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 heating was either not working or had been switched off
Condensation was running down the windows
The “Next Stop” audio/visual system wasn’t working
There was litter and plastic bottles on the floor and some of the seats
The nearside lower-deck lights were switched off and the offside ones dimmed by 50%
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!
Lancaster Bus Users' Group 