Entries from February 2010 ↓

I’ve had a couple of polite emails from my hosting service that I’m almost at my monthly bandwidth limit as in the last few months the bandwidth usage has been creeping up and is now three times what it was a couple of months ago.  This has not been helped by the Israeli, Russian and South Korean users trying to leave messages on my site selling all sorts of goods that a site like this has no wish to sell, I also suspect my new theme has not helped.  However the constantly higher viewing figures are also an issue.

This may mean that I will need to find a way of monetising this site to pay for a better hosting package.  Any ideas?  I know Ad Sense is easy, but it’s not a particularly attractive addition to the site.

If anyone knows how to prohibit certain sites from using up my bandwidth by spamming my comments without seriously annoying search engines I’d like to hear them.  I quite like people looking for Seymour Road or Station Street coming on to this site, I’ve picked up quite a few regular readers this way.

Bob Blastock who, as well as being active in a bewildering variety of other local groups, is one of the leading lights in the Over Stoke History group, has told me that the rectory that Rectory Road was named after is actually where the Bridge Ward Social club is now, and that Rectory road was actually built on the grounds of the old rectory.  He also pointed out, and this is far better known, that the station that Station Street was named after was actually on Croft Street where the EUR (Eastern Union Railway) pub kept the memory of the station until entertainment licences, smoking bans and the other nannying dictates of our modern state shut it down like so many other pubs.

Does anyone know of any other road names in the ward with an odd history?

Dame Bryony Rudkin (it’s a matter of time, mark my words, so we better start using the title now) has been blessing us with her representative skills at the council and asked about the Wherstead Road route.

On a serious note we should not simply be asking why the route shut down, Suffolk will say it’s revenue and First said on Monday – I was there - that it was revenue AND punctuality.  The latter makes it harder to entice them back as they are getting crucified on punctuality at the moment.

Most people are quite aware that as long as the country is effectively bankrupt we won’t get any subsidy for the route.  What we need is collaboration to evenly space out the routes, which will mean that the residents of Wherstead Road will have a reasonably spaced bus service and the companies will have profitable routes.  Sadly the European Commission has (surprise, surprise) totally inappropriate competition rules – and so this will need Suffolk County Council to act as an honest broker to see if we can get a simlar result as Oxford had.  This is the issue

When I was looking for a new house I looked at some on Wherstead Road.  I would not have a bus from the station for two hours during the evening rush hour.

European Competition policy on the buses is another round of bus regulation.  It would be uncontroversial to deregulate this on the Wherstead Road.

I’m going to spend most of this post annoying my Labour supporting readers, so I might as well start by annoying the Tories.  The worst election for the Tories was not 1997, but 1992.  They needed a time in opposition and the win in 1992 convinced them that they were invincible.  The lost their humility, and when you lose that you start to lose a grip on your humanity as well.

Labour’s at that point.  If they scrape a win this time they could finish their party off They have lost their humility and humanity and are not fit to direct a parking bay let alone the country.

This little gem from Ipswich Spy shows why we need to have another turn of the wheel.  Labour clearly think government is a freehold rather than a leasehold position.  Not in a democracy it ain’t.

Let’s miss the brouhaha about whether the Labour were at a group meeting or leafleting, it’s perfectly possible to be doing both.  It’s hardly relevant.

What is that there seems to be no humility in their response.  It is possible for both sides to make mistakes.  The Labour councillors for Bridge ward clearly made a mistake here.  Three councillors aren’t needed at a group meeting when two could go.  Councillor Philip Smart would have been told about this meeting as he was a member of the Ipswich Transport  Society, as Ross seems to admit to Ipswich Spy (if either Ross or Ipswich Spy want to send a copy of the email I’d be glad to publish it here).  Did he not see the importance, did he forget?  Who knows.  He made a mistake.  He should have fessed up.  I hope I would have been a big enough man to do so.

But no, it was spin instead. 

Now they claim (or Ipswich spy claims that they claim) that members of the public could not go along to the meeting with First Eastern.  But I was a member of the public.  I was there.   I paid £2.50 to get in.  So did the Wherstead Road residents.  What Alasdair Ross claimed was not true. It was the direct opposite of the truth. What is true is that the councillors made a mistake.  It’s not the original mistake that kills you, it’s the cover up.

This is boring.  Trying to spin your way out of what was clearly a stupid mistake born of complacency, a mistake that Labour has made time and again with Bridge is why we need a real alternative in Bridge.  The fact that the Labour party from the lowliest councillor to the Prime Minister himself need to simply learn humility shows that they need a rest.  It’s time to go in opposition and let the Tories get complacent, forgetful and rusty.

