I had hoped to be able to bring you various bits of news on a week of travels last week. Indeed I did go to Southampton and Reading, with the former telling you about changes to car parks, bus hubs and more.
Some of the things that we did not report on though are becoming more important, so let’s get straight into them.
Fares Up at morebus
Alongside the fare rises at Bluestar (and the ones I forgot to mention at Southern Vectis) GoAhead morebus are raising fares across the board from next Sunday.
As with other GoAhead subsidiaries, smart card system theKey is slowly being phased out in line with the push to their smartphone apps and contactless card acceptance, so if you are using these for the love of God, find another way because that is going to become even more expensive than holding a paper ticket. I find it ironic that while the Great British Railway is still largely pushing smartcard technology, buses introduced them later and withdrew them earlier…. all down to cost.
Some single and return fares are going to be going up by between 10p and 50p. Now, I am expecting that these 50p rises are going to be more for the longer-distance or tourist-esque fares; Weymouth to Monkey World, the full length of the X3, the sort of fares that people would not use on a very regular basis. I would be interested to see if some morebus users let me know what fares they have that have gone up by the maximum.
Almost across the board though, season tickets are now set so App is cheaper than ticket, is cheaper than theKey.
Something I did not notice in the past though, highlighted in the new item about the rises, is that the Zone ABC day tickets are actually more like the old Explorer tickets from the 1990s where these are valid across everything GoAhead from Southampton and Salisbury to Blandford. For £9.50 for a day ticket (up to £780 for an annual pass) that is actually pretty good value for money!
Jubilee at Stagecoach
Something published on Thursday which I wanted to try and get my own picture for, Stagecoach South have released two Enviro E400MMC buses in a special Queen’s Platinum Jubilee livery. This is something that very few operators seem to be doing. Reading Buses have a vehicle decked out with the Queen’s Jubilee Emblem, designed by Edward Roberts from the University of Leeds, Stagecoach South have these two rather fetching vehicles, but there are very few others.
The vehicles are initially based at Andover and Worthing but will be making their way across the Stagecoach South depots in our area in due course. I had kind of hoped to have grabbed my own pictures of it when it was on the activ8 at the weekend, but until I catch up with it, this is Stagecoach’s promotional shot.
First Marwell
Following on from last week when we told of the on-off timetable saga of the Marwell Bus Service, it turns out that the operator who is running a commercial Marwell service M1 from Southampton and Eastleigh to Marwell (not Zoo) Wildlife this year continues to be First Southampton.
This puts the end to the subsidised service M1 which was being promoted by Southampton Mini Link.
In other news; the 13a continues on Saturdays and Sundays, and the 14 is still on target for launch on 4th April.