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Bus passengers travelling north and west from Lancaster bus station are finding their journeys getting off to an easier start with a change in priority at the Damside Street exit.

Every one of the County Council’s Bus Service Improvement Plans of the last few years has promised various bus priority measures on the city’s streets, although all of them seem to have been delayed or quietly abandoned following objections or lack of capacity to implement them. But suddenly, a scheme that hasn’t featured in any of them has appeared at the heart of the city’s bus network.

Buses leaving the bus station via Damside Street have previously had to give way to traffic coming from their right. Damside Street isn’t the busiest of the city’s roads but buses have always had to approach the exit with the expectation that they would have to give way, which frequently they would be required to do.

Now, however, “Give Way” markings have appeared on Damside Street and buses leaving the bus station now have the priority.

The actual time savings may be small (and buses using Damside Street to enter the bus station from Cable Street actually lose the priority they previously enjoyed) but as the saying goes: “Every little helps” and hopefully this is just the first of many measures to make life easier for the city’s bus drivers and passengers alike.

Our website now contains a link to Bus Times.org, a website containing

• Real Time Locations of all buses in Great Britain, Ireland, and the Isle of Man
• Timetables for bus services throughout the British Isles
• Locations, names, photographs, and departure lists of all bus stops
• Website links to all bus operators.

Bus Times is an independent and unofficial site, but it surpasses in the breadth and quality of its information anything yet produced by bus operators, local authorities or government departments. It is free to use.

It is the only website that shows buses of every bus operator, in real time, on a single map and contains links to timetables for every bus route in the UK, plus Ireland and the Isle of Man. On a working day it usually tracks over 25,000 buses of almost 1,000 bus operators calling at around 420,000 bus stops!

Its bus tracking service is thought by many to be more reliable that those provided in bus companies’ own apps and websites.

This map – a screenshot from a Sunday morning centered on Lancaster – shows what to expect, with buses from Stagecoach, Lonsdale Buses, Blackpool Transport, Archway, Preston Bus, Blackburn Bus Co and others all shown together on one map. Clicking on a bus icon tells you which service it is operating, where it is, and whether it is on time. There are links to the full timetable for the service and, for those who are interested, details of the bus itself complete with photographs. Zooming in on the map will show the exact location of bus stops, again with photos, and departure lists of buses from the stop with scheduled and real times.

You can access Bus Times from the menu on this website’s header or from this link: Bus Times.org

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!

After a gap of many years, the county council has again published a map of bus services in Lancaster and Morecambe. Funded through the Bus Service Improvement Plan (now known as Local Authority Bus Grant), the map is one of a series that will eventually cover the whole of the council’s administrative area.

The map shows all bus services in the area, irrespective of operator, in a common style and has been produced with input from the Bus Users’ Group. As well as a network map there are local area plans for Lancaster, Morecambe and Carnforth town centres as well as Lancaster University.

Such maps were once common throughout the country, usually produced by county councils or unitary authorities, but most, including Lancashire’s previous series, fell victim to austerity cut backs and continuing underfunding of local authorities. Even now, with the additional Local Authority Bus Grant funding available most councils have yet to re-start map production.

Copies of the map will be available free of charge at all libraries in the District and, hopefully, at Lancaster bus station, where an enlarged version is already on display in the Bus Users’ Group’s display case at the Cable Street entrance. We will also have some available at our meeting on March 19th in Lancaster library.

Unusually, the county council has not made the map available online, although a copy can be viewed on our website via this link:

Lancaster & Morecambe Bus Network Map