by Cllr Michael Hudston - Central Ward
In these days of increased energy costs and the acute awareness of the climate emergency, it is unsurprising to me that more and more people would like to ditch their cars and turn to public transport to get around.
Well, they would if we had a decent and reliable public transport service that can be relied upon, but from what I am reading online and in my personal experience, it’s obvious to me that we don’t!
I’m talking of course, about the No 55 bus service that Stagecoach operate, which is supposed to run every 20 mins between Swindon and Chippenham via Calne! For the majority of the Covid pandemic and lockdowns that service was reduced to every 30 mins and for a while that was understandable, but Covid restrictions have been lifted for over a year, yet Stagecoach only re-introduced the 20 min service at the end of October!
Not that it has improved the service in any way! The busses are still late, they are still regularly cancelled without notice and when they do turn up, they are often a single decker or are standing room only!
Whilst I am not a regular daily user of the bus, the times I have used them, they have never been on time, even before Covid, and on recent occasions were cancelled or simply didn’t exist.
On a recent trip to go out for Sunday lunch, the bus was cancelled, and my partner and I had to get a taxi otherwise we would have lost the booked table. Another time a family member had to be called to collect us back from Studley at 10pm as the bus simply didn’t show up, and we didn’t fancy that walk in the dark!
This very week, the one bus we wanted was cancelled, but thankfully the previous service was running 35 minutes late, so we got that one, but it was a single decker!
Our experiences will appear, insignificant 1st world problems to many of you, but if that’s the experience when we don’t use the service that often, what is the real experience of those of you who really do rely on the service day in day out, to get to work, hospital appointments or to go to school?
Is the service really as bad as my experience and social media posts would have me believe?
Are you regularly late for work, school or have you missed a train or hospital appointment because of the poor bus service? I want to hear from you.
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