York - Park & Shambles

Over the last few weeks I have used the York Park & Ride from Monks Cross. For those of you who have never been York is an ancient walled town that is a major commercial centre and a world-class tourist destination. So it has all the ingredients for traffic gridlock. The network of park & ride schemes that have been rolled out over the last twenty years have ensured that it is relatively easy for the motorist to park their cars on the outskirts of York and take a bus nearly into the centre of York. The town still works.

However with in my view with a few simple improvements it could be so much better, indeed world class.

1)    Pre-payment – There is a good warm waiting room at Monks Cross, however when the bus arrives some thirty or so people queue in the cold, and it was very cold on the last day I was there, and potentially rain. Almost everybody has to pay some fare. Given there is a substantial waiting room and only a limited number of fare combinations why are there no pre-payment machines in there. If there was boarding would be considerable quicker.

2)    Return payment – On the way back far fewer people pay, although again a prepayment machine would help. The problem here is that the bus driver has to visually inspect each ticket. If the return tickets were printed with a machine-readable code then this boarding process could again be speeded up.

3)    Plastic Coins – A new feature is that the car park entrance barrier issues a plastic coin; this coin is validated before boarding the bus, or on the bus. I assume that this is to collect a fee from those people using the car park but not taking the bus. I can understand that York Council wishes to prevent revenue extraction, however given that just two hundred metres over the road is a massive free car park serving the retail park I cannot imagine that it is a huge problem. It does though make boarding more protracted, and from my observation would be easy to get round.

4)    Bus Lanes – A great idea but frequently in York they seem to give cars the priority. At the T-junction with New Lane the bus I was on would have had a clear run through the normal lights, instead while cars continued to pass freely the bus waited in the bus lane at a red light. Surely a device that changed the lights in advance of the buses arrival like a car key fob could be used. Again not a high tech or costly solution.

5)    The Buses – This week there was controversy concerning the relative priority of pushchairs and wheelchairs on buses. On the buses that I was on there was only space for one push chair, inadequate on a park & ride route which by design is going to attract lots young families. Given the number of park & ride buses nationwide surely there is room for fantastic innovation to produce great buses for this specific use.

So all in all, York you could do better, with some simple improvements.