Stagecoach South East has partnered with Thanet District Council and Kent County Council to launch a new initiative with a new enforcement officer to tackle illegal parking and improve the reliability of bus services across Thanet.
A newly created Civil Enforcement Officer role, funded through Kent County Council’s Bus Service Improvement Plan (BSIP), is focusing on 26 parking hotspots that regularly delay buses and affect passenger journeys. The role is managed collaboratively between Stagecoach and Thanet council.
In the first two weeks of the role being active, 66 Penalty Charge Notices have been issued and 88 vehicles moved on from bus routes
Joel Mitchell, Managing Director at Stagecoach South East, said: “This partnership is a great example of how we can work together to make a real difference for local communities. Illegal parking causes significant delays for our customers and frustration for our drivers. By creating this role, we’re already seeing positive results and improved bus reliability.”
Cllr Heather Keen, Cabinet Member for Communities at Thanet council, said: “Illegal parking has long been a concern for both drivers and passengers. This partnership approach is already making a real difference in our community, helping to keep key areas clear and improving the reliability of bus journeys across Thanet.”
A Kent County Council spokesperson added: “We’re pleased to support this initiative through our Bus Service Improvement Plan funding. Ensuring our bus network runs smoothly is vital to encouraging more people to choose public transport. Early results show the impact this collaboration is having on keeping routes clear and buses on time.
“The CEO role also helps to ensure that the bus improvements delivered through our BSIP Thanet Loop Improvement project can realise their full benefit for buses.”
The role will see particular attention focused on Thanet Loop Improvement Project routes and aims to reduce delays, improve punctuality, and make bus travel more reliable for passengers.
Most Stagecoach delays are caused by them dishonestly claiming ‘this service has been delivered earlier’, when the people who are waiting at the stop have seen the bus go in the opposite direction shortly before the turnaround and know that it has just been cancelled at short notice so thd driver can catch up on his break.
Don’t bother complaining, Stagecoach don’t respond to complaints either.
Yes, seen that many times.
I’d be more impressed if they stopped axeing rural bus routes!
Brilliant idea 💡 long may it last ,just need to sort out the rest of the parking on yellow lines around Thanet and Kent ,people just making it hard to move around
Should have been done years ago under the Quality Bus Partnership.
Not just yellow lines though is it? Pavement parking has quadrupled and so has Pedestrian crossing zig zag lines which if caught leaving your vehicle on will see you with £100 fine and 3 penalty points. These can both be handled by Parking Enforcement officers within local authorities as well as the police but very rarely do. Then you have the idiots who park delivery vans and cars in the bus stops causing issues for buses who have to block the road or miss the stop, all because some selfish lazy ass wants to get to the shop nearby and doesn’t want to walk. This is prominent in Northdown Road, Cliftonville by the Thanet Express shop. It would make a difference if this new officer actually issued some PNC’s there for once.
I use the Loops virtually every Monday to Friday. Most of the time they’re pretty regular. Unfortunately, every now and then – last evening included – I have to wait 50 minutes for a service that is supposedly every 10 to 15 minutes. It used to happen more often in previous years, but since @Stagecoach ‘s promise to run more Loops earlier this year, the service has in general improved. The app. was no help either. It showed that every Loop service for the rest of the day had been cancelled!
However, what really grinds my gears is that there is an obviously standard excuse. “Road works!”
Now, dear Stagecoach. Please correct me if I’m incorrect and tell me HOW I am incorrect.
If a Loop, whichever direction it is travelling, leaves the bus station every ten to fifteen minutes. There should be a Loop stopping at each bus stop on the route every ten to fifteen minutes. No matter the incidence of roadworks. As each and every bus will be delayed for the same amount of roadworks, traffic lights, passenger embarkation and disembarkation, etc? Nobody should ever have to wait at any bus stop in either direction for a Loop for more than ten to fifteen minutes. Should they?
So. Stagecoach. What is the true reason that I am occasionally having to wait up to an hour for a Loop?
Think yourself lucky. When a hourly bus doesn’t turn up, you’re really f-cked! This happens often with the 36 from Herne Bay to Thanet.
The difference with that Peter is this.
