Like many operators, I heard the news in 2019 that I would need vehicles that would comply with PSVAR. In fact, the local authority specified that certain home-to-school routes needed to have PSVAR compliant vehicles. Along my routes on rural lanes, I decided that deploying a passenger lift from a coach would take too long and cause gridlock as cars start piling up in front and behind, so I bought a couple of buses.
It was an expense I could have done without, but at least I could now use vehicles for rail replacement work. Roll on another couple of years, and now those buses don’t comply for rail replacement work as they don’t have the interior destination displays and next-stop announcements soon required.
Now I find out that those buses don’t even meet the government’s most basic standards for PSVAR — because my trade body notes that buses don’t meet the minimum requirement. It says that every operator doing schools now needs at least one coach — a PSVAR-compliant bus won’t do!
Now I find myself being told off by DVSA because I haven’t trained my drivers in PSVAR. As if six-monthly specialist checks on passenger lifts that we never need to deploy aren’t enough, we now need to train all drivers (who are never likely to take a wheelchair user as the school has several floors, no lift of its own, and so is itself unsuitable for students with mobility issues) in their use.
In this age of austerity, where local authorities are going bankrupt and operator numbers are diminishing, why are we still being forced to waste vast amounts of money trying to fix a problem that doesn’t really exist?
Name and address supplied.
