With the Government announcement that schools are returning next Monday, bus operators are starting to announce their revised services to start at the same time. Stagecoach South have released their timetables right across the area, and they are already on their website for you to take a look.
Keeping things simple, I think that the idea of using a single page of PDF downloads is a good idea, some people will need more than one timetable, and less complication is more user satisfaction.
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.
No Change to Stagecoach Weekends
The important thing to remember is that these changes are almost exclusively for weekdays. There are no changes at the weekends because this is mostly to facilitate schools and working people. There will still be no pubs or restaurants open and only essential retail will be allowed to open.
Where Stagecoach South is so large, we will try and focus more on the big changes rather than list every single service. You can find links to all timetables at the Stagecoach South COVID page.
Out of Area
Firstly, an important one if you are travelling out to Frimley Park Hospital. The temporary diversion of the Gold 1 to serve the hospital grounds ceases as of Monday 8th March on weekdays.
Stagecoach have said that this is indeed the case, and weekend services will follow suit in due course.
Andover
Most services see an uplift and an extension to their day.
Those services that were running on a few days rather than every day are now back to running every weekday. This includes the 5 out to MOD Monxton, 7 & 7A to Newbury and 17 to Over Wallop.
Basingstoke
Most services will increase frequency on weekdays and evening services will run until around 11pm again.
Town services will revert to something akin to what they were in December, with many services returning to a 15 minute frequency.
For students in Winchester, the additional schools services on route 861 through Hatch Warren and Oakley will also run.
Portsmouth
Service 23 will increase to Every 10 Minutes
Services 30 and 31 will increase to Every 30 Minutes in each direction
Service 37 will increase to Hourly
Service 38 will have more journeys
Service 700 between Portsmouth and Flansham Park will increase to Every 20 Minutes
Winchester
Most services will see an increase on weekdays and some evening services will resume.
This is Just the Beginning
All of the bus operators are acutely aware of the service changes that will happen in time for the Easter Bank Holiday.
Stay At Home ends on 29th March. Although everyone will be asked to limit travel wherever possible, you will be allowed to travel. I would not expect a massive uplift of services so soon after next week, so I would plan for these services to be in place until the Government’s ‘Stage 2’ pencilled in for 12th April.