Happy New Year to all our passengers, friends and supporters – thank you so much for your support this last year and here’s to 2020!
Here are some of the highlights of the last 12 months:
January: One of our new electric buses being assembled in the factory
February: On 17th February we ran all our services with electric buses for the first time ever. It was a nail-biting finish – Pete was the last one back, returning to the depot with his dashboard showing the battery at 0%!
March: We don’t know who Jezza is but he seems to have enjoyed his day out on our buses and his Facebook post made us all very happy 😃
April: We made some quite major changes to our services, replacing route 56 with extended routes 47 and 52, thus creating new links to the hospital and the marina from the west and north of the city
May: We ran our second Walking Holiday in May 2019, along the Dorset coast from Weymouth to Sandbanks. Here’s a tired but happy team at Sandbanks at the end. This year we’re going to the Isle of Wight; click on the photo if you’d like to come!
June: Here’s one of our new electric buses on its final journey of the day, from Woodingdean to Brighton Marina
July: Two of our new buses being put to bed at the end of the day. Each one gets washed, swept and mopped and then put on charge.
August: Our Sunday Walks continued to be very popular this last year; here we are at the Bluebell Railway 🚂
September: 2019 was the busiest yet for coach hire! Here we have a lovely group of Happy Campers on the way to the Happy Startup Summer Camp 🏕😁
November: Our depot at dusk. Last autumn we bought two more, secondhand, electric buses; here they are on charge on the left hand side of the workshop
So what does the future hold?
This year we plan to complete the transition to an all-electric bus fleet, powered by renewable energy, and share our experience with as many people as we can; to encourage other operators to transition to zero-emissions vehicles powered by renewables, and to empower those without adequate bus services to set up their own, using our systems.
We are currently working on an online investment tool which we are going to launch this year, which enables members of the community to easily invest in new electric buses, and keep track of their investments online. We are going to offer this to groups anywhere in the UK, to use to raise their own funds for new projects, and use our experience, systems and software to help them to do so.
Do you know anyone who might benefit from this? Please let us know!
Happy New Year 😊