Author: relbus

We held our AGM last week, at which our chair, Barry Turner, summarised succinctly a fairly busy year behind us. Our minutes of meetings are published on this website, so feel free to swing by.

The highpoint of the meeting was a thoughtful and entertaining talk by public transport expert Barry Hutton, Chartered Town and Transport Planner and also a resident of Pencaitland. His book Planning Sustainable Transport was published earlier this year.

Hutton proposes that public transport must have one or more defined explicit purposes to overcome its inherent unattractiveness (e.g. it is inherently less convenient and less comfortable than the alternatives; it can never be ready and waiting at your door; it can only be delivered at times and places which are not exactly as you wish; AND you can never choose your travelling companions!).

Continue reading RELBUS AGM

Free bus passes, aka the National Concessionary Travel Scheme, have certainly been a massive boon to older folk in Scotland since their introduction back in 2006, regardless of your political view. It it has been argued that the trouble with the scheme is its universality, but what is often overlooked is that the greatest value of the scheme accrues to those that have suitably frequent and accessible bus services, i.e. people in larger towns e.g. on commuter routes and those in cities.  Older people in rural areas – remote or otherwise – without access to a car or family network, who may be on low incomes, have mobility or health problems or any combination of these, will feel pretty isolated with or without the scheme. It is hard not to be moved by the stories that accompany Age Scotland research that casts further light on the problem.

Continue reading An age old problem – can you spare a minute?

This little known body, run by Transport Scotland wound up business in March 2013 – read also abolished. PVS with its catchy strapline “bridging the gap”, was a committee of the great and the good advising Scottish Ministers about passenger perspectives on public transport. Its record on the face of it seems somewhat unexceptional, however one thing it did do and will be continued is the work of the PVS sub-committee “Bus Passenger Platform”, a sort of bus ombudsman for Scotland, but less grand.  If you ever had a complaint about a company that could not resolved by the company, that wasn’t to do with bus registration or compliance (that’s the the Transport Commissioners or VOSA), you could escalate the complaint to the BPP sub committee, provided you had any idea it even existed. The sub committee handled just over 500 complaints in the year ending March 2013 only double the number it started off with 5 years earlier. Almost 300 of the complaints were classified as out of scope for various technical reasons. The rest were mostly resolved after initial correspondence, so not much left to arbitrate.

Continue reading What happened to Passenger View Scotland?

Statement from the chair

It has been a year since I took up the role of RELBUS  chair in the aftermath of the devastating  service cuts made by First.  These cuts clearly demonstrated  that  the current legal framework for the operation of bus services does not always work in the best interests of the passengers.  In the year things thankfully have settled down and it can be argued that overall we have better service provision now than before the cuts.  This is in no small measure due to the cooperation of operators and the efforts of East Lothian Council.  It has also been a year in which RELBUS has been particularly active promoting its own initiatives, sometimes jointly with others, and responding in a creative and positive manner to external initiatives.

Continue reading RELBUS ANNUAL REPORT Highlights of 2012-2013