One way or another, we’ll make you wait.

Today (Tuesday 6th April 2021) saw the launch of another four North Somerset Council supported bus services. Service 56 (Clevedon - Walton Bay) had been supposed to start last Thursday, but belatedly made it's debut today after somebody copied and pasted the wrong bit of supporting text to Facebook. Source: North Somerset Public Transport Facebook…

We’ve never used a bus, but we know best!

I wrote a post a couple of years ago bemoaning people who seem to think they can plan a bus service without any knowledge of the industry. Things haven't changed. Aside from Twitter being full of people who think that public ownership will solve everything, recent press activity from the Chew Valley Chamber of Commerce…

This isn’t good enough

I know i've moaned about Weston Community Transport before, but they're not getting any better. I thought it might be a reasonable time to illustrate the ways in which this community transport operator is failing where a professional operator would not be able to do so: Step entrance vehicle. In an age where low-floor, accessible…

False Economy

Lets disspell a couple of myths: Community Transport is not saving bus services. Community Transport is not saving the public purse any money. On the first point: Community Transport is being used as a plaster to patch up a crack in a dam. Community Transport does nothing to promote new public transport usage to new…

Breaking links

I was out driving this morning, covering a coach job for a local operator. At one stage i passed Hartcliffe Morrisons and was waiting at the traffic lights as the CATT Community Bus left the store with a considerable load of pensioners on board. It struck me that these were precisely the sort of people…

A vital village (dis)service

In May 2016, the WebberBus operation collapsed. WebberBus had done a fairly comprehensive job of spreading themselves far and wide over most of Somerset, often duplicating First routes but also taking on some other work in which nobody else had an shown an interest.Most of these odd choices were operated commercially - Bridgwater and Minehead…