Saturday 19 January 2019

Falling off the Chariot





Back in September 2018 I took a ride or two on Ford’s then new on-demand transport service ‘Chariot’.  I never got round to sharing my experience on this blog, but now the Chariot experiment is coming to an end, I thought it’s time to reconsider chariot and the on-demand/demand responsive/scheduled minibus sector, particularly in the context of London.

The M1 & M2 Round Kirkhill Estate

The mid-1980s were a time of rapid expansion of minibus services across the UK, as newly privatised bus operators sought cheap [van-derived] vehicles to improve their service provision, or bringing private sector flair to the market, if you will.  My own experience was a large fleet of 16-seat Freight Rover Sherpa vans acquired by Northumbria Motor Services to provide increased frequency and coverage of housing estates across Northumberland towns.

As this ‘boom generation’ of van derived buses reached the end of their useful lives (and judging by the notices about engine replacement in the cabs of Northumbria’s, this was at about two years old!) they tended to be replaced by vehicles more recognisable as proper buses such as the Optare Metrorider or Dennis Dart, with increased capacity, and thus routes/frequencies reduced in consequence.  The market for smaller buses has largely remained with the community transport sector, where specialist body builders are able to meet a broad range of accessibility requirements.

These Aren’t Marshutkas

Fast forward to the last couple of years, and the van derived minibus sector has made a return.  The beginning of 2017 saw both Arriva and Stagecoach operations in Kent introduce Mercedes Sprinter based buses, Stagecoach under the ‘Little & Often’ brand and Arriva as ‘Click’.  Little & Often featured bus seated Sprinters with all the bad things about minibuses remembered: cramped aisle, no legroom, and now disabled access regulations take away more of the seats.  Arriva’s initial vehicles were much better specified (leather seats on bays of 4, USB charging, etc) but they admitted these early vehicles would not be the specification rolled out across the country.


Stagecoach Little & Often

Arriva Click’s justification is that it is more than a regular bus service: it operates ‘on demand’ (in as much as a finite sized fleet can do), and the concept has now expanded from Sittingbourne/Kent Science Park to south Liverpool whilst Sprinter minibuses have also been acquired for other operations such as Stevenage, Hertfordshire.  Travelling with Click requires a little more effort than a regular bus, requiring both the app and booking a trip. 

Coming soon after Click was a two day trial by Citymapper, running a minibus (again a Mercedes Sprinter) in a loop round central London, which I blogged about at the time.  I still don’t really know what Citymapper were doing, at the time I thought it was about the sort of data they could collect about bus services, demand and reliability. Looking back, they did then start an overnight scheduled bus operation in east London (note, scheduled and bus, not on-demand and minibus).  The fact that has since ceased suggests they actually thought they could run a bus service better than anyone else, and that people would pay a premium for it (it was not included within London’s cheap bus fares).

Ford-owned Chariot was the first modern day serious attempt at a privately operated quasi-demand responsive minibus around highly residential streets.  Exactly what Northumbria did in Morpeth, Cramlington, Ashington, Blyth and Whitley Bay in the late-1980s.  The only different being, demand for Chariot would be controlled by mobile phone app.  You book and pay for travel using the app.  And I say only quasi-demand responsive, because a set route was operated and appeared to operate to a set schedule, assuming there were customers.  Some variation from the other operations described above though, being Ford-owned the vehicles were Ford Transits.
Chariot app, see the location of every vehicle
Journeys on Chariot start at a  rail station, before heading in the residential streets.  Therefore in the morning the vast majority (all?) demand was towards the station and in the evening, away.  Reasonable to assume there’d be few counter-peak journeys, not many mod journey alighters (in the morning) or boarders (in the evening).  Therefore, of a particular journey has no one booked on it, it could presumably not run (though, I am not familiar with how these were licensed by Transport for London, but as a non-contracted local bus they would have some form of license to operate).


The Ability to Work

My first experience at trying to book Chariot was wholly negative: I had the app, I had credit to travel, but it turned out that a journey could only be booked once a driver was logged on in the vehicle being used(!!!).  So the average commuter seeking a journey at 6pm couldn’t book until some time after 3.30pm when the driver was at work. Being creatures of habit in the main, I’d expect an intending customer might seek to book every day for the 6pm trip home. 

