Bus Service · UK public procurement notice

Single Suppliers Intellectual Property Exclusive Rights; Additional Repeat Extension Partial Replacement; Urgency

The University of Salford has agreed to partner with Transport for Greater Manchester to provide a bus service that is required to support our students and staff, running between Adelphi Street/Oldfield Road to Media City, cover all three university campuses (Peel Park, Frederick Road and Media City Campus).

The service would be for a Monday to Friday 52 weeks of the year and until 9pm and from the first bus in the morning at 4am.

The 50 and 51 bus is a service that covers all key areas and is a service that our students, staff and visitors use and TfGM are the sole provider of this service.

TfGM would want to control the service within Greater Manchester and so no other company could run a bus service on this specific route, covering a key catchment area of our students and staff and visitors to the university campuses.

If TfGM was to change the route impacting users, the University would be consulted on this to ensure our students and staff remained supported. The agreement allows for easier scalability in that TfGM provide the service that can match our semester schedules or special events without requiring additional time or resources from both sides to deliver this.

By working with a provider who already runs the bus service allows the university to avoid high costs of owning, maintain and staffing its own fleet, or incurring other charges and the provider can offer discounted rate for consistent high volume service.

TfGM have trained staff, maintenance infrastructure and operational expertise ensuring a safe and reliable transportation, and with the route already being a wider route, no administrative burdens on the university to manage the route with planning, scheduling or fleet maintenance without the UoS having to put anything in place.

As part of our goals to support being sustainable in the local area, we wanted to support having less vehicles on the road and this service using existing networks, supports the ease of traffic and congestion, and hopefully encourages more public transit use from student and staff as they become more aware of the wider TfGM network.

TfGM can provide monthly reports based on audits and data analysis to ensure logging and tracking accuracy.