Jonathan Welch continues his conversation with the Tower Transit team who keep Jersey’s LibertyBus operation running and hears about plans for bespoke new buses and electrification
In the first part of this feature, I spoke to LibertyBus parent company Tower Transit’s Managing Director Samuel Ribeiro and Operations Director Sam Greaves about the highs and lows of running an island bus service, looking at the background to the company, and how Tower Transit has helped to provide an improved offer to islanders and visitors whilst creating better value for Jersey’s government. This time, we take a closer look at some of the operational aspects. Building on earlier comments about customer satisfaction levels, service management is another important factor, Samuel said. “We have monthly meetings with the government,” he explained.
“There’s no us-versus-them scenario. We look at what we can do together, For example, although we are not contracted to run any more mileage than what we have in our contract, in the summer, when you have all those visitors in and it’s a rainy day, most of the people instead of going to the beach or the zoo might decide to go to the Jersey War Tunnels. When this happens, in our bus station we can see there’s extra demand so we just put on additional services. We’re not required to do it, but if we have a spare bus available, we’ll bring it in and put it out. We want to deliver that good service.
“I know there’s enough demand for me to fill a bus, and I’m capturing that demand because some of those guys might decide to not take the bus, or to just stay in their hotel and not take the public transport at all. That’s not a good thing for the industry of the island. We normally operate 104% of our contracted mileage annually; this is higher especially in the summer, because we deliver more mileage than we’re contracted to do on days like that.
“The contract is there to regiment the minimum standards but we believe that we have to deliver beyond that.”
Practical issues
Turning to the topic of staffing, I wondered whether the island environment posed any challenges. “Actually, finding staff for the island hasn’t been particularly difficult,” Sam said. “We have a relatively robust recruitment process, mainly because the operation has such a good reputation on the island. The idea of coming to work for LibertyBus, whether it’s in a driver capacity or any other support role is a stronger draw than in the UK.
“There will always be issues in terms of the cost of living, which is very high in Jersey, and that’s a challenge because you need to make sure that wages are such that people can actually afford to work for you and live on the island. But there’s a real community feel in Jersey and people find a way to make it work. You see that from the quality of the customer service feedback that Samuel’s already mentioned.
“We attract good staff, and they deliver quality services for us that creates another feedback loop. Because the service quality is great, people want to work for us and travel on the bus. We’ve currently got more people waiting to come into our operation than we’ve got positions, so we don’t have a recruitment issue at all at present.”
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