Once that was figured, you got the name and picture of your driver (like Uber’s app), a pick up time, and a booking code.  The driver also got the same, on a tablet device in lieu of a ticket machine.  My first driver was Peter, without a photo, and he was #944 (a meaningless number displayed to customers, unless you happened to look at the fleet number on the van).  On a busy trip the driver could check booking codes and passenger images, but on my first trip from North Greenwich, departing at 17:19, I was one of only two passengers for Peter.  You can track the locations of not just your van, but every van in service, on the app.  The Transit carried an attractive livery, but inside were, ultimately, a typical Transit van, with high backed seats, no legroom, and a van rather than bus interior.
Chariot ticket

Trannies will never be known for their legroom
I selected some random residential street to alight, but Peter made no attempt to stop there or inform me that I was at my destination.  I did ultimately alight in a randomly selected street, Mayplace Lane.  At which point I thought I’d test the app and try and book myself on the next Chariot: low and behold Andrew B (driving van 926) was four minutes away, and upon turning in to Mayplace Lane, was looking out for me. 

Now Andrew B was a whole lot more talkative, probably because he really wanted to know why I was boarding an evening peak bus almost at its terminus, which I am guessing no one ever does on Chariot.  Andrew B was an ex London bus driver (I forget which company) and was very enthusiastic about the Chariot USPs: almost a door to door service, travelling with like minded people, on-board wi-fi, and the ability to work during your commute. 

Booking a pick up deep in residentialia
Failure

The 1980s van-derived minibus scene largely returned to operation by bigger buses running less often, with a few Mercedes 809Ds hanging on until accessibility regulations prohibited their use.  The Stagecoach Little & Often concept barely lasted a year before it saw a largely similar fate.  Citymapper haven’t come back with any kind of minibus/bus offering, and Chariot are not only closing their London operations but their global operations, including New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago and San Francisco.

In larger cities I do not believe a demand responsive service appropriate or necessary. In the case of London the demand for travel and urban density is such that those ‘on demand’ services have already progressed in to a red bus every 10-15 minutes.  The prevalence of real time applications for tracking buses means that ‘booking’ simply isn’t necessary.  Further, why would you want to book when your journey plans could change: a few minutes more at work, a connecting a Tube a few minutes late, a quick call in to Tesco Express all mean a regular interval, unbooked bus service is actually more flexible.

And that’s before we consider that as a Travelcard holder, the bus journey is free at the point of use.  Chariot charged £2.40 per journey that was not included in any TfL ticketing options

The lower seating capacity does not appear to be off set by the lower operating costs of van derived minibuses.  A Sprinter or Transit will have much more easily accessible parts and servicing, and at least in the 1980s drivers on a lower pay rate than their big bus counterparts.

Chariot in London operated for approximate three hour peaks only.  This makes driver rostering difficult as a split shift is necessary, and results in long days, starting before 6am and finishing after 7pm.  There were also proportionately high positioning costs, with buses returning to their Battersea base between peaks.  Conversely a regular bus operating 18-20 hours day can be very efficiently rostered to provide more drivers on shift at peak times.

The Chariot concept will never make money.

One area I didn’t understand about Chariot is how mid-journey bookings were relayed to the driver.  It suggests that either a pro-active check of the tablet device is necessary, or that somehow it provides an alert to the driver away from their line of sight.  Conversely, on regular London buses the iBus unit turns itself off when the vehicle is in motion, as does the tablet-esque display on modern ticket machines from Ticketer. Citymapper als equipped their drivers with a tablet which blanked when the vehicle was moving.

Not All Negative

Rather than commuter services (which by their very nature have known travel patterns, times and volumes) the demand responsive concept is much more suited to situations where pre-booking is required for irregular trips.  This is likely to be in the community transport sector, where the demand responsive element can genuinely respond to mobility needs. 

Van derived minibuses also have their place.  The Spinters and Transits form the modern backbone of the marshutka sector in the former Soviet bloc: marshutkas being the ultimate expression of free market demand responsive transport.

Sprinter central!  The long distance bus station in Chisinau, Moldova is a hot bed of van derived minibuses. 

Another appropriate use of van derived minibuses is providing public transport where conventional buses will not fit....