Lancaster Bus Users' Group

Lancaster & Morecambe Bus Times has been around for about 8 years, having been set up initially for students and staff at Lancaster University, who still comprise the majority of its users.

However, the site has recently been expanded and developed to cover the whole of the Lancaster & Morecambe area as well as parts of Westmorland, Furness and areas of Wyre and Ribble Valley Districts.

Drawing on data from the national Bus Open Data Service, the site is primarily a map-based overview of the area on which are shown buses (both Stagecoach and Lonsdale Buses as well as other operators) in real time locations. Clicking on the bus icon brings up betails of the route it is operating on and its expected arrival at stops along the way. Clicking on one of the blue bus stop icons brings up a list of the next few expected departures, again in real time.

Whilst the overall approach is similar to other sites, such as Bus Times, Lancaster & Morecambe Bus Times also includes options to show the location of road works and traffic levels as shown on Google Maps. Both these features are likely to have an impact on bus service reliability, so to have them together with bus locations in real time is potentially useful.

Unlike Bus Times.org, the site is mercifully ad-free (increasingly rare on the internet these days) although it does include a link for voluntary contributions (on either a one-off or regular basis). There are also links to Trans Pennine Express where you can buy train tickets (for all operators) and this, presumably, in some way helps to fund the site.

The Bus Users’ Group understands that further development of the site to include actual timetables is planned.

The site can be viewed via this link: Lancaster & Morecambe Bus Times (lancasterbus.co.uk)

Lancashire’s Evening and Sunday bus fare offer, which sees fares reduced to just £1 for travel after 7pm in the evenings and all day on Sunday and bank holidays, is being amended.

The Lancashire Combined County Authority (LCCA), which is now the body responsible for local transport in Lancashire, will increase the fare to £2 with effect from 13th September, as the scheme, which currently costs the authority £5m per annum, has been deemed “unaffordable”.

A Report to a meeting of the Combined Authority taking place on 23rd June, states that it expects to receive £18.6m Local Bus Grant funding in the current financial year. The Grant is divided into “Capital Funding” (for building things) and “Revenue Funding” (for running them) and the revenue side of the Grant, which pays for the fares offer, is set to fall by £560,000. The Authority also has to make allowance for expected increases in the costs of contracted bus services as these are retendered and the cost of running the mandatory annual Transport Focus survey of user satisfaction.

Options

After consideration of a number of options, the LCCA will increase the evening and Sunday fare to £2 from 13th September until 31st March 2027, to save almost £1.2m in the current financial year. This will bring the end date of the offer into line with the ending of the Government’s £3 fare cap scheme. Any future local fares offers could then be reviewed in the light of what happens to the national fares cap.

Until then, the offer will continue to be available on all journeys within Lancashire, expect for those operated by Blackpool Transport and most Preston Bus services.

According to the report 3.5m journeys were made using the scheme in 2025/26 or 68,000 per week.