Their remit excludes the city of Leicester, which is administered separately and will be covered in a future post.
Where do the buses go?
We have a series of town maps and county-wide network diagram, plus a link to Leicester City Council's Greater Leicester Bus Map. Excellent. 5 out of 5.
Timetables
Timetables are provided, but only for those routes that are subsidised by the county council. Passengers are unlikely to know whether their route is subsidised or not, so this is far from ideal. For commercial routes, we are referred over to Traveline, which actually has timetables for all bus routes in Leicestershire and beyond. Would it have hurt the county council to include timetables for all routes? I think not. 2 out of 5.
Fares
The only fares information is a link to the Leicester Flexi multi-operator ticket, which covers the city of Leicester plus neighbouring parts of the county. There is no information on single fares, single-operator day tickets or any other type of ticket. Plusbus, available in Hinckley and Loughborough, is ignored. 1 out of 5.
Summary
Great maps, patchy timetable provision and no information on fares. Leicestershire County Council scores a total of 8 out of 15.
Tried printing off one of the town maps a few days ago as visiting the area. Didn't fit an A4 page.
ReplyDeleteJust to clarify, whilst Leicester City is a unitary authority & as such politically separate from Leicestershire County in public transport terms these are managed jointly with Leicestershire County Council who tender all routes & provide the publicity & website for both (on the LCC website reviewed the 162 operates entirely within Leicester City and never crosses into the county at all) as such the City site has pretty much no information at all about bus services as it is all dealt with by the county. It is a shame that the county site doesn't provide better & clearer links to the operator websites for timetables of commercial services, possibly off a list of all services (I am sure they used to do that, not sure when or why they changed it). It is actually a slightly expensive undertaking to provide universal timetable for all commercial services, especially given the slightly surprisingly low proportion of contracted services in the city & county, but it wouldn't be that hard to have a route list with links to the operator websites for commercial services.
ReplyDeletePresumably it's also fairly expensive to have county or town maps published and kept up-to-date?
ReplyDeleteThe ones I have obtained from libraries etc appeared to be an 'in house' production but perfectly adequate and cheap to produce.
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