Following my abandonment of route 66 last month in favour of my Citroen Saxo, I wrote to First Eastern National in Chelmsford commenting on the shortcomings (in my view) of the service. I received a prompt response from Colin Riches saying that my e-mail had been passed to their Operations Manager for his comments. It's apparent that the Operations Manager has no comment to make, or at least none that he will share with me.
It's rather poor customer focus if you want my opinion (and by clicking on Southbus Comment, I might be forgiven for thinking that you do). It's a shame because bus operators could learn a lot from their customers, individual comments possibly being far more useful than the MAP surveys of the late 1970s carried out by the National Bus Company, which famously omitted the question "where do you want to go?"
First Great Eastern (the local train operator) are currently running an advertising campaign on Anglia. Each segment has the look of a badly shot home video and concludes with the legend "First Great Eastern - Transforming Travel". This can be taken to mean a number of things, some of them not particularly positive.
My brother (visiting Colchester for the first time) made the error of getting on a First Great Eastern train unaware that his ticket permitted travel on Anglia trains only. As the train approached Colchester North, the ticket inspector appeared. Discovering that he had maliciously foregone the opportunity of riding on a non-stop, air-conditioned fed-and-watered-at-your-seat train in favour of one which creaked to a halt at every milk siding en-route, a penalty fare notice was issued. This was not a demand for the First Great Eastern single fare but a penalty equivalent to double that amount (well, it would have been double if the ticket inspector had been capable of basic addition).
I think most people would agree that a penalty fare system is a good thing. However, where the system fails to discriminate between those who have made an error (e.g. they have a ticket for the journey but not the operator) and those who set out to avoid payment, it will not have universal support. The way First Great Eastern's system is set up appears to be a licence to print money. Is this what First Great Eastern mean by transforming travel?
The other way in which First Group have transformed travel is by abandoning the use of rear destination blinds (as have fellow Colchester bus moguls Arriva). Older readers will remember how, when one person operation was introduced in the 1960s/1970s, it was considered too arduous a task for the driver to walk to the back of the bus and change the number. Many provincial operators not only stopped using rear number displays but panelled over the aperture. With the advent of deregulation and a more customer focussed approach, rear number displays made a comeback. However, they are now disappearing again (Arriva Colchester have even panelled over some of theirs) - presumably in this brave new world, operators have decided that they now have the customer base they require and now wish to deny people the opportunity of identifying the bus they have just missed?
Perhaps this is also the reason that First Eastern National's Operations Manager hasn't replied to my e-mail?
Abandoned. First Eastern National Volvo B6/Alexander on service 66 in Osborne
Street, 27 April 2002Nigel Chatfield
This page was updated on May 08, 2008