So in a moment of good news for users of the CityRed 9 service in Southampton, First Southampton are revising the timetables for both the 9, and the Sunday morning service on CityRed 3. These changes take effect from 01 November.
You may have noted that I previously had an issue with the service out to Woolston, Bitterne and Sholing. Many users along the route have commented that the bus is often full and leaves school children behind on it’s 40 minute headway.
Claire Whyte is actually quite a proliferate campaigner for a decent service and has been rebuffed by the Twitter team in… York, or Leeds, or somewhere… multiple times.
So First Group have listened adjusted the timetable by a few minutes to give a little more running time. Apparently there is not enough cash (or profits) in the CityRed 9 to make it a more frequent service.
You can pick up a Service 9 timetable from the CityRed Website.
Changes to More Frequent Services
The CityRed 3 however, get changes to it’s Sunday morning service. Basically the additional services between 0400 and 0600 on the Sunday mornings, to get people to and from Southampton General Hospital, are cancelled.
Presumably, as these services never did run before the pandemic, they are now back to their empty levels. This is something that I was expecting to happen towards the end of the summer, but now it has happened.
The new Service 3 timetable is available here.
Lockdown to come again?
With announcements of a 4 week lockdown in both Germany and France now announced as well, it’s only time before services are slashed again.
Certainly in most parts of our Solent area, cases are on the increase. It is inevitable that bus drivers, along with other front line workers, are going to start suffering from symptoms, isolations and … that dreaded COVID App.
Of course, it will also be December soon, everyone will want to cram into a bus to go shopping at the cancelled Christmas markets and panto.