Park and Ride Bus Services in The United Kingdom - Marketing and Liveries

Marketing and Liveries

Some high profile public authority backed schemes employ a common "park and ride" brand identity for their park and ride scheme, and project this brand commonly across a website, printed material, and even extending to the colour of the bus in an all-over livery. In a small number of cases, the branding concept does not use the "park and ride" moniker as the primary identity, opting for a different name, such as Centre Shuttle (Basingstoke), Quicksilver Shuttle (Leicester), Taunton Flyer and Park for Truro.

Smaller schemes may not necessarily employ specific marketing or dedicated all-over liveries where the passenger revenue does not justify this, such as in Stoke, Scarborough and York, although the term "park and ride" is a near-universally accepted term that is still applied to these smaller schemes on timetables and/or non-overall livery route branding. This also occurs in busier schemes where other high profile branding of local bus services exist, or the park and ride bus service is of the type that only consists of just another regular stop on the local services, rather than a dedicated shuttle type service, such as in Leeds and Nottingham.

Schemes will often be promoted in terms of being high quality, with bus drivers undergoing customer service training, and schemes attaining the government Charter Mark for excellence in public service quality, or the Park Mark award for implementing enhanced car park security features. Maidstone was the first scheme to obtain a Charter Mark.

All-over liveries are employed in single or multiple site schemes. Liveries often emphasise the green credentials of the scheme, such as Plymouth's cloud livery, or by using green as a base colour (Oxford, Winchester). Other schemes use a bold overall colour scheme to reinforce the brand with publicity material, such as the Chelmsford (jet-black), Maidstone (yellow), Canterbury (Silver base with green piping and decals), and Ipswich (pink), coordinated with the colours used in a website/publications. In some multiple site schemes, the all-over livery aspect is often extended to a distinct livery for each route/group of routes, such as the multi-colour coded schemes of Swansea, Norwich and Cambridge.

At peak times, standard liveried buses from the operator's main fleet may also supplement the service, or as replacement cover in the event of a dedicated vehicle's failure.