Knott End bus services

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.

The Knott End Folly

Early in 2007 plans were approved for what Wyre Borough Council’s planning officer described as an ‘iconic development’ of 34 flats, oops, sorry, apartments, and offices on a site previously the bowling green belonging to the Bourne Arms, at the point where the River Wyre meets Morecambe Bay in Knott End-on-Sea.  


Now Wyre BC lives in Poulton, on the other side of the river, so it knew it wouldn’t have to look at this 'iconic development' every day as Knott End residents would, and it therefore had no qualms about approving a plan which nobody at all in Knott End wanted and which the local town council had strongly opposed.  It thought, with that superior wisdom which falleth from heaven on all planners and planning committee members on the day they qualify or get elected, that  the 'iconic' three or four-storey structure – which would have towered above the historic Bourne Arms next door as well as new bungalows across the road – would look very nice indeed from Fleetwood over the river and persuade coachloads of Glaswegian bargain-hunters to buy another bag of chips while goggling at it, thus bringing in much-needed revenue.







And in due course the bowling green went and building began...


In a couple of months the builders went out of business, having failed to notice in time that their contractual obligation to strengthen and maintain their bit of the sea wall was going to cost them an arm and about fifty-seven legs.


Somebody else (it is rumoured) took over – and went bust in their turn, and nothing has happened now for well over a year.


It’s grey and drizzling this morning, so I thought I’d just stroll round and see if this 'iconic development' is still there.  


Unfortunately it is.