About Stagecoach West

Key facts May 2015 – April 2016 

• 24.41 million passenger journeys 
• 11.95 million miles operate carrying customers on our network
• 248 buses operating about 100 different routes across Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Swindon and Herefordshire with some journeys extending into Bristol, South Gloucestershire, Wales and Oxfordshire
• 696 staff working across 5 depots located in Cheltenham, Gloucester, Ross-on-Wye, Stroud and Swindon
• £4.5 investment on 7 brand new single deckers and a new bus depot in Swindon
• 95.0% service punctuality
• 99.7% service reliability
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Our passengers 

We carried a total of 24.41 million passengers over the year, an increase of nearly 2% over the previous year.

We received a total of 1,740 passenger complaints about our services equating to one complaint per 14,029 passengers which was a significant reduction on the prior year. We comply with our industry code of practice, and every complaint is investigated and action taken to avoid repetition of the problem.

Our staff 

We are a major local employer with about 550 drivers, 95 engineers and cleaners, and 55 supervisors, managers and clerical staff all based locally.

We continue to invest in training our staff. Every driver undertakes a training day to enable them to hold a Certificate of Professional Competence (CPC).
The focus of these courses during the past 12 months has been on providing additional Equality training.

We employ 7 apprentices to provide skills for the future. Our supervisors and managers have all completed relevant training courses for their various professions.

Our services 

We operated a total of 11.95 million miles over the year, an increase of 6% over the previous year. Our key measure of performance is the reliability and punctuality of our services. In the past year we operated 99.7% of our scheduled services, with 0.15% failure due to internal reasons, and 0.15% due to external reasons such as congestion, diversions and weather. We monitor our services for punctuality and 95.0% of our services operated within 5 minutes of their scheduled time. We continue to seek improvements by rescheduling services and through ongoing discussions with our local highway authorities.  We have made further improvements to services over the past year including the introduction of 7 new ADL E200 single deckers for service 12 in Gloucester. At the same time the frequency of the route was increased to every 10 minutes. During the year we also improved the frequency of buses on service 51 between Swindon and Cirencester plus introduced a new Sunday service. Popular Gold route 66 also saw more journeys with buses now linking Swindon, Faringdon and Oxford up to every 20 minutes. 
In February 2016 we opened our brand new Swindon depot. At a cost of around £3.5million, this state of the art facility will allow us to continue to increase the number of buses we operate in and around the town, whilst enabling us reduce our impact on the environment. The depot is fitted with around 100 solar panels, a bus wash that recycles water and a high tech energy consumption monitor.We covered 11.25 million miles, an increase of 1.3% over the previous year. 

Our key measure of performance is the reliability and punctuality of our services. In the past year, we operated 99.7% of our scheduled services. 95.6% of our services ran within five minutes of their scheduled times, with traffic congestion being the main reason for delay. 

We have made further improvements to services over the past year including the introduction of 10 brand new Scania E400 double deck vehicles onto the Swindon local network, 5 brand new Scania E400 double deckers onto service 94U in partnership with the University Of Gloucestershire and 19 brand new single deckers into Cheltenham which has reduced the average fleet age to just 3.5 years. 

We also started a new coach service between Gloucester and North Bristol in March 2015.

Our fares 

We offer value for money fares and ticket options  including standard single fares and unlimited travel zone tickets.

We also have a range of special tickets for students , young people and jobseekers . 

We increased fares in May 2015 by an average of 2%, below the rate of inflation. This helped us to cover our increased costs of pay and insurance, and to invest in new vehicles, premises and equipment.

Our Fleet

We operate a fleet of 248 buses and coaches, of which we replaced 7 over the past year with a total investment of about £1 million. 100 % of our fleet are low floor or wheelchair lift equipped to provide easy access for the elderly, disabled and buggies.

All our vehicles are inspected by our engineers at least every 3 weeks, and maintained to much higher standards than the legal minimum to ensure safety and comfort. Every vehicle is cleaned inside and outside daily.

Our environment 

per gallon. We are working to improve fuel consumption through technical measures, and all our drivers have completed a safe and fuel-efficient driving course. We have installed a telematic system called Green Road to all of our service vehicles. This system allows us to better manage our drivers’ performance both in terms of actual driving standard to improve customer comfort but also improve their driving style to achieve better fuel economies. These factors have led us to improve our fuel consumption by 4% during the past 12 months.

Stagecoach Group has recently achieved the Carbon Trust Standard for reducing energy consumption, and has announced a challenging CO2 reduction programme for the next 5 years.

All our fleet runs on low sulphur diesel, with a high-tech additive Envirox to reduce pollution and improve fuel consumption. Vehicle engines must meet increasingly higher Euro standards of exhaust emissions. 100% of our fleet meets at least the Euro 3 standard and 55% of our fleet meets the Euro 5 standard.

We recycle most of our waste, such as litter, used oils, filters, batteries, parts, etc. We also recycle the water we use to wash our vehicles every night.