Bin collections are probably not the most exciting thing for most people, but I know that if I miss a collection it can be four or six weeks before I can stop collecting the overflow rubbish in plastic bags.  That this is down to stupid pointless rules from Brussels is no surprise.   The Eurosceptic Daniel Hannan goes on about it in the Telegraph today.  No surprise as even his best friends admit he has a bit of a thing anout Europe.  But he does make a good point.  If even the bins aren’t being collected according to local decisions, what is left?  And more importantly where are those left wingers who were threatening to go to prison rather than set a legal rate?

I was at the meeting yesterday with Alan Pilbeam, the managing director of First Eastern Counties, pleading the case for some sort of service to replace the Route 66.  We didn’t expect much, we didn’t get much.  Hopefully someone from First Eastern Counties will be talking to the Wherstead Road residents soon.  It would also be nice if we got Suffolk County Council to be involved, but alas I’m not the County Councillor.  Anyway there were a couple of interesting facts to come out of this:

1.  The Route 66 on Wherstead Road was axed almost as much for punctuality as it was on the grounds of cost.  This was not something that was very clear at the time.

2.  The Managing Director of First had this to say on Ipswich Buses being privatised – “First Group are a professional operation” and about Wherstead Road, “their involvement has got a good chance of sorting out this problem.”  No doubt we won’t be able to get the message round Wherstead Road, but simply put a partnership with Go Ahead could actually get them a half decent bus service.

3.  There were no councillors there.  Bryony Rudkin is understandable, after all she’s recovering from jet lag, and she’d have a problem finding Austin Street.  Phil Smart is less obvious, he doesn’t live close to the Bridge Ward Social club but he is a transport geek (I’m sure he wouldn’t mind me saying that).  As for Jim Powell, I was walking on the other side of Austin Street as I was going in to the Bridge Ward Social Club as he was going towards Vernon Street, we even waved at one another.

Sorry for the short notice.  I got this through from Ipswich Buses:

Alan Pilbeam, MD of First is doing a presentation to the Ipswich Transport Society tonight at Bridge Ward Social Club in Austin St, at 1930. Public can attend for an entrance fee of £2.50
 
I will be there (although I’m coming from London so this will be at the mercy of the trains).  There should also be a couple of people from Wherstead Road who want to talk about the curtailing of Route 66.  If you’re coming then please email me at james@bridgeward.org.uk or find me at the meeting.

At Bridge Ward News we can understand why “Dame” (it can only be a matter of time) Bryony Rudkin doesn’t have us on her Christmas card list. It hurts, obviously, as we’ve decided that she is one of the treasures of Bridge Ward. OK, she’s not a great representative, but that’s to misunderstand her essence. She can give us something to aspire to, if only we had the Labour Party contacts we too could have £400 a day consultancies and live on Corder Road. We should be happy that she has chosen to grace Bridge with her presence. Chanty’s loss is surely our gain. However it hurts, it really does, that we did not get on a post card from her latest all expense paid holiday, sorry fact finding trip, to South Africa during their summer. She was funded by the International Aid budget, which was a truly creative way of using this budget as some bureaucrat obviously worked out that the presence of Dame Bryony is a greater boon to the poor of South Africa than something dull like HIV vaccines or school text books. Did you hate geometry classes and booster shots? Me too. So we have to once again leap to her defence when those blackguards at Ipswich Spy make sarcastic comments about our Bryony. Hands off our Bryony. She brings light, joy and local government best practices to all who meet her.

There’s an enigma in Labour’s stance on Ipswich Buses.  The Labour Party knows that if the buses remain in municipal hands without any help, then as the second smallest bus operator in the country they will be susceptible to a strike from First Group.  First Group could, as it has done to other small operators, run services three minutes ahead of Ipswich buses on the largest routes and offer all the Ipswich Buses staff a signing on bonus.  An Ipswich Labour administration could then be stuck with closing down Ipswich buses.  This would be a stick that the Tories would beat them with for years.

This nightmare scenario is perfectly plausible, because it’s been done already with other operators.  So that leaves some odd options.  Perhaps Labour are criminally short sighted, and this may be true at the Prime Ministerial level but I can’t believe that it’s true at a local level.  An alternative is that they’ve got a plan B that is not that different from what’s being done at the moment.  Essentially do the same deal with a group (not necessarily Go Ahead, but certainly not First) which is sell a minority stake and preemption rights in return for money, bulk buying power and management expertise as well as a virtual guarantee that Ipswich Buses will not go down.

The way they could differentiate it would be to say that instead of selling 49% they would sell 20% and in return retaina a greater degree of control.  Would it satisfy the activists?