14 Oct 2017, 1:04 pm
#119
(14 Oct 2017, 11:40 am)Dan It is a pity that quality is not taken into consideration with the scholars and Miscellaneous Works contracts.
I'm not suggesting that the likes of Go North East or Arriva are perfect, but at least you can have a bit more confidence that the children who use these services are safe and in the event that something does go wrong, the buses are all equipped with CCTV and telematics systems.
I don't think every independent operator is the same, but this year's significant loss of contracts from Arriva and Go North East has resulted in a large number of smaller independent operators gaining more work, and I think the quality of the vehicles sourced has reduced somewhat. Nightingale Coaches' gains last year saw a fleet of ex-London double-decks acquired which were repainted externally, and they looked pretty tidy. This year is a completely different kettle of fish: buses running around with no fleet names, legal lettering, destination displays, etc. I regularly pass double-decks in Kingsleys Coaches' fleet on my way to work - some of them have what appears to be a bed sheet in the front windscreen on the upper saloon, with some form of advert on it! The ex-London stock Stanley Travel has taken is still running around in London base colours, and again, leaves a lot to be desired.
Go North East has already bailed Nexus out with one or two contracts - one bus from the Special Events fleet has been allocated to a scholars service previously operated by Nightingale Coaches (if I remember rightly) for the past few weeks.
About how long do the current contracts last? I fear that if the answer is a short duration, the operators won't bother spending as much effort in vehicle presentation, especially if they are mostly only going to do scholar's and Nexus misc boards, when Phoenix aquired a fair amount of Nexus contracts last year, they put pretty much all of the vehicles they aquired out in their previous operators liveries and sure enough they lost most of these services when the contracts came to a end about 8 months later, who would spend fortunes on making buses look smart and well presented when you only end up having to sell them after 8 months, which is a shame really.
