On one of my regular trips out in the UK, I happened to catch sight of a particularly shabby bus operating for a major group. This may not sound overly surprising or noteworthy as many large fleets will have those vehicles that are heading towards the end of their service lives or perhaps have had a mid-life refurb delayed, however this wasn’t the case here. The more I looked and learned about the vehicle and its history, the more I wanted to share its story and the important lessons that could be learnt from it.
To respect the company involved I must ask you to imagine the scene with me. At first glance the bus in question looks like any other slightly shabby bus out there working hard to earn a living. However, take a moment and you will see there are bent panels, missing bits of trim, streaks of rust, additional bracing pieces exposed and several shades of paint on show. Now we must also consider that this vehicle is only 6 year old and operates alongside better presented vehicles that are at least 10 years older than itself.
The condition of this bus in comparison to its stable mates lead me to dig into its history a little further. I was curious as to how and why one vehicle was allowed to deteriorate to such an extent when the depot was clearly able to maintain decent standards with the rest of the fleet.
When I started to research this story, the first startling revelation was that this vehicle was only refurbished some 10 months prior to my visit to the town. I learnt via various sources, that once the contract this vehicle was purchased for had come to an end, after 5 years, our subject vehicle and its 2 sisters all received a small refurbishment that included any necessary repanelling and a complete repaint. This meant that all the damage and deterioration had taken place in only a short space of time, and due to the patchwork of repairs and prangs I concluded that it wasn’t as a result of just 1 or 2 incidents.
As I continued to learn more, I started to suspect that the real issues were down to something peculiar to either the type of vehicle or the type of work it was doing. Now, as an 8.9m ADL E200, it is hardly a difficult vehicle to drive. The overhangs are not extreme and the short wheelbase should allow it to be rather manoeuvrable. So what about the work it was doing?
This particular vehicle, it would seem, was usually allocated to a certain contracted service in and around a nearby market town. This service employs 1 vehicle for 8 hours a day, connecting all the side streets, residential schemes and railway station to one another along a circular route and is also used to connect to through services for the nearest major town some 11miles away.
As I suspected, it was indeed this particular route that was the reason this vehicle was so down-at-heel. The narrow streets, tight corners and parked cars along the route means there is very little room for the buses providing this service. As a result, scrapes with hedges, high kerbstones and other vehicles are commonplace.
In a social media thread I saw, a mechanic at the company in question tried to defend the general untidiness of the vehicle. They maintained that this vehicle was considered some sort of sacrificial lamb; always allocating it to the same working knowing it would come back at the end of the day damaged meant other vehicles were spared the same fate. There has to be some respect for that logic, however I do wonder if there is a bigger picture going unseen here.
I understand that the damage sustained on a given day regularly sees the vehicle off the road the following day. This might mean that over the 6 days this service operates each week, our subject vehicle is perhaps only available for 4 ½ of these. This therefore means that this service must operate using spare resource around 25% of the time, which gets me wondering if this contract is actually worth operating?
So what lessons should we learn from this vehicle?
Well, when resourcing any service we shouldn’t necessarily ask ‘do we have a vehicle’ perhaps we ought to instead ask ‘do we have the right vehicle’. Not an Earth-shattering revelation, however in this instance I can’t help but think that it was simply convenient to allocate one of these recently surplus ‘small buses’ to ‘the route that’s a bit tight’ and replace the aging and predictively shabby vehicle used at the time.
An important lesson that we could learn from this example, is perhaps we should occasionally flip our viewpoint and question whether we have the right route for the bus. This service would be difficult, politically, to remove, however over the years it has been operating, the physical dimensions of cars has increased, so too has the number of them. The roads have unsurprisingly not grown however. Therefore, where we encounter a line of parked cars, the available road space that was once ‘Narrow’ is frequently becoming ‘Too Narrow’, leading to problems
So what would the answer be in this case?
Well, it’s difficult to say. Certainly operating in the way outlined above is very costly and could ultimately prove unsustainable. This suggests a different approach should be taken, however, as mentioned, simply re-routing the service away from the most challenging points will be difficult. So the only option seems to be that, if the available road space is getting smaller, then so to should the bus.
Moving to a smaller, perhaps van derived, vehicle to operate the route does however have its own problems.
- Will this vehicle be unique within the depot? and if so, what do you do when this vehicle is unavailable?
- Will a van derived vehicle be able to keep up with the constant strain that this route demands?
- Will the seating capacity be an issue? If this vehicle makes the route more reliable, then would patronage increase as a result; will you still have enough seats?
- Reducing the vehicle size may only be a short term solution unless the issues of parking and limited road space are addressed.
So, hopefully this tale of one particular shabby bus has opened our eyes to the complicated series of events that can lead to a vehicles neglected appearance. Hopefully too, it can teach us to question all aspects of our operations regularly to assess the suitability, not only of the vehicles in use, but also of the routes we choose to take.
Kieran Proctor 