COMMENT
Seven years ago, as his company reached the 30th anniversary of its birth, Stagecoach founder Sir Brian Souter expressed the view to this magazine that the Mercedes-Benz 709D minibus was ‘the most cost-effective bus of all time’.
The point he was making then was that the drive for low-floor accessibility — a perfectly laudable objective — was pushing Stagecoach and the rest of the industry to buy appreciably more expensive vehicles for the routes served by 709Ds. In its case, the hardware of choice was the Optare Solo.
His concern was that these more expensive vehicles could push marginally commercial routes over a financial cliff. Those that would still break even or turn a small profit would get their new Solos, as would those where passenger numbers were rising, but those pushed into loss would be given up and left for local authorities to support if they deemed them essential.
There was a greater chance of councils having the budgets and being prepared to spend them on those routes in 2010 than there is today, and with the toxic combination of increasing traffic congestion, low motoring costs, changes in shopping and banking habits, and the arrival of disruptive travel technology like Uber …
