it and they could be smartened up.

Another wishful user of Stagecoach buses was Kieron Pelling. Part of his job as Healthy Transport Active Travel Officer for East Sussex NHS Healthcare Trust is to encourage workers and visitors to ride the bus, walk or cycle rather than drive a car to Conquest Hospital – quite a challenge! He described to us the extreme difficultly of changing travel habits under present circumstances which go like this –

The Trust has introduced a car parking permit policy with the aim of restricting issue of parking permits to staff who need them. Unfortunately, this has not reduced cars being parked on site enough and there are still more cars parked than there are parking spaces. With no parking enforcement or effective measures, unauthorised cars get parked regardless – in staff areas or unmarked spaces, as their drivers see fit.

With such reliance on car travel, there is inevitable congestion around the hospital, Ridge and A21 each day. If the Queensway Gateway Road linking Queensway to the A21 via Whitworth Road, were to be connected, 10-15 minutes of (a car or bus) journey could be saved, said Mr Pelling, which would be particularly important for hospital transport such as ambulances and courier deliveries. Instead, it lies not quite finished, taunting us all as the road to nowhere while the existing network, at certain times, becomes a toxic fuming hell of barely moving motor traffic.

He asked how this group, including himself, could begin to influence the change that is needed to reduce car use in the town. He said, any plans to change the roads to prioritise buses or cycling would result in a very strong response by car users who don’t want to be inconvenienced – so how can all the evidence about the benefits of shifting away from the car to sustainable transport be formed into a compelling argument which influences the people who make the key decisions and approve funding to bring in these changes?

To begin to answer that, Mr Mitchell said that bus links to improve connections to the three main hospitals in Eastbourne, Hastings and Bexhill were being considered. He asked who and how many would use the service? Mr Pelling said that ESHT had looked at this several times in past years, particularly as a staff only service. The cost of running a service had always looked too expensive after assessing how many staff would actually use it.

When the Eastbourne and Hastings Trusts first merged in 2002, a shuttle bus was set up after strong demand by staff for one. It was however not well used and was soon cancelled. Any new service should be for all users of hospital services including staff, patients and visitors, said Mr Pelling, and research would be needed to find out how many people travel between hospital sites.

The bus company and NHS do sound willing but you can’t help but see the obvious – if only buses and shuttles had road space of their own, they would be quick and efficient, popular and profitable.

 

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