NEWSFLASH: First finally pulls the plug on Southampton

First announced today that they are closing their City Red operation in Southampton. The final day of running will be Saturday 18th February 2023. All of their routes in the city will be withdrawn, with the exception of their Solent Ranger X4 and X5 services, which are run by their Fareham depot, which is unaffected by the move. 

Go Ahead's Bluestar, who will have a near monopoly, are already planning a network of replacement routes.

They will no doubt be helped by recent experience in Bournemouth, where Yellow Buses collapsed at the end of August and Go Ahead's More stepped in with 48 hours notice to successfully replace most of Yellow's routes. Bluestar have a bit more notice here, so there should be no gaps in service.

This move by First brings to an end almost 150 years of history, as their current operation is the direct successor of the Southampton Tramways Company, initially running horse-drawn trams from 1879 before coming under council control in 1898 and eventual conversion to electric trams. After the second world war, buses gradually replaced the trams, but the council-owned Southampton City Transport still had a monopoly on most routes within the city boundary. Buses outside of Greater London and Northern Ireland were deregulated in 1986, which meant competition was now allowed. In 1993, what was then known as Southampton CityBus was sold to its employees. They gave in to temptation in 1997, as First swooped in to wave a bunch of tenners under their noses and local ownership of our city's buses came to an end.

Since then, it's been a sad, long and slow decline.

The first major blow was in 2001, when the University of Southampton, unhappy at how First was serving their students and staff, decided to subsidise its own network of routes, which became Unilink. That made many First routes on the Portswood corridor become less and less viable. They were gradually cut back until they were eventually withdrawn (save for the Townhill Park route, which stumbles on), leaving a huge hole in their coverage of the city. When I was growing up in Swaythling in the 90s, First had a bus every 10 minutes to the city centre. Decades of mismanagement saw First eventually abandon Swaythling completely in September 2015.

Here's how First's network looked when this blog first launched back in 2009:

There have been some bizarre cutbacks, with First withdrawing routes, declaring them to be unviable, only for Bluestar to immediately pick them up and find them so viable that they are still running them to this day. Evidence: Bluestar 7 to Sholing and to Lordshill via Oakley Road, literally cobbled together over the years out of routes that First had simply given up on and stopped caring about.

Around this time, First lost interest in those routes that were kept running by council subsidy. Filling major gaps in the commercial network, most of them are now with Xelabus.

Here's their network in summer 2015:

By 2019, this was all that remained:

Much the same as their current network, which runs until 18th February 2023:

The main difference between the last two images is the addition of route 1 to Calmore which is a futile almost exact duplicate of Bluestar 12.

For more details of First's long and inevitable demise in our city, see this blog's previous posts. There's an index in the right-hand panel on the desktop version. We've been going since 2009, so we've managed to document a lot of the damage they've caused.

Looking to the future, Bluestar will now be in charge of the whole commercial bus network in Southampton. Good for the inter-validity of network tickets across the city. Not necessarily so good for the price of those tickets: with the absence of competition, Bluestar can and probably will raise fares significantly. We'll be watching and reporting.

We of course feel sorry for First's workforce, the best of which will almost certainly be picked up by Bluestar, and wish them well for the future. To First's management, who have never truly understood or cared about this city: good riddance.