Sunday 16 March 2014

Council check: Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council

How good is public transport information being provided by Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council?



Where do the buses go?

If you can find the BwD Connect part of the council's website, then you can see this map of all bus services in the borough.


The only improvement that could be made is for a plan of the town centres to be added. There is one for the bus station in Blackburn, but not the whole town centre. 4 out of 5 for BwD.

Timetables

Some timetables appear in pdf form on the right hand side of this page, but they are incomplete. No explanation is given, but it looks like these are for the subsidised routes only. Most of the commercial routes can only be found on Transdev's website under the Spot On, Lancashire United and The Lancashire Way brands. Nothing on BwD Connect. There is a link to Traveline North West, but it is very clunky and difficult to use compared to its southern versions. If you want to use a commercial service that isn't run by Transdev and you don't know who runs it, you have no way of finding the timetable.

BwD could definitely do better here. The uselessness of Traveline North West pushes their mark down to 1 out of 5.

Fares

BwD provides no information on fares at all. Not even the Blackburn Plusbus ticket gets a mention. Transdev, Rosso and Stagecoach provide info on tickets that are valid on their own buses only.

A very poor show: 0 out of 5.

Summary

Excellent map, patchy timetables and no information on fares & tickets. Blackburn with Darwen scores a grand total of 5 out of 15.


1 comment:

  1. The BWD Connect site seems to be particularly useless, especially as it claims to be "The one stop shop for all travel information in Blackburn with Darwen", and then proceeds to be completely the opposite!

    ReplyDelete

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