Publisher: Cllr Barry Anderson

I have now received a response back from first Bus to some issues that have been raised by your Chair and some other local residents. A précis of the response is as follows:

“Metro do not take the revenue risk on anything, they could if they wanted offer Gross contracts whereby they keep the revenue and pay the operator for total costs not surprisingly they don’t do that as it would mean making up any shortfall on predicted revenue themselves.

We do have an all operator ticket in West Yorkshire its called Metro Card and offers a wide range of tickets to a substantial customer base who need the flexibility of use between operators. The Own operator tickets such as our First Day and First Week are hugely popular and represent a large portion of our revenue, people buy them, they understand them, they like them. We like them too because we keep all the revenue and there isn’t the same level of waste in admin costs surveying use and distributing revenue as there is with Metro Card. While it would be legal for us to accept each others tickets, it is illegal for us to agree the price of those tickets between us.

Simple fares project is designed to make it easy to understand the bus fare. The easiest fare would be a flat fare and this is what we were aiming to do, however when we looked at it we found that a large proportion would end up paying more and so looked at other options. The three fare option we introduced was the one with the least adverse effect 7% paid more, 7% paid less, overall to us was no increase in revenue, but for the first time the ability to market our fares.

We don’t have room in the schedule for a later last journey at the moment, I think the last time we met I showed you the loadings and described how evening trade had declined particularly last journeys, that in previous times were full, had declined dramatically over the years.”

You will recall in our last post we were promised a waste collection today but unfortunately this did not transpire.  Your association again contacted Cllr Barry Anderson and received the following update:

“I have just spoken in Council about this debacle and an emergency meeting of some Councillors including me has been called for 12 noon tomorrow as the situation is getting worse.”

We will keep you advised.

Unfortunately, today we had a missed collection.  The details were forwarded to Cllr Barry Anderson for his attention.  He then immediately made contact with Streetscene and received the following update:

“We are experiencing problems due to crews being unfamiliar with the new routes. The crew concerned have returned to the depot at 16.45 and reported that they have not completed. I have made arrangements for a recovery collection tomorrow (Wednesday).”

If you have any further queries regarding this collection please do not hesitate to contact either your association or Cllr Barry Anderson directly.

Further to discussions with some of the local residents about the local bus service (28).  Your Chair took up the points raised that you were not happy with the present service since the change to the timetable etc. and passed your comments on to Cllr Barry Anderson for him to discuss with First.  After receiving an unsatisfactory response a further meeting took place the last week of October with some residents and Cllr Barry Anderson to discuss the issues of concern to try and come up with a suitable solution and agreed he would arrange a meeting with First and Metro to discuss and report back in due course.

To read follow-up post dated 21st November 2010. Please Click here…