A Bedford Borough cllr had said the council should get bus operators to “clock-face” bus schedules as residents are complaining about buses turning up within minutes of each other.
But he was told the council has “little control” over the timetables used by commercial bus operators.
Cllr Jonathan Abbott (Liberal Democrats, Clapham and Oakley) was responding to a report on bus services presented to last night’s Rural Affairs Committee (Monday, 25 November).
“I have an email here from a resident on 28 October saying ‘Dear Mr Abbott, is there a rationale for having 56 minutes between buses followed by two within four minutes of each other during the middle of the day?”, he said.
“We get the comment that people don’t like seeing all these buses coming around their streets all the time, it’s probably because we’ve got Stagecoach and Grant Palmer chasing each other around Oakley, chasing each other around Clapham.
“[Does the council] not talk with the operators to try and clock-face the bus service?” he asked.
A clock-face schedule is a repeating schedule for public transportation that uses consistent intervals for departure and arrival times.
Sarah Fleckney, manager for passenger transport and sustainable travel, said “Of course” the council doesn’t want services running 10 minutes apart when it goes out to tender.
“We would ask them to space the services to get the best coverage within that hour,” she said.
Ms Fleckney explained that the service in question, the 25, had its timetable changed a number of times following the reduction of the Grant Palmer service.
And when an operator registers a route it goes to the council for a 28-day consultation, then onto the Traffic Commissioner for 42 days.
“If an operator has decided to run a route within a few minutes of another service we can say in that consultation that we’re not happy with that,” she said.
“The traffic commissioner is the governing body for services, and there have been occasions when we have rejected [the proposal] and said we won’t support this registration because it runs 10 minutes after the next.
“And the traffic commissioner has accepted it anyway. We have limited control over what commercial services do.”
Cllr Abbott said: “One thing residents don’t realise [is] how little control we have over the buses as such, particularly the commercial operators.
“I don’t know how we can let residents know that, actually, how our hands are tied at the moment. Because I don’t think there is a councillor here that thinks it’s a good idea to have buses chasing each other.
“But when they say to you, ‘why are there buses four minutes apart?’ and you go ‘that’s because of what they’ve chosen to do’. Instantly they go, ‘Well, can’t you and the council do something about it?’
“I don’t think people realise how little we’re able to encourage operators to actually do the right thing. Rather than run buses, I’d argue, for their benefit rather than for our residents’ benefit.
“I don’t know how we could do that,” he said.
By John Guinn
Local Democracy Reporter
