This from the
Lancashire County Council website -
“Lancashire
has an extensive network of bus services, from high frequency bus services
serving urban areas, to rural bus services providing a vital community link.
Lancashire
County Council works in partnership with local bus operators, and we are
committed to providing high quality bus
travel, allowing you to travel easily and safely
within the county.”
(my italics.)
Apparently
there’s a public consultation exercise going on about proposed cuts to the 2C, 86
and 89 bus services between Lancaster and Blackpool, but if you can find any
information about it on the Lancashire County Council, Wyre BC or Blackpool
Transport websites you’re a better man than me. The cuts, which would come into force in 2014, would mean no
services at all on Sundays, and no weekday or Saturday services after 7:00pm. And all this just as Blackpool Victoria Hospital is about to begin evening appointments.
A Vital
Community Link?
So anyone
living in, say, Cockerham or Glasson Dock, or Pilling and Stakepool, Hambleton,
Stalmine or Knott End-on-Sea, who relies on buses to get home from work, or to
keep hospital appointments or visits, including our clergy visits to the sick
in Blackpool Vic hospital, or to get home after school or college evening
activities, is going to be a bit stuck. Schoolchildren. College students. Shiftworkers.
Nurses and other NHS staff. Shop assistants. People who'd been to the theatre in Blackpool. And many of them are voters, as
well as council tax-payers, and they certainly know how to use the ballot box.
We are not hicks and yokels in West Lancashire. Some of us even have the
Internet, as well as the electric light and indoor privies.
In West Wyre
villages alone there are some 11,000 residents, many of whom rely on the rural
bus services, these vital community links,
that Lancashire County Council is so proud of.
No doubt the
county will argue money and falling bus occupancy. Hm. I worked in local
government long enough to know how easy it is for bumblecrats to fiddle the
figures. We seem to have had a lot more double-decker buses in Knott End over
the last year or so, though still the same number of passengers, and I’m
starting to sniff a conspiracy. While 10 passengers on a 20-seater
single-decker make the bus half full, those same 10 passengers on a 40-seater
make it three-quarters empty. Public Transport Authorities (PTAs) have got rid
of unprofitable local railway lines and bus services for decades by thus
massaging the figures and spinning their arguments, and they’re very good at
it.
Knott End has
a very high percentage of elderly residents. I haven’t seen many of them riding
about on bikes, because in this village (pop. 5,500) disability buggies are the
preferred mode of transport, yet Lancashire has invested millions of their tax
revenues in cycleways and 20mph zones, and it’s quite startling, when you’re
driving obediently at 20mph in your buggy, to be overtaken by that rara avis,
a cyclist.
But back to
the buses and Reg Varney-land. Local taxi firms must be rubbing their hands in
glee. We do, however, have a voice as council tax-payers and voters. We don’t
yet have the vox-pop power in the form of local offshoots of change.org, which
rallies public opinion so effectively that it often changes government policy,
but it will certainly come.
In the
meantime - do we want our council tax to be spent on cycle lanes which hardly
anyone uses, or on our rural bus services, these vital community links,
to use LCC’s own propaganda?
It is up to
us.
