Entries Tagged 'Route 66' ↓

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.

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.

A pioneering agreement in Oxford may be able to offer hope to people on Wherstead Road.  Wherstead Road is plagued by sporadic bus services, which would be far more tolerable if they were properly spaced out.  Under typically stupid European Union rules this cannot be changed because there are a number of different operators on the route they cannot get together to redraw the timetable to space out their bus times, the authorities prefering that they bunched up their services to make them “competitive”.  Why Europe needs to get involved in bus services that don’t even cross a county border, let alone an international border, is typically left unexplained.

This has meant that there is an almost two hour gap between buses in the evening on the route out of the town centre, and this starts almost exactly when the first commuter train comes in from London.  Thanks Brussels. 

Oxford has moved to stop their version of this needless, mandated competitive inefficiency by getting an agreement between the bus operating companies.  Hopefully we won’t have some European under-secretary for buses deciding that this won’t work.

In fact the minister who could decide on this would be Chris Mole.  I know that he doesn’t keep an eye on local media any more, but a couple of his tax paid staff do (even this humble site), so perhaps they can pass on the message that if he blocks the Oxford deal it will play badly on the Wherstead Road.  We’ll make sure of it.

Since the Route 66 bus service has been discontinued Wherstead Road has had to make do with village services going into Ipswich town center.  This has caused a number of problems:

• Infrequent services – one an hour if you’re lucky
• Unreliable services not keeping with timetables
• Few seats by the time the busses get to Wherstead Road
• More cars on the road
• No disabled access on the tiny busses

This has got to stop.  It may be hard to get money out of the government, especially as Chris Mole is now the minister for transport, but this can’t go on.