Lancaster Bus Users' Group

The Summer Saturday DalesBus service from Lancaster to Ingleton, Ribblehead and Hawes in the Yorkshire Dales National Park is making a welcome return from this weekend.

DalesBus 80 will run every Saturday throughout the summer from 4^th April between Lancaster, Hornby, Bentham, Ingleton, Ribblehead Station and Hawes.  Buses leave Lancaster Bus Station at 0900 and 1530 returning from Hawes National Park Centre at 1105 and 1725

The timetable allows plenty of time to explore Hawes and the surrounding countryside, including the famous Hardraw Force waterfall at the Green Dragon Inn in Hardraw, the Dales Countryside Museum and Wensleydale Creamery.  Onward connections to Leyburn on Wensleydale Voyager minibus 156. DalesBus 80 also provides a useful service for trips to Lancaster and other places along the route.

DalesBus 80 is operated by Lonsdale Buses as part of the DalesBus network managed by Dales and Bowland Community Interest Company with support from Lancashire County Council and York & North Yorkshire Combined Authority.

The maximum single fare on the route is £3, under 19s travel for just £1 each way and concessionary bus passes are now valid too.

Full details of the service are available online at www.dalesbus.org/80 and in leaflets available at Lancaster bus station, Lancaster library and other local outlets

If you’ve been waiting at the stop on a cold, wet and windy night. there’s nothing more welcome than the sight of a warm and brightly-lit bus coming to pick you up and whisk you off homeward-bound.

But that wasn’t the experience of passengers on Stagecoach’s 1A yesterday evening around 10pm, who having boarded at Common Garden Street found themselves on a very different sort of bus….

A bus where:

The photo, taken on a mobile phone, if anything exaggerates the amount of light there was on the lower deck and the atmosphere on board was at best unwelcoming and at worst, to a vulnerable person or someone travelling alone, quite threatening.

No doubt there are excuses (or even valid reasons) for each of these failures, but put together they reflect poorly on the service offered to passengers, who we feel deserve better. If this had been the first time a passenger had used a bus they would be unlikely to make a second journey.

And this was on one of the newer buses, not one of Manchester’s cast-offs!