FIRSTGROUP AMERICA, INC.
CINCINNATI, OH

Our services help create strong, vibrant and sustainable local economies and our opportunity is to be the provider of choice for our customers and communities. During the last year around 2.4 billion people relied on us to get to work, to school or college, to visit family and friends and much more and, each day, every one of our 110,000 employees works hard to deliver vitally important services for our passengers. This means we can be confident that, whatever the specific transport challenge is, somewhere across our business we have already identified and implemented a solution which will work. We have a competitive advantage as a result of our scale and the diversity of our portfolio of businesses: We design and operate hundreds of networks in partnership with our communities, procure, maintain and operate around 50,000 vehicles; hire, train and manage 100,000 employees; and transported two billion passengers last year. As well as serving a huge range of passengers in the UK and North America, we work with national governments, state and local authorities, school boards and universities to meet their transport needs. Partnership is at the heart of our success across our businesses. We work closely with procuring authorities, industry partners and communities everywhere, so we can best understand and respond to their specific needs and deliver solutions to congestion, helping stimulate the local economy and deliver good value for customers. In turn, stakeholders know that by working with us, they have access to our depth of knowledge and vast experience, which includes the latest thinking and the best of our global expertise. Each of our businesses has a market-leading position in a sector which is key to driving economic growth and essential to creating strong and sustainable communities. As a private sector operator we are well placed to deliver the most innovative and efficient solutions to the congestion which results from the growth of urbanisation across the world. We continuously improve our performance by sharing best practice across our businesses. This allows us to deliver high quality, safe and reliable services which meet the needs of customers and the communities we serve. First Student is the largest provider of student transportation in North America – twice the size of the next largest competitor. Industry-leading safety programmes, strong customer relationships and service record are key differentiators. of the familiar yellow school bus which keeps millions of students moving every school day. We are twice the size of the next largest competitor with almost a quarter of the outsourced market. We operate in 470 locations across the US and Canada, working with school districts to provide safe, reliable and cost-effective transportation for five million students per school day. We currently operate more than 1,100 contracts which typically have a three to five year duration. We employ 50,500 people and have 44,000 buses. For more than a century, we’ve provided industry-leading transportation services by emphasising the relationship with our customer and putting students first. We work closely with school officials to understand their unique challenges, developing solutions that save money, improve safety, drive efficiency and provide peace of mind. Student safety is the primary concern of school districts, parents and communities and we invest millions in equipment, technology and driver training, making our school buses one of the safest forms of transportation on the road today. In addition to our main contracts we also provide charter hire services for school and non-school activities, including the Super Bowl, NASCAR auto racing and the PGA golf tour. First Transit is one of the largest private sector providers of public transit management and contracting in North America. Within it, our First Vehicle Services arm is one of the largest private sector providers of vehicle maintenance and related support services in North America. We have wide-ranging experience of many types of contract and it is through this experience that we continually deliver value for our customers and grow as a business. We are exploring opportunities in light rail, commuter rail and bus rapid transit in North America, where we continue to benefit from the strong expertise in our UK divisions. Our initial US commuter rail contract, Denton Country Transit Authority’s A-Train, in Texas, began operating in October 2016 and is already showing signs of success. Our direct, point-to-point services, such as Greyhound Express, which now serves 1,000 city pairs in more than 135 markets across North America, are broadening the range of customers using intercity coach services. We also operate BoltBus in the US Northeast, Pacific Northwest and California. These premium brands are encouraging a new, younger, passenger demographic and helping to spur a renaissance in intercity coach travel. Passengers also feed into these point-to-point services from right across our unique nationwide network. We employ 6,500 people and we carry around 16 million passengers a year who travel more than five billion miles a year on our fleet of around 1,600 vehicles. We provide a package delivery facility on our coaches and we also run food outlets in our stations. In recent years our onboard customer service offering has been transformed with the purchase of hundreds of new coaches and a comprehensive refurbishment programme on our existing vehicles. Our buses now feature new look interiors with on-board amenities including Wi-Fi, and are powered by clean diesel, low emission engines. Greyhound now also offers additional sales and distribution channels and stimulates conversation and debate with our customer community through award winning social media channels. By marrying the latest customer technology to our national network, we are ensuring Greyhound remains an American icon for its second century. Our First Bus division operates around a fifth of local bus services in the £4.3bn deregulated marked outside London. We are one of the largest bus operators in the UK with a fleet of approximately 6,000 buses.