All Aboard the Mince Pie Bus

By Alison Holland

Published: January 13, 2025

Mince Pie Bus Canva.

“Have you heard about the Mince Pie Bus?”. It was a good opening line and certainly got people’s interest and attention at the local housing development - Hanwood Park’s - community Christmas party. I was there promoting our trial free shuttle bus service from the estate to the local Christmas market in Kettering town centre. 

Good Footfall and Travel Options to Town Centres
Getting good footfall into our town centres is a challenge that faces businesses and local authorities across the UK, not just at Christmas but any time of year. It needs a bit of creative thinking and to be able to offer something that inspires people to head for their local shops as well as make use of all the other opportunities their local town centre community can provide. But it is also about giving people better options on how to get around.

Why Invest in Free Town Centre Shuttle Buses?
Whilst local authorities or BIDs often offer ‘free parking’ in town centres they rarely look beyond the car mindset to invest in not just providing, but effectively organising and promoting, free green travel options. Of course also ‘there is no such thing as free parking’ - that space has a value and the opportunity cost of the car park revenue not received will dent the local authority’s finances. But that is a discussion for another day (along with the point that ‘free’ parking can mean over-demand on spaces with early-arriving shop workers filling up car parks. For every one shop worker or office worker parked free all day, the sacrifice could be five ‘pop to the shops’ Christmas shoppers who can’t get a space even if they are willing to pay).  This negative impact isn’t relevant when there is investment in shuttle buses. Anyway… back to mince pies.

Here at Brightwayz we love to trial some quite quirky ideas to improve travel options in our local area - in the hope that the things that work get replicated further afield whether by us or others.

Practical Planning for the Mince Pie Bus
The Mince Pie bus was a fully accessible, large bus with sitting and standing capacity provided by our friend Ka Li-Chun at Comm Mini Bus, a fellow local social enterpreneur. We fixed a route that would cover the whole estate and would loop round to go directly from the estate to and from the town centre. By not having pick ups outside the estate between the estate and the town centre (already served by buses) we were able to plan a consistent and reliable 30 minute complete loop. 

The service was free of charge and all passengers were given a ‘mince pie voucher’ to exchange for a mince pie once they got to the town centre Christmas market. This helped encourage people to actually come to the Christmas market which was just a five minute walk around the corner from the bus stop. The voucher also listed the return times so passengers could plan their return journey.

The service ran over two Saturdays to coincide with the Christmas markets, with a bus going in every quarter to and quarter past the hour and a bus returning every 30 minutes on the hour and the half hour - easy to remember!

Promotion
We promoted the service via facebook, the development’s Christmas community event, posters on the bus stop and emails to parents from the local primary school. The school is very ‘on board’ with promoting sustainable travel as they recently started our Brightwayz ST:EPS programme (Safer Travel: Enabling Pupils and Schools) to develop and implement lots of green travel measures and gain their Modeshift STARS accreditation.

Mince Pie Bus FB AD.

How Was it Funded?
The cost of the bus service was funded by North Northamptonshire Council as part of the Strategic Transport grant that they give us to use for trials like this. The promotional efforts were covered by our own general budgets.

How Successful Was it?

Over the two days 86 passengers used the service to travel into town. The attention it got locally from social media was really positive and we feel made people more aware of buses as a travel option in general (even if people can drive!). We survey passengers during the return journey:

  • Over 80% of passengers said they would use a shuttle bus again even if they had to pay £2 (now a bus on that route would be £2.50 if charged for).
  • 45% of surveyed passengers said they usually drive themselves to the town centre when they come.
  • Over 50% of passengers had a drink or snack out whilst in town. 
  • Nearly half bought something in the Christmas market.
  • Other popular activities included having a wander around town, buying from main market and buying from town centre shops. 

So the shuttle bus DOES help boost our local town centre economy and reduce car journeys.

Quotes we had from our feedback survey of passengers included:

  • “Thank you for providing this since the bus stops have been installed our little boy has wanted to go on a bus! Today he had the chance! Thank you.”
  • “Lovely idea with the mince pie thing. Went to town with wife and child. Kid enjoys a bus ride.”
  • “Took my daughter for her first bus ride ;)”.
  • “Nice friendly driver.”
  • “Good service, would like to see it regularly.”
  • “Just need more advertisement as pretty great idea.” (yes we will learn from this comment and allow more than a week to plan and promote the next one more widely and to older age groups too such as local secondary school age pupils!)

Future Plans
It would be great to have a regular, reliable shuttle bus service that served the whole development and the other areas ‘forgotten’ by existing bus networks. That is a higher level funding/political issue. Meanwhile we can do what we can here by trying out some more quirky themes for shuttle buses to special events. We will plan this with local partners and hope to go beyond Kettering to serve other communities in our county for their special events any time of year.  And of course we would love those with the resources in other counties to be inspired to do the same in their areas.

Mince Pie Bus. Dez at Christmas market. Passengers on Mince Pie Bus.

Here at Brightwayz social enterprise we love to provide information and tips to help you, your colleagues, friends and family travel in safe, active, sustainable ways for everyday journeys.

Our unique range of products is here to help support your active travel campaigns and 100% of profits from sales is ploughed back to support the work we do. Take a look at our range here and find something to help you inspire others to travel in good ways.
 

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