Every bus company is changing their bus timetables to reflect the return to school and college education next week. While some are adjusting their entire schedule, GoAhead have already increased much of their bus network, so are only making minor tweaks.
The New Advice
The Government advice will move from Stay at Home to Stay Local on the same day, so there are a few things to remember:
- All schools & colleges re-open. Universities re-open for practical courses only.
- Childcare and children’s supervised activities can resume to support working parents.
- People can leave home for recreation or exercise with one person from outside their household, in addition to as a household or with your support bubble.
- Care home residents will be allowed one regular visitor.
This means that there will be more people needing to use the bus from Monday. Contactless payments will still be preferred and means that you do not need to interact by handing over cash. First Hampshire are also trialling ToTo on their Eclipse services – I know, I have not talked about that yet.
Bluestar Changes
- Bluestar 3 – between Eastleigh, Hedge End and Southampton, will leave Eastleigh slightly later on all journeys.
Buses will then run to the existing timings from Fair Oak, albeit on top of that some peak time services will have an additional ‘minor’ retiming. - Bluestar 6 – the morning journey that extended to Priestlands School will no longer do so. The schools contract service 706, for students only, will resume.
- Bluestar 9 will increase to Every 20 Minutes on weekdays. Weekend services remain as they are until further notice.
- Bluestar 18 will increase to Every 8 Minutes on weekday peak periods (only), again with no changes to the weekend timetable. Bluestar also indicate there are minor changes after 2300 as well.
Schools services for most schools will be reinstated from 8th March. The exceptions to this are Barton Peveril College (which re-opens on 15th March) and St Georges School (where services 306 & 307 are permanently withdrawn)
… and for a bit of Credit
Where some of the local bus operators have had wibbles in consistency, I think that GoAhead have been consistently clear, concise and up to date with their service changes.
Whenever I have heard rumours of changes, or seen it on social media, I have gone to the homepage of Bluestar and morebus and it has been very clearly there.
I did not expect that I would still be filling in for Southampton Bus Update for this long, and that the money I paid out [It’s about £100 a year] for hosting and the domain would be wasted. So it makes this a lot easier.
Other operators have – as I said – had minor wobbles, posting a new news article but not updating their COVID special updates page, or missing out services.
I know, and you know, that GoAhead Group probably don’t even care what I say on these pages, but it has been a good public facing effort from them.