Working Together to Improve Your Bus Services
Centro-WMPTA and Travel West Midlands have created a bus partnership to demonstrate the extent to which improved performance and customer satisfaction can be achieved through a voluntary partnership agreement. The project has the goal of increasing passenger usage on the routes involved by 10% in 12 months.
The Voluntary Partnership Agreement will transform six key bus routes through Birmingham, Walsall and West Bromwich to give passengers faster, cleaner and more frequent services.
Passengers on the routes will, for the first time, be able to get refunds if the high standards of punctuality committed to by Centro-WMPTA and Travel West Midlands in a Passenger Charter are not met.
The six services that have been upgraded are:
The Partnership Agreement for the six routes was signed at a press launch on 2nd August 2007 by Geoff Inskip, Chief Executive of Centro-WMPTA and Richard Bowker, Chief Executive of the National Express Group, the parent company of Travel West Midlands
Services 1, 377 and 451 benefit from the introduction of refurbished low floor wheel chair accessible buses to replace the current mainly non-low floor vehicles
Services 934, 993 and 997l benefit from new low floor coach seated buses built to a higher than normal standard of passenger comfort. The users of the 997l also benefit from totally different looking vehicle interiors including leather seating.
All six routes benefit from real time passenger information displays with at least 25% of all of stops having electronic passenger displays and all stops will have SMS text real time information available.