Evening Telegraph (First Edition)
A letter to Xplore Dundee
TODAY, I sent this letter to the owners of Xplore in Dundee:
Dear Messrs Sandy and James Easdale,
I write in my capacity as a columnist of Dundee’s Evening Telegraph but also as a loyal customer of our city’s bus service for over 25 years, which is now under your oversight.
A resilient local bus service is a critical buckle in the belt of the local economy. As well as providing vital jobs for local people, it transports workers to their places of employment, pupils and students to outlets of education, people feeling poorly to GP or hospital appointments and pensioners going to the nearest bank because a local branch has closed down.
Overall, there has been little about Dundee’s bus service which has given me cause for complaint. It has not been an unblemished era of service, but what Dundee citizens experienced before your acquisition in 2020 was an undisputably operationally superior service.
At this point, I have never been less optimistic about Dundee buses, an optimism you have fed with your public criticism of a service you claimed in 2021 via local media had “… been going backwards for the last 10 or 15 years.”
To the contrary, since 2020, we have seen strike action by dissatisfied employees, many of whom have left because of awful split-shifts, cancelled buses due to driver shortages, replacement drivers drafted in from other local authorities and taking wrong routes in a city with which they were clearly unfamiliar. There is an app with bus times that do not correspond with actual services, customers can see no buses for an hour and then two within minutes of one another as well as packed single-deckers on busy bus routes and empty double-deckers on quiet ones.
My disappointment with your leadership, or lack thereof, is such that I have written two columns about this. In the first, dated November 6 2023, I stated: “I have never known
a more disorganised service, for such a protracted period of time, than the one Xplore currently run. The last two years have been a shambles by comparison to that which preceded it.”
Every one of the numerous emails and messages I received from your customers exhibits
universal agreement. I am yet to receive one endorsement of your service.
Dundonians have historically seen manufacturing come and go, de-industrialisation followed by deprivation, austerity replace prosperity as well as businessmen who overpromise and under-deliver.
We, therefore, are a sceptical bunch not easily taken in by over-optimism.
However, you have neither recognised this nor discouraged optimism. In fact, you have done the exact opposite by claiming you would “… bring it back to where it should be” through “better buses and (a) better service”. Gentlemen, you have failed but you need not go on failing.
Please come back to Dundee, spend time on your buses at peak time, talk anonymously to customers and even those willing to put their heads above the parapet and call for improvements. Then, having observed discrepancies, please implement simple changes which would provide an improved service and enjoy the rewards of a grateful customer base.
I look forward to your response.
Yours sincerely, Ewan Gurr.