Liverpool City Region Bus Franchising

[iMarkeh]

RE: Liverpool City Region Bus Franchising

(25/07/2023 05:48)St Helens Rider Wrote:  Limited Stop/Express routes are what the region is desperately short of. I have recently travelled on routes which one would think would be fast but aren't (these being the X1 Liverpool - Chester, X2 Liverpool - Preston and 500 Liverpool - Airport) and none of these routes seem to be any quicker than other routes on their respective corridors.

The X1 was fast until MCSL management decided that they wanted to kill off demand on the 1/X1 corridor.
The 500 is limited stop and is 10 minutes quicker from the Airport to Liverpool One. The issue is that it needs to serve more of the city to make it attractive to people but the down side of that is that the 500 takes 40 minutes to get back from L1 to LJLA but that makes the 500 and 82A take the same journey time.

West Wirral to Liverpool express routes have potential using the M53 and anything from Rock Ferry to Liverpool not serving Birkenhead would save a good amount of time.

Halton to Liverpool was doing alright on express routes but Arriva actively killed the X1 and put so many costs onto it needlessly (then wondered why it didn't make money despite bus and driver sitting around in Runcorn forever.

Other than these, what is the potential for an express bus? The roads which express buses would use (your Edge Lane, East Lancs etc) have so many traffic lights which massively delays buses and the traffic is so variable and with bus operators aiming for 100% reliability so padding up the timetables, any express bus would not really be any quicker than the main bus services.