This document discusses The MHD Partnership imagining a new livery for the defunct bus operator Dart Buses of Paisley if it were still operating today. Dart Buses operated from 1996 to 2001 in Paisley, Scotland, using minibuses and later larger vehicles. The MHD Partnership has redesigned Dart Buses' livery to be predominantly blue with yellow used for the fleet name and roof. Their slogan is "Dart here, there and everywhere" accompanied by pastel colored map lines emerging from the letters in Dart.

1. IDENTITY PARADE
We 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.