For those advocates of bus franchising in the UK the Hope Street bus in Melboune is a case study of the consequences. The Hope Street Bus Line company had been operating - for Melbourne - a high frequency 20 minute headway bus service with an end to end journey time of around ten minutes. The company in its last days had just two buses, but only needed one to maintain the service: a Custom bodied MAN 10.155 and a Volgren bodied Volvo B6 both dating from 1998 and seating 35. Passenger loadings rarely exceeded 5, let alone 35 and for ten years the bus used to divert around a school at school times, which had been closed for ten years. Parallel services serving more popular destinations run on adjacent streets. The state government continued to subsidise the service and as it was public money no one bothered about the absurd waste of public resources until it was finally axed in 2012 and Hope Street Bus Line closed down. However politics now intervened. Hope Street is in Brunswick, which is a marginal seat for the state government, so the Labour Party promised to reintroduce the Hope Street bus service to quite literally buy votes in the constituency. This was not an isolated instance and voters were bribed with public transport services across the state - a parallel with Boris Johnson's election pledge to rid London of bendibuses and develop a new bus for London shows a similar emotive bribe to voters regardless of cost - and those Borismasters are not cheap and nobody wanted to buy those prematurely retired bendibuses. Imagine the costs in the UK with politicians controlling bus services nationwide and bribing voters with poorly thought out transport options.
Well Labour won the state election and the Hope Street bus service returned in January. Two brand new Chinese built BCI Proma 33 buses (895 & 896) have been bought for the service to be operated by Dysons. One is presumably a spare as the new service is only hourly and operating between 0900 and a little after 1400. Hopefully for a chance at financial viabilty it has a school run before and after to a school which is open! Proma 896 was found on Sydney Road resting after its arduous day's work around 1500h on Monday this week.
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