This week, we needed to do a big grocery shop in preparation for Saturday but also just for general house items. We don't have a car, so we decided to try out PickMeUp, an on-demand local bus service that largely serves Central, East and South Oxford.
When you create an account and log in, you are greeted by a screen which shows your current location and you have to choose your pickup point. Once a pickup point is selected (you can actually just set a pickup point as outside of your house) the app decides the best point for you to be picked up from, and you will be told when a bus will be able to come and pick you up.
We first tried the app at around 15:00, which was a bit of a problem as that is around the time that schools finish. So the app actually would not process our request for at least 30 minutes until there were free seats on buses. So this is a point worth noting when trying it out. Eventually I got a notification saying that 'Marion' our driver will be able to pick us up in 12 minutes. The app recommended us walking to the end of the road to be picked up.
Once we were picked up, the app draws out the route that it will take and you can track the vehicle on the map, with an ETA continuously being updated as to when you will arrive at your destination. We were the only passengers on the bus, however, we should have been joined with 3 other passengers, who were actually waiting for us at the same pick up point. However, they were not allowed on as the driver said that she already declined their ride. The problem was the the user did not realise that their 'pick up location' was further up the road. The bus driver said she should have paid attention to her phone in order to ensure she was collected from the right location. It seems like the app does not allow for changing your pick up location, so in this instance she could not ride and would have to rebook onto another journey with another bus. This is one of the negatives to PickMeUp in contrast to the bus.
However, we did make our journey across (albeit with a bit of traffic!) And the journey was smooth. It was interesting chatting to our driver as she was the first person to ride the first PickMeUp bus. She is now working full-time for them, after previously working with the Oxford Bus Company on a double decker bus. She prefers her experience driving the minibuses as they are more cosy and you get to know people on it better. She said that there has been great interest and they recently extended their opening hours.
In light of using the service, I would definitely recommend it for one off journeys around Oxford that would require more than two bus journeys or a taxi-ride. At £2.50 per journey, the price is comparable to a bus and you would make a saving if you were taking several bus journeys instead or a taxi. If you use a referral code for your first ride (which we did) you get £5 credit automatically. I would use it again as well, as I don't think I can cycle with this much shopping:
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