It has been another busy year for RELBUS featuring not only our quarterly participatory meetings but the now established mix of initiatives, responses and direct involvement with other organisations which are dealt with below. It has been a year when RELBUS has been reaching out and having more and more influence on what is happening to bus service provision in East Lothian.
Continue reading RELBUS ANNUAL REPORT Highlights of 2013-2014
The RELBUS mobile website handily brings together all the current apps for bus and train information. Whether your phone is apple, android or windows, you can have the right app at your fingertips.
Visit mobile.relbus.org.uk to find out more
Did you know that Google Maps uses Traveline’s national public transport information. If you zoom in far enough, you will be able to see individual bus stops and what buses leave from each one. A link will also take you to the operator’s timetable.
This information on Google Maps mobile app, so you can have it with you all the time.
RELBUS, the group campaigning for better bus services in East Lothian, is pressing for bus services to be adapted so that they are more attractive to tourists. East Lothian has a fantastic tourist offering including castles, beaches, golf courses, historic towns and villages, grand country houses, a distillery, the Seabird Centre and Museum of Flight, and it all sits next door to Edinburgh which is one of the biggest tourist centres in the UK. But getting to and between our tourist attractions other than by car is not easy. RELBUS thinks that there is much scope for making it more easy and convenient for visitors to use public transport to reach what is on offer and wants to work with the council and bus operators to see what can be done.
Former councillor Barry Turner who chairs RELBUS said: ‘By drawing up the bus passenger charter for East Lothian we have shown what can be achieved by different organisations working together. We now think that a similar approach could lead to real improvements in transport for tourists, encouraging more visitors without cars to come here and getting many local trippers out of their cars. Look around the UK and overseas and you will find public transport geared up to meet tourist needs. We can do it here in East Lothian too. We just need to adapt and be more innovative when it comes to organising our bus services and we need information to be available and accessible so that visitors know what’s on offer’.
The kind of things that RELBUS has already identified as offering opportunities for improvement are better integration of local and longer distance bus services so that it is easy to change from bus to bus, better integration between bus and rail services, tourist day tickets to be available and a high profile presence in Edinburgh relating to East Lothian’s attractions and how to reach them by public transport. Better connections for tourists will also mean better connections for local people in rural East Lothian which remains the principal aim of RELBUS .
