What’s to be done about the buses? MP gets involved

Hastings & Rye MP Helena Dollimore has picked up the case of our deteriorating bus service and will hopefully meet with Stagecoach to discuss how it can be improved. While the bus company has a role to play, action – and money – are required from other parties, as Anna Sabin explains.

Having received lots of Stagecoach-related pleas for help from her constituents, our MP Helena Dollimore has written to the CEO of Stagecoach about the shrinking Hastings and Rye bus services.

She asks that she:

1. “Meet with me to discuss how these changes are affecting our communities.
2. “Publish the ‘low passenger numbers’ which led Stagecoach to make these changes to its Hastings and Rye services, and explain how this data on passenger numbers is at all accurate, given the serious problems with Stagecoach services record over [the] past year. To name just one example, last October 217 buses were cancelled in just a four-day period.
3. “Put measures in place to address the problem of these late and cancelled services.
4. “Work with local residents and councillors to deliver a bus service in Hastings and Rye that puts the needs of local people first.”

The demands she makes are of the sort our local Stagecoach employees, who come to talk to the Hastings Area Bus Users Group (Habug), want to head off. Such demands imply that Stagecoach may have no right to operate here, no right to enjoy a local monopoly and no right to soak up Government subsidy, unless they give a better service.

Stung?

Our lovely local Stagecoach drivers and commercial director would possibly be very stung by this call to pull their socks up – they see themselves doing their best in difficult circumstances.

When they were asked at the last Habug meeting why, on 1 September, the Hastings bus timetables were changed, for the worse, they said:

To align them to the numbers of passengers using the services, which are 1,000 fewer post-Covid. Free bus pass passengers used to balance the spread of passenger journeys by travelling in the off-peak hours but since Covid their numbers are down 20%. They have taken to shopping online and meeting on Zoom for which no bus is needed, so it’s only affordable to run fewer services.

And Stagecoach is suffering from uncertainty – will the Government continue the £2 fare cap beyond the end of this year? The real cost of a town bus journey is £4.50 to £5, and if fares go up that much, passenger numbers will slump again.

However, they told us, to help with change, two new local Stagecoach posts have been created to focus on ‘local engagement’. Of the sort we were being treated to in the meeting.

On the current course, it looked to Habug as if we were going to get three times more charm and empathy and relentlessly fewer buses. They said the timetable changes have been made to cover costs but they hope passenger numbers will grow soon.

Some hope

That doesn’t seem like a very well planned hope. It looks more like loss limitation. For instance, the old 20 that used to go from Ore to Hollington is now split in two at Hastings Station. Station to Hollington always took more passengers than Ore to Station and, as cross-town services are prone to holdups and a two-part service less so, the 1 September changes have turned the service into two separate journeys requiring two separate fares. That’ll cause yet more passengers to turn away from bus riding.

If you still want to or have to ride, here are all the changes – though not yet on paper nor on a map…which makes it all even less accessible to those missing free bus pass holders.

Notwithstanding, the committed drivers still dream – Utopia, they say, would be road space to themselves, no roadworks and no mal-parked delivery vans. But in the meantime we suffer – like this: the last bus to Bohemia from town now goes at 8.30pm, two hours earlier than before the change for the worse.

The Bus Service Improvement Plan (BSIP) subsidy which brought £41m to East Sussex subsidises the only Hastings services sure not to have been cut. The commercial director implored us to acknowledge the bald truth – it costs £35 to £45 per hour to run a bus which is not covered if only two or three passengers ride. Only if subsidy can cover the gap will it survive. If it’s subsidised, it runs.

And consider this, they said – the subsidy would be plenty if buses were supported at the rate trains are. They had a resentful comparison for us – 3.5 more people go by bus than train yet the first three months of this year’s bus subsidy is £68m – the same as two days’ train subsidy!!

Pothole problems

Hastings has, arguably, the worst bus service anywhere in England, but its road surfaces, in Stagecoach’s telling, cause three times more costly damage to a vehicle’s suspension and electrics than road surfaces in any other part of the county.

Why? From where Habug is standing, it appears there is a very cosy, mutually supportive relationship between Stagecoach and the ESCC Transport Authority which allows Stagecoach to throw the blame for the three times worse potholes not at the County Council, which is responsible for roads, but at Hastings Borough Council – for not asking insistently enough for the potholes to be filled!

In the end it’s all pretty shabby. We need 21st century transport officers to design majority traffic-free bus networks, cycling networks and smooth and lovely walking conditions everywhere. This would quickly cost far less than repairing roads getting ever fuller with ever heavier cars.

People are campaigning all over the world against the dysfunction of cars squeezing out all other more affordable and less carbon-emitting forms of transport. Better ways of using urban space are universally known.

Parisian hero

If you actually succeed in implementing them, however, the field is still so sparsely populated, it can make you internationally famous. Mayor of Paris Ann Hidalgo has made herself a hero and got thousands of people walking, cycling, bus riding (and swimming!) in her city and huge numbers of tourists flocking to it because it’s so much nicer now.

At this point, no more campaigning should be necessary. We should just follow the formula and rake in the prosperity and wellbeing.

Our new Minister for Transport, Louise Haigh, a supporter of Active Travel, knows what must be done, as she explained in a recent podcast.

But how do you get it through to the capillaries of the county – including Hastings and Rye?

Angela Rayner, in her capacity as Minister for Housing, Communities and Local Government, has recently written a letter to Metro and Regional Mayors and the Leaders of all County Councils, including ours. In it she points out that England’s Metro Mayors have delivered better integrated transport and publicly controlled buses and she would like to devolve the powers they have enjoyed to more leaders of to-be-devolved administrations – like East Sussex.

She hopes they will write local growth plans and get transport, housing, jobs and skills advantageously aligned.

The Leader of East Sussex County Council wrote back to her saying (I paraphrase): We’d love to! …we are proud of the strong collaboration between upper and lower tier councils that this letter reflects…

In practice, frustratingly, there’s lousy collaboration between his upper tier and our lower tier and I’ve never met anyone living in Hastings who’d say otherwise. So, we have a job of work on our hands. And it is absolutely fantastic that our don’t-mess-with-me MP is asking questions!

 

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