Consultations: February Bus Changes 2019

Overview

The way people travel around South Yorkshire is constantly changing. We need to have a public transport system that adapts to varying demand, while supporting economic growth and allowing residents to live, work and enjoy life in the region.

Buses play an essential role, they are the most accessible form of public transport and provide the widest and densest network of travel options for distances that are too long to walk or cycle. Good, reliable bus services are fundamental to how our customers move around the borough’s and wider City region.

The bus network is crucial to South Yorkshire’s continued economic and social development, and will be vital in meeting the Mayor’s Transport Vision.

To address the fall in demand and improve customer experience we need to tackle specific challenges that exist with the bus network. These challenges include:

• Parts of the network are inefficient - We are not currently making the best use of the bus network with some parts of county experiencing an oversupply of buses when compared to customer demand.
• Some services are unreliable – By running too many excess buses we add to the problem of congestion on the road network. Congestion not only slows down bus journey times but can also make our services less reliable. When services are slow and unreliable customers will look for alternative means of transport.
• The network can be over complicated - where we have multiple routes serving the same area our customers can find it difficult to understand their best travel option. Customers need to understand which route offers them the fastest and most reliable service to their destination.
• Resources are not deployed where they are needed most – One of the strengths of the bus network is that it can be adaptable and flexible when the needs of our customers change. This flexibility will allow the operators to reduce or remove services where demand is falling, while affording the opportunity to re-shape the network where we see an increase in demand e.g. on high frequency corridors such as service X1.

South Yorkshire Passenger Executive (SYPTE) supported the local bus operators, as part of their partnership commitments, to carry out some consultation on their network proposals.

This page presents the findings of the bus network proposal consultation, undertaken by SYPTE between 29 October and 9 December 2018.

In total, 959 responses were received. In addition to this, several emails and letters were received separately and are included in the summary of responses but not within the findings below.

Three different types of consultation were carried out:

• General network
• Service consultation (32, 41 and M17)
• Area consultation (Brinsworth/Catcliffe, East Dene/Herringthorpe, Kimberworth Park/Thorpe Hesley and Wickersley/Bramley)
   

 

A generic consultation was held to cover all proposed bus service changes across South Yorkshire. Additionally, further individual consultations took place covering different geographic areas where a specific route change was occurring. The results for all of these are shown below. All comments received from the consultation are included but some information has been redacted to comply with GDPR legislation. All redacted sections are clearly identified.

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Demographics

Note that the personal details section was optional, although most people populated at least some of it. Most respondents were female and aged between 45 to 54. 

Nearly half of respondents, 48% (458) live in the Rotherham area with 16% (150) of these living in S66 postcode area and 13% (121) living in the S17 postcode area of Sheffield. 

• Read the breakdown of demographics in the full Top Line report ( PDF, 151Kb)

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General Network

16% (152) responses were received.

Respondents were able to provide general feedback on up to five different services. The most popular services commented on were the services X78 (16%), 10/10a (15%), 227 (13%).

• Read the report of consultation responses for General Feedback ( PDF, 298Kb) 
   
• Read the report of other comments received regarding the consultation ( PDF, 550Kb) 
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