How bus companies keep city moving through the pandemic
BUS operators have spoken of the challenges they have faced to keep operating during the coronavirus pandemic.
Last April and May, after the country was placed in the first lockdown in March, David Astill, Nottingham City Transport’s [NCT] commercial and operations director, said customer levels were down to 10 percent of what they were during a normal year.
“At the height of the pandemic, instead of carrying a million customers a week, we were carrying 10 percent of that. So we were running something that was not that different to the service we typically run on a Boxing Day.
“We were utilising around about 200 drivers, bear in mind we normally have 800. The rest of the workforce went on the furlough scheme. We had a small team of engineers, supervisors and managers that kept us going for that period - April, May and most of June.
“All non-essential shopping ceased - the network was very much targeted at NHS staff and other key workers and we liaised with the local NHS trust to make sure we’d got buses at the right times of the day, serving the main hospitals, and it worked successfully.”
It was a similar situation for trentbarton after the first lockdown was announced, as Tom Morgan, the company’s group commercial director, explained.
He said: “After seeing how that announcement impacted people’s travel habits we knew there were a significant proportion of people that would continue to rely on us, key workers especially, NHS and care home workers, and even people within retail – the people that needed to be able to effectively keep the country going.
“Those sorts of individuals would still rely on and require some kind of network of public transport.
“We knew that it was important that we still needed to be there and that the services we were providing had as many possible measures in place to make sure that they were safe.”
He added: “We dropped to about 25 percent of our pre-covid service level and we saw our customer numbers drop to about 15 percent of our pre-covid level. That happened really quickly, by the middle of April considering the announcement was in March.”
Both companies made sure various measures were in place to adhere to public health guidelines and keep drivers and passengers safe.
Trentbarton ensured staff were using anti-bacterial products to focus on touch points on the buses including “grab rails, push buttons and surfaces that people would hold”.
Extra cleaning staff were deployed at terminals such as Friar Lane and the Victoria Bus Station.
“When the buses would come in from wherever they’d been the cleaner would jump on before the next group of customers would board and wipe down all those touch points again,” said Mr Morgan.
The firm also decided to check the temperature of each member of staff before they started their shift.
At the end of June, the Department for Transport announced public transport services would increase from July - although the Government recommended that people avoid public transport where possible, as restrictions eased.
Mr Morgan said trentbarton began to step service levels back up at the start of July at around the time pubs started to reopen.
“In July we were at about 50 percent of our previous service levels but then the next ramp up, was in preparation for the schools returning,” he said.
Mr Astill said NCT reverted back to “what you would call appropriate level of service for the time of year”.
Face coverings became a mandatory requirement for passengers boarding public transport - and schools, colleges and universities began to reopen for the new academic year.
Mr Astill said: “During August and September, it was very clear that people’s confidence to travel was returning. During September we got back to about 55 percent of normal patronage and we were confident that was going to continue increasing but of course then we had the drawback of the second lockdown.”
Mr Morgan said: “Since lockdown two has been implemented, but the schools were retained, we’re at about between 45 and 50 percent of previous customer levels. A large chunk of that is based around school travel. And then the other chunk is people who just don’t have the option to work from home, whether that’s hospital staff or care home workers.
“We obviously serve the airport and there’s M&S, DHL, Amazon - big distributors who have a lot of labour. They’re needed on the production line.”
Mr Morgan said the company was “cautiously optimistic” about the future. He added: “We don’t know how long, or if, we will ever get back to the sort of levels we were previously. But we’re confident in our ability to react and match our resource with whatever demand we have to make sure that, from a business point of view, we’re sustainable.”