Yesterday fbb was examining bus services to and from Ham, a small town in the Somme département of France, an investigations provoked by a series of photos sent by chum Dave, the lorry driver from Sheffield.
We learned that all four services (50, 51, 53 and 53) are essentially school buses which run to the Lycée Professionel which is on the northern edge of town.
For non-scholars the bus serves "République" which fbb assumes is an abbreviated street name, Boulevard de la République. And there is an "Oiseau Bleu" bus ...
... waiting for its next departure, having (presumably) nipped round a little turning loop at the end of the road.
fbb could find no sign of bus stop or timetable frame anywhere along that thoroughfare. And it is some distance from the ton centre and nowhere near the station. Integrated Transport - pas pour les Hamois!
But those four services ran historically under the auspices of the Somme Département and Ham is near to the border of two other areas. To the south is Oise.
Here fbb could find only one service, numbered 55.
This runs due south from Ham via Guiscard to Noyon ...
... where it serves three education establishments ...
... and the station.
Thus we might expect a similar school-centred timetable as the others.
And we would be right.
We are invited to use ...
... to simplify our "movements".
Simplify? Here is the on-line route map ...
... and here is just a chunk of the timetable that this piece of cartographical incomprehensibility attempts to illustrate. Here are the morning departures from Ham.
fbb has had to omit the detailed stop names to fit the table into the blog space, but you will get the idea. The 0647 (GREEN) runs six days a week when the schools/colleges are open and this run is replaced by 0650 (PURPLE) when education takes a break. Note that the pattern of village calls is quite different during the holidays.
Confusing eh?
And what is "TAD"?
These "vacation" journeys have to be pre-booked before 1400 the day BEFORE travel; for Monday that means before 1400 on Friday. Super convenient, isn't it?
There is a list of holiday dates but hitting the right "middle of the day" time set must be a nightmare.
Was Oise service 55 the bus that Dave photographed during his brief sojourn at Ham station?
Hey ho! Perhaps things are not as bad as they could be in the UK?
Perhaps those who adhere to the "it's all much better across the channel" idea should try travelling by bus in and around Ham?
A bit more sanity tomorrow : Saturday 18th Novmber
As you have found with your investigations about Ham, the role of the bus is rather different to that in the UK. Before WW2 there used to be quite an extensive network of routes but many of these were cut back when the SNCF was formed in 1938 as a legal protective measure for the struggling railway. Even then most routes only operated once or twice per day, sometimes with extras on market days. Routes are planned and operated on a per department basis, often meaning that cross border travel is difficult. The move to a more regional basis should, in theory, mean slightly more joined up opportunities. Certainly longer distance services have been discontinued where the train provides an alternative.
ReplyDeleteI understand that there is a legal requirement to operate school services. However, above that the demographics mean that there is less requirement than would be assumed using a British model. A couple of years ago I took a 1730 departure from Mulhouse to Colmar. At that time of day, between two major towns with a big spread of villages in between, you might expect a reasonable load. I was the only passenger for the entire journey.
The naming of bus stops (or other transport modes) can quite often give what appear to be strange or unrelated names. It is not necessarily a shortening of the name. There are many fewer stops overall. A village may only have one and the gap between them is much greater than we are used to, so it can be misleading to try to make a direct comparison with over here.
Much of my bus travel in France has been in the eastern part of the country, but my timetable collection, stretching back over 90 years, would suggest that is quite typical.