Wightbus - Operations

Operations

Initially, the main work Wightbus undertook was on school journeys. As many settlements on the Island are small, while most are large enough to support at least one primary school, there are few state-run high schools (and even fewer private ones). Because of the Island's 3-tier school system whilst Wightbus operated, there were also middle schools, which were located in most towns but not in any of the many villages. Because of this, there was an extensive 'network' of school bus routes, all operated under contract from the Council, to get a few primary school pupils from remote areas to the nearest larger settlement, to transport middle school pupils between nearby towns, and to move large numbers of high school students, sometimes halfway across the County.

A few of these school routes were not available to the general public and operated with destinations such as 'School Bus' with no route number, however many were available for anyone to use, showing a route number and appearing in the Council's own Public Transport Handbook.

In March 2008 Southern Vectis revised its school bus timetable to include several journeys already operated by the Wightbus school network. The row was believed to be sparked when council bosses and managers at Southern Vectis could not agree on how to run the school transport service in March. As the extra services were costing the council around £400,000 a year to run and were running empty anyway they were discontinued from September 2008.

When the buses were not in use for school journeys, and in the last year of the companies operations when it no longer operated school services, some were used on the handful of normal routes the company ran in various rural and estate locations that would not be commercially viable for the main operator, Southern Vectis to run. This initially started with Wightbus taking on a much larger share of evening and weekend services from October 2004 as tendering these services to Southern Vectis would be much more expensive and would have to result in service cuts. Eventually however, all these services were timetabled separately from any of Southern Vectis' services. Some of these (notably the 16, which had a dedicated vehicle running in a modified Wightbus livery) are operated during school journey periods and so additional buses were required beyond those purely for school purposes.

In the period of Cowes Week until 2008, Wightbus ran the "Sailbus", a free route which linked the Ward Avenue car parks with Baring Road, Castle Hill, Parade, Queen's Road, along the sea front to Gurnard, Woodvale Road, Baring Road, Crossfield Avenue (for the heliport and the coach setting down point) and the main events of Cowes for visitors. This used three spare buses - not working due to Cowes Week being in the school Summer holidays - to maintain a five minute frequency. The sailbus was the only public vehicle permitted onto the Parade during Cowes Week. However, the lack of a sponsor for the 2009 event and the Isle of Wight Council no longer receiving income from the Northwood House car park because it doesn't operate it, caused the council to instead reach agreement with Southern Vectis to run the service with a £1 per journey fare.

• Bus number 5872, a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter/UVG in Ryde.

• Bus number 5825, a Mercedes-Benz 811D/UVG CityStar in Newport bus station.

• thumb|right|250px|Bus number 5846, a Dennis Dart/UVG UrbanStar operating the Sailbus service amongst the Cowes Week regatta.