It time for one of those collect all my thoughts on one page roundup sort of posts. I have also not been able to get out and about as much as I would have liked; planned trips to Bournemouth and Portsmouth got cancelled and upcoming trips will be reliant on how much I tolerate a planned change to medication.
I get the feeling I won’t be tolerating it.
What was going to be a round up of everything has turned into a round-up of one provider though. I started rambling, and it’s now got a bit long…. so here is:
Stagecoach South
With the substantial roadworks affecting services through Alton and Bordon, Basingstoke service 13 will be back on diversion from 30th June. The service will divert via Selbourne rather than Worldham.
This has an effect on services in the town centre as well, because of the interworking between the town routes and the 13.
Now unfortunately, I have never been that successful with browsing the Stagecoach Bus website for one reason or another. It has been a month or so since I was last able to set my location so I can see service updates and today there appears to be a system outage affecting everything at South. It’s almost like it’s connected to the bus tracking failures that the Stagecoach App has had of late.
Anyway
Basingstoke
On information coming from open bus data uploads; I still think I am not far off with the updates I posted to my post earlier this month. Starting with service 8 from Sunday 30th June.
The core change is that the town end of service 8 will now run a loop from it’s Sinclair Drive stop, via the Railway Station, the Bus Station and then direct back to Sinclair Drive.
On a detail level though, the conspiracy theorist in me thinks that it might also make it easier to manage disruption. The service now shows as starting and finishing it’s trips at the Railway Station rather than the Bus Station; which when a service is cancelled due to late running will make it easier to cut-and-run out of town to pick up service in Hatch Warren.
Indeed when a bus is planned onto another route or out of service, that bus is timetabled to continue into the bus station to end it’s journey.
Elsewhere in Basingstoke, service 7 to Chineham has a service increase on Sunday 30th June. The Monday to Saturday daytime service increases to every 20 minutes (from 30) and the evening service to every 30 minutes (from hourly).
Service 20 to the new(ish) Vyne Park housing estate will increase to every 20 minutes (and every 15 minutes in the weekday rush hour) and gains a new Sunday service every 30 minutes. I do not know whether the increase is a result of the housing developer support, or whether the service has genuinely been a success.
Portsmouth
Here we go again as it appears that The Hard Interchange – or Gunwharf Quays Bus Station is being closed again for resurfacing. It is apparently going to take so long that Stagecoach have put in their route changes that it is a long-term closure.
Frankly, for a new build, I find the ups and downs of it all laughable. From Sunday 21st July all Stagecoach services appear to be moving to Stand K at the Dockyard end of the bus station (except the 23 and 25 towards Southsea which will continue using stop M outside The Lady Hamilton)
Now…. whether they genuinely will be using stand K, or whether stand K is actually moving out of the bus station I do not know. Timetables will change a bit, probably to spread the loading times for all services.
From the same date, some of the evening services on Portsmouth College services 13 & 14 will extend to/from Gunwharf Quays stand K. I can not see that there are any service reductions on other services that these will replace. There are also evening timetable changes to service 18 between Paulsgrove and Southsea.
Now…..
I am convinced that this is an error, just because of the timetable uploaded to BODS, but the D1 in Waterlooville is no longer showing as running to Hambledon. The service change was registered as “Change to a timing to to assist with safety” and for the rest of the timetable it appears to be something minor.
The data shows that the D1 terminates at Denmead Green and starts back some 25 minutes later. I am definitely assuming that this is an error on that basis and the bus will still run through to The Vine at Hambledon.