Our services
We operated a total of 16.5million miles over the year. We have observed a change in customer travel patterns which we believe has been influenced by; highest ever car ownership in Wales, plentiful and cheap town and city centre car parking, socioeconomic and demographic reasons for patronage change, with the adverse effects of
traffic congestion acting to deter bus travel through longer and unpredictable journey times as reported by Greener Journeys.*
* http://stge.co/iaXb30cweTS
In spite of these challenges we have continued to invest in new buses and more bus journeys, with Gold standard buses (including free wi-fi and USB charging points for services X24, X3, 132, 26, 151, 1,2,5A,5C,6 and 7 in Cwmbran). We have also extended services with the T14 (Hereford – Brecon) now serving Cardiff, with more Sunday services in Cwmbran, Merthyr and Aberdare.
Our key measure of performance is the reliability and punctuality of our services. In the past year we operated 99.5% of our scheduled mileage, with 0.33% failure due to internal reasons, and 0.19% due to external reasons such as adverse weather (0.02%), congestion, diversions and road closures etc accounting for the rest.
Our reliability is greatly affected by congestion and road traffic accidents and incidents involving other road users.
We monitor our services for punctuality and 90% of our services operated within 5 minutes of their scheduled journey start time; traffic congestion, uncoordinated road works and lack of bus priority measures being the main reason for delays. We continue to seek improvements both through rescheduling services and through consultation with the local highway authorities for new and more effective bus priority measures.
We continue to invest in additional resources to maintain as punctual a service as possible.