The Loop caters for delivering and returning parents and children to schools all around Thanet. Along with employees to the industrial estates, Westwood Cross and the shopping centres around the island. Things that cannot be substituted for with a train. Unlike Herne Bay, Westgate, Birchington, Sturry, Sandwich or, Canterbury journeys.
Whilst I acknowledge other towns and districts are important. The Loop provides a very specific and irreplaceable service for thousands of Thanetians daily. A fact that should really be uppermost in the minds of the schedulers at Thanet’s bus garage. One of many places along the route that is also not served by trains!
Of course, though these days there is only 1 bus per hour from Minnis Bay (where there’s no station) – and they have to gt onto a 2nd bus to get to QEQM or Westwood Cross, while St. Nicholas village centre only has one bus each way per day now!
It took three buses to get from Ramsgate to Cliftonville last week and an hour and 20 mins, RIDICULOUS
I have sympathies with both views. It is not true that Thanet is not served by the railways, as there are 6 stations in quite a small area,compared to one or at best two in other conurbations.The loop is one of the few private industry initiatives, that wasn’t removing parts of the network. Rural routes are being cut, even though the BSIP, that Joel Mitchell harks on about is pouring money into bus services at a scale not seen before. Less than the railways, true, but more than the DFT has funded in the past.
The Loop vehicles are now 5 years+ of age, and this time they ought to be replaced with electric vehicles, that will do better on the hills, and will cut pollution, while having a longer life.
This scheme might do something at the margin,but what is really needed is more bus lanes.I find it funny that the present incumbents at KCC who advocates of the war against the motorist theory, are promoting this.There is £90m in the BSIP kitty at KCC, plus quite a bit of unspent cash for capital projects in the KCC BSIP. How about some better bus stops with electronic information boards, so Harry and his fellow passengers know when the next Loop bus is due.
There’s 8 railway stations in Thanet. As I keep telling you George, you really do need to get out more (you’ll be shocked to learn that steam engines have been replaced by electric!).
7.I refuse to call that useless car centric monstrosity at Parkway a station.
You always complain that you don’t get out because of the lack of toilets, so maybe you might want to scale down on how someone spends their life.
Yes, I miss steam,and how we used to value our trams,trains and buses.Now we have bean counters and politicians designing transport systems.
I DO get out, but mostly out of Thanet (or I piddle in public).
How do you wash your hands afterwards? Or don’t you bother either things like that?
I always carry clean water and moist wipes with me. Very handy if I go near Ramsgate.
How do you keep slim and fit?
Thanet Parkway is very useful for those living in Cliffsend area and for those wanting to park a car at the station. Especially for those in all the houses being built in that area and around Westwood Cross.
Indeed. I’m sure it already gets far more passengers than Dumpton, possibly Minster too. I just wish there were through trains from Birchington!
The grid is not up to supporting a fleet of electric buses and probably won’t be for a long time. The current Loop buses are not that old for a bus and meet Euro 6 emission standards.
Well firstly, how do you know? Secondly if I was suggesting all of the network be decarbonised at once,you might have a point, and in any case Coventry has decarbonised, so are you saying Thanet can’t? We have to start somewhere, and the loop is a good place to start.
As for Euro 6, that’s old tech, and these buses are run hard, uphill and down dale, intensively takes a toll of a diesel bus, which is why Stagecoach replace them after 5 years.It’s a good place for electro tech.Faint hearts, especially those who might harbour a faint hope of a fossil fueled future, throw in these technical difficulties, shall I be kind enough to term them, as a way of putting off the evil day.The grid is being rebuilt as we speak, and why would it be a long time? If KCC have their way it would be a long time, because it’s run by climate change deniers.
I say again if it can be done everywhere else why not here? Are you saying that somehow that Thanet is an outlier? Because I don’t. I mean Hereford has electric buses.Hereford for God’s sake.
Thanet and East Kent always gets rubbish policies, from rubbish administrations, it’s time that East Kent and Thanet received a decent deal.
There’s hardly any hills of note in Thanet, particularly on the route of The Loop.
