When a resident contacted us about problems getting home by bus on Monday, we asked Stagecoach for an explanation. To their credit, they responded within a couple of hours explaining the situation.

With more First Bus strikes planned, it’s worth being aware that they can have a knock-on effect on Stagecoach services on certain routes.

All of our services along Oxford Road were extremely busy yesterday and at times it resulted in buses being unable to pick any more passengers up along Oxford Road. Another bus operator along Oxford Road, First bus, have an ongoing industrial dispute which meant their drivers who would normally be driving First bus services along Oxford Road were on strike yesterday hence the additional demands on our services.

Whilst First bus do not operate to Cheadle, passengers who were making shorter journeys between Manchester City Centre, Rusholme, Withington and Parrs Wood were using services such as the 42B hence this service became full and could not pick Helen’s daughter up. We knew of the impending strike and made arrangements to run additional buses along Oxford Road to provide additional capacity but at times this was not enough.

We reviewed our experiences of yesterday and in particular where we saw additional demand that we could not satisfy and will incorporate that into the further planned strike days by First bus.

Whilst we can never guarantee capacity we do our best to match capacity with demand and given yesterday was the first of a series of strike days announced by First bus we will learn from the experience for next time. At this stage First bus have announced strike days on every Monday in October subject to further negotiation with their trade unions.