IDENTITY PARADEWe start a new feature this month in which creative agency The MHD Partnership imagines what sort of livery a defunct operator might adopt were it still around today. It starts with Dart Buses of Paisley.

56 www.busesmag.com November 2015

T he MHD Partnership is a creative agency that specialises in public transport. It has over 30 years’ experience in creating route and

ticket promotions, service branding, internal communication, livery designs, industry reports and franchise bid documents for some of the UK’s leading operators, including First Bus.

It believes that public transport branding, advertising and in particular liveries are way behind most other industries and is keen to promote the idea that they can both look good and be practical, while pushing creative boundaries and remaining recognisable.

So to do that, and have a bit of fun, it is producing a series of exclusive designs for Buses, taking a defunct operator from around the UK and reinventing it for the roads of 2015 and 2016.

First of these is Dart Buses, the Paisley-based operator that was founded in June 1996 and went into liquidation just over five years later, on 26 October 2001 — the 15th anniversary to the day Britain’s bus services outside London were deregulated.

Dart was set up by three former managers of Clydeside Buses — by then part of the British Bus group — with secondhand Mercedes-

Benz 608D minibuses, the first 20 of which came from Stagecoach. The livery was dark blue and white, with the blue applied to the front and skirts.

The company’s name had nothing to

do with a certain highly successful Dennis single-decker but gave it a non-geographical identity that could take the business into other parts of west central Scotland.

‘It suited the idea of direct routes with minibuses darting around at a high frequency,’ managing director Alistair Mackie told Buses when we profiled the two-year-old business 17 years ago.

A change of strategy in 1997 saw Clydeside (soon renamed Arriva Scotland West) acquire a 25% shareholding in Dart and trade some of

its longer semi-rural routes for most of Dart’s Paisley locals, a move that led Dart to operate larger vehicles.

Another major change came in April/May 2001 when Arriva’s 25% shareholding passed to Stagecoach, which franchised a group of underperforming Glasgow suburban services to Dart, which painted some of its buses in its new shareholder’s stripes.

With insufficient revenue coming in to meet costs that included finance payments on most of the fleet, it ceased trading at short notice, with First stepping in to provide immediate replacements. Stagecoach took three Marshall-bodied low-floor Dennis Darts and reallocated them to Exeter.

For its imagined relaunch of the Dart livery and publicity material, The MHD Partnership has kept three elements of the original business: the name; the use of blue as the dominant colour; and the idea of buses darting about.

The blue now covers almost all the bus and instead of white the second colour is yellow, for the fleetname and also the roof, which on most of Dart’s buses was left in their former owners’ colours. The slogan ‘Dart here, there and everywhere’ accompanies pastel-coloured map-like lines that emerge from the four letters of the Dart name. ■

ONCE MORE DARTING ABOUT

The original Dart identity on Marshall Capital-bodied Dennis Dart SLF T131 MGB, which became Stagecoach 33782.