NCT’s management team. Left to right: David Astill, Gary Mason, Nicola Tidy, Mark Fowles, Mick Leafe and Rob Hicklin
belonging to a particular route. It was a radical overhaul that required Fowles and his team to have complete faith that they were doing the right thing for the business, rather than ‘trying not to make the wrong decision’. The result was mayhem. Despite a massive communication effort that saw over a million leaflets distributed over six months, and a two-stage consultation with passengers, the changes seemed to confuse everybody. Passengers and staff alike were not used to change, and they didn’t like it. It took eight or nine weeks for the furore to die down. But during that time, Fowles found himself in the firing line. He was grilled by the leader of Nottingham City Council every Friday evening and prodded by little old ladies with umbrellas in the street. The Nottingham Evening Post ran a picture of him on its front page - with his hair cut to look like devil horns. A local radio breakfast show used their fleet of people carriers with the intention of picking up frustrated bus www.passengertransport.co.uk
NCTsupp-p02-05 3
users on the Ilkeston Road corridor. But there was no-one there because the new network had finally bedded in, and the issue soon dropped off the radar. The benefits of this overhaul, however, have endured. Soon after the launch, passenger numbers started to grow after 50 years of unrelenting decline. And while it was not accepted at first, the new colour-coded network has been embraced up by the public. By 2004, for example, literature in the city’s Queen’s Medical Centre was advising patients to travel there on an “orange” bus. “When you get people using that sort of terminology and language, you know that you are beginning to penetrate the market. The message is beginning to get across,” says Fowles. Patronage growth on the Go2 network has enabled increased service frequencies. Of the 14 Go2 routes, 11 now have a service frequency of every seven minutes or better at peak times. The past decade has seen NCT’s overall patronage rise by 1-2% every year.
KEY NUMBERS
£1
The price of a single stage short hop fare. An Adult Single is £1.70. These prices have not changed since June 2011
51,900,000
Million passenger journeys in 2012/13 (up 0.5% on the equivalent figure for the previous year)
6.0
Years - the average age of NCT’s fleet, with the company buying 73 new buses in 2013/2014
Percentage of NCT passengers ‘satisfied’, according to the Bus Passenger Survey from Passenger Focus (March 2013)
92 10 May 2013 | 03
02/05/2013 09:53