PC, May I suggest to you about 4 I can already note right this second. The point around to the harbour in Ramsgate, there’s the hill going up to the six bell’s childrens centre before Cecil in Margate, there’s also that hill/incline leading into Cliftonville down from Cecil and last but not least another hill around Ramsgate High St. I know full well there is a few more on the loop route, however these are the ones I take note of.
If this 63 year old with a dodgy ticker can cycle up them (as I did very recently), then they’re hardly a strain on modern buses. You need to get fit, son.
Excellent. I rely on the Loop to whisk me around Thanet
Checksfield is ignoring the struggle of the buses going up the hill to Ramsgate or up and down Madeira walk,and there other places like getting in and out of Broadstairs. As always he is being obtuse. He ought to know the typography of the North Downs, that’s why they are called the North downs. It’s flat in parts of Thanet,but to get to the flat lands you have to hill climb.Not the Alps I grant you, but steep enough for short distances.You only have to hear the AD300s having their engines thrashed to get up those hills at sufficient speed.The drivers complained that the engines were short on power when they were first introduced 5 years ago. A thrashed engine, and an ageing vehicle, are two of the causes of engine fires, and Stagecoach has had a few of them in the past, because their fleet is everyone’s cast offs.
Sometimes Chumpsfield is his correct moniker.To achieve the 15 minute ideal frequency of service, the vehicles are driven hard to maintain the schedule.Historically, provincial bus companies always bought vehicles of a lower spec than London.The original Routemaster had a bigger engine and a more advanced construction, than the Regents supplied to East Kent,built by the same company AEC. The reason why London has had problems with reliability in the past, is when they buy buses of the peg ,such as the Atlantean and Fleetline, which were fine elsewhere.The only exception being the Metrobus. If you ride on the Borismaster or new Routemaster,you will find it immeasurably superior to anything run by Stagecoach SE, and some of them are 9/10 years old.
If Stagecoach SE pocket the subsidy money and do not invest, the service will struggle to be acceptable.We have seen enough of sweating the assets, now is the time to rebuild the network.Afterall Kent is as populous as Northern Ireland, yet we do not have a single electric bus operating in the county.The only EV at Stagecoach SE is Joel Mitchell’s BMW.
Well I can still cycle up all those, unlike in parts of Canterbury and Dover. Probably Thanet’s toughest climb for cyclists is coming up from Minster.
Bring back the No 9.
Definitely! Also the No. 8 continuing to Broadstairs and the No. 36 all the way to Whitstable. Even when not scrapped entirely, there’s been a gradual reduction of Thanet buses over the last few years (except The Loop).
Would be nice if a loop system was set up from Birchington along Canterbury Rd through Ceciil Sq and then rear part of QEQM along St Peters Rd along Westwood Rd past Asda and into Westwood depot
I’d love a REAL Thanet Loop, incorporating all the villages. That way, George, Rees & co. could get out more!
I am outside and waiting for a bus.At least in Thanet you can have some form of debate, where as in Swale, toilet smashing and balaclava wearing is their form of political discourse apparently.
I feel a lot safer in Faversham than I do in Ramsgate and Margate. Jump on a train, its lovely there.
(and put your phone away, it’ll get knicked!)
If anyone tried they might regret doing so,but it is as safe in Thanet as anywhere and at least no one is letting rockets bounce off the sides of buses as in some parts of the West Midlands.
To get back to the point,yes going after anti social motorists might help at the margin, but really we need a plan to sort out the network.This was supposed to be done under the Bus Service Improvement Plan or BSIP, but instead all that happened was KCC paying off Stagecoach SE and Arriva every time they threatened route closure. This is like Aethelred paying off the Vikings a 1000 years ago.
I have far better things to do than check the internet when I’m out. Talking to people for example (I have no smartphone, and nor do I want one!).
Easily sorted elsewhere just use the bus mounted cameras to report and fine every parking / traffic infringement.
We seem to off the real story of parking that stops busses accessing stops and delays routes. Cliftonville school parents always park in the 8a bus stop at Laleham Corner. They are a menace for those living in and around any school in Thanet. Yellow lines mean please park here for some drivers. Time the wardens did some actual work around Thanet.
The real problem that most have missed. A shortage of Traffic Wardens, which is a TDC problem. So, to most of the above comments A.T.D. ?