Time for another demand responsive minibus service.....
In the spring of 2019 Transport for London launched it's
Go Sutton demand responsive transport trial. It is focussed on [some of] the borough of Sutton, which is south of the Tube network and has no other TfL managed/contracted rail services, although it is
in the running for an extension to the Croydon-centric tram network. But that might end up being a bus.
With Go Sutton operating for a few months, on 6th August it was time to give it a go. Go Sutton is primarily booked via a dedicated app, on which you need to register and store payment details. There is a call centre option available too, which presumably reflects the fact that some users may be less tech-savvy: a standard fare of £3.50 is charged but whilst completely unintegrated with any other TfL or London ticketing scheme, concessionary pass holders can travel for free.
The operation of Go Sutton is contracted to a combination of
Via Van and
Go-Ahead buses. It looks like Via Van are behind all the tech and the public facing elements of Go Sutton: even the Go Sutton website looks the same as the Via Van corporate site. Upon looking to book a Go Sutton service, the app will tell you when you are within the operating area, which despite being Go Sutton is not the whole of the borough of Sutton, and has the curious northern boundary of the River Wandle. This is either to prevent over-use or competition with buses to, the Underground southern terminus at Morden. Maybe. Or maybe it's just because traffic is bad on the A24.
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| Despite being on the wide A317 when we booked Go Sutton, we were directed to a local residential street. |
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| Through here..... |
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| And we can track where the van is...... |
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| And after the two minute walk, our remaining eight minute wait was spent on this street corner in suburbia. The ten minute wait time was accurate, and I recall reading is about average. |
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| Go Sutton van/van derived minibus approaches through the tools of flourishing local enterprise. The driver would be wearing full Go-Ahead London bus drivers' uniform, and not a flash of Go Sutton visible. |
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| Or van/van derived minibus was a brand new 19-plate Mercedes Sprinter. I believe Go Sutton also have some from Stagecoach's failed Little & Often experiment. It comes with ten high back leather seats, which are quite comfortable and generously spaced for this type of operation. |
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| There is a low floor entry and wheelchair ramp and space. There are also three tip down seats in the low floor area: tip downs are no longer permitted on TfL's buses (those that remain are glued/screwed upright) ..... but positively encouraged on TfL's trains! I failed to check whether these ones actually folded down, but as I suspect the vans are leased not owned, they probably do. |
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| Many passenger verisons of the Mercedes Sprinter have another row of seats, creating the more usual zero leg room minibus experience. I assume that the USB chargers are a standard fit, so this slightly weird arrangement results from the removal of a row of seats and evenly spacing the others. |
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| The app allows you to follow progress and see an ETA. |
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| Text messages allowed interaction with Go Sutton (unsure whether this would be a real person or a bot) |
Conclusion: on the basis of this one sample journey, deliberately chosen to be cross-borough and taking us to somewhere useful, Go Sutton works. Our vehicle was spotlessly clean, which may not be a good sign if it's hardly used, smart driver and well driven, everything worked exactly how and when the app said it would.
It is however quite expensive. A local bus fare is £1.50, and with a slightly longer walk at each end would only have taken thirteen minutes. I do wonder whether our route 'through the houses' really did save any time. The Mercedes Sprinter is a bouncy machine and doesn't have the robustness of a bus over speed bumps, even driven as cautiously and as well as ours was.
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| The bus alternative |
Returning to the fare, of £3.50 and then £2 for each additional rider on the trip. Transport for London has one of the simplest and best integrated ticketing schemes in the world, which works across nearly all public transport including franchised train operators. To develop a service outwith all of that seems a bit counter-productive. The failed Slide Bristol noted that demand responsive transport "...can only operate smoothly when they are fully integrated with the public transport network...".
And that takes me back to demand responsive transport. In this blog I have previously considered that such a model can never make any money: I was writing about Chariot at the time. Since then the demand responsive coach service Sn:ap has considered itself to be so successful it lacked the funds to carry on: anecdotal evidence suggested a small number of people were riding in lightly loaded modern well-specified coaches. I suggested that Chariot's model was ostensibly for commuters, but didn't allow booking at a regular time. Oxford's Pick Me Up service (also using Via Van technology and Go-Ahead bus operations) has fallen foul of this too, but has recently expanded its fleet (curiously, the press release gives no detail on ridership!).
