Better Buses for Waterside
In this guest blog by former Times Environment Editor, Ben Webster, he explains how he became involved in a local campaign for better buses.
There are many good reasons for being a bus campaigner but for me it is partly an act of penance. When I was transport correspondent of The Times, I wrote more than 20 stories about trains for every one about buses. I knew that buses carried more passengers than trains and were a lifeline for thousands of communities across the country but rail stories were much more likely to be published.
I should have tried harder to get bus stories into the paper and my neglect has become more obvious to me since moving out of London to Hampshire. There are no rail stations in the Waterside, a string of large villages with a total of 40,000 residents sandwiched between Southampton Water and the New Forest national park. We used to have a lovely ferry to Southampton served by the world’s oldest pier train but it has been suspended since August because it needs repairs which the current owner, Red Funnel, appears unwilling to fund.
The official 11-mile ‘cycle route’ from the Waterside to Southampton is a death trap, with blind bends and speeding vehicles. So if you don’t have access to a car, the only way in and out is by bus.
Waterside Changemakers, a local group which helps people cope with the cost of living crisis, launched a campaign for better buses earlier this year and I volunteered to help them with communications and strategy. The first step in the campaign was to conduct a survey, door to door, in village centres and on Facebook, to find out what people thought of local buses and what they wanted.
We received 272 responses, with 53 per cent saying bus reliability was either poor or very poor. The survey revealed that unreliable buses were affecting people’s ability to get to work, school, college and appointments at hospitals and GP surgeries.
We requested a meeting with the manager of the local bus company, Bluestar, and to his credit he came from Southampton to meet us. We found it ironic that he drove rather than catch one of his buses, which stop right outside the church hall where we met. That meeting did at least open a channel of communication with the company which has a near-monopoly on buses in our area.
We also launched a petition for more frequent and reliable buses and fairer fares. It was hosted by the website 38 Degrees, which has a helpful back office team. We secured 1,250 signatures and in November we travelled (by bus of course) to Winchester to present our petition at a full meeting of Hampshire County Council. Two campaign members made moving speeches about the isolation caused when a community loses half its buses and the petition hand in was was covered by the local BBC news. We’ve also worked hard to get regular media coverage of the campaign, on news sites, local radio and in local newspapers.
Serena Merritt (on right) handing Better Buses for the Waterside’s petition to Councillor Lulu Bowerman, Hampshire County Council’s executive member for highways, outside the council chamber in Winchester.
Our MP, Sir Julian Lewis (Conservative) has been helpful in prising answers out of Bluestar. But I have to admit one big failure so far. We launched our campaign at a ‘Beach Bus Picnic’ held at Calshot, a seaside village at the far end of the Waterside. Sir Julian and other local politicians attended, as did a speaker from Campaign for Better Transport. We chose Calshot for the launch because its isolation and poor bus service causes real hardship for what is one of the most economically deprived communities in our area. The village has no shops, schools or GP surgeries. There is no pavement on the 60mph road which connects Calshot to the nearest village with a shop two miles away. But we didn’t realise that six months earlier, Hampshire County Council and Bluestar had begun secret discussions on a plan which would make Calshot’s bus service even worse.
Under a new timetable, introduced in September with zero public consultation, Calshot lost half its weekday buses and now has five-hour gaps between services. Bluestar claimed that Calshot’s previous frequency was not commercially viable and decided to focus its services on parts of the Waterside where it could make a profit. This is understandable from a private company but we were disappointed to discover that the council had effectively endorsed this approach by giving Bluestar £200,000 to increase frequency in parts of the Waterside where it already made a profit.
Last month (December), we joined Calshot residents to form a ‘walking bus’ of 13 people to draw attention to the difficulties they now face. Wearing high vis vests, we walked along the 60mph road from Calshot to Fawley, the nearest village which still has a regular bus service. Most drivers were respectful and slowed down as they passed but then our group was hard to miss. Calshot residents who cannot wait five hours for the next bus are regularly forced to make this journey alone and sometimes in the dark, when the road is particularly lethal. The walking bus earned us useful media coverage, including the front page of the Lymington Times (our local paper) and the Daily Mail online.
Waterside ‘walking bus’
Waterside campaigners in Calshot
We believe the council’s bus strategy is flawed because it aims to increase passenger numbers on routes which are already commercially successful rather than protecting services for communities neglected by bus companies. In November, Campaign for Better Transport published some very useful research on bus funding which will help us campaign for a guaranteed reasonable level of bus services for all our villages.
Last month (December), we held an online meeting with bus campaigners from across Hampshire and we are planning to join forces. When we stand together and speak with one voice, it will be harder for the council, the bus companies…and the media… to ignore us.
For more information on the campaign contact Ben Webster.
Main photo, left to right: Jackie Clark, Ben Webster, Heidi Bottrell, Maria Cooper, Serena Merritt, Tom Wardle, all from Better Buses for the Waterside, outside Hampshire County Council’s head office in Winchester.
