Bus future still unclear though some Stagecoach cuts reversed

East Sussex County Council has received more than £41m to improve bus services, but has yet to disclose details of precisely how it intends to do so. However, it has moved to reverse some cuts announced by Stagecoach in Hastings services. Anna Sabin provides an update.

First Boris Johnson promised England £3bn as ‘new funding to level up buses across England towards London standards’. Local transport authorities all over England, including East Sussex, put in bids for improved bus services amounting nationally to £9bn’s worth of improvements.

Then £3bn was cut to £1.4bn (prompting the observation that ‘the Treasury isn’t counter-signing the cheques No.10 is writing’). Which was a pity. I can’t imagine any of these bids were frivolous. They’d have made each area nicer, more equal and less climate damaging. Transport, in its current configuration, is contributing more than a quarter of the UK’s carbon emissions.

In the event, East Sussex has received more than most authorities – it’s been awarded £41,415,025, a bit under half of what it asked for.

No details for bus improvements have so far been seen, though the County’s aims have been published, albeit in modified form. Gone is the original bid’s aspiration for buses at turn-up-and-go frequencies – which a town would need if it were to substantially rely on public transport rather than the private car.

Instead there is a greater emphasis on building infrastructure – high quality interchanges (at railway stations?), better shelters, more real-time information, traffic light priority, etc., and reduced fares in the hope it’ll all draw in more passengers so that fare revenue can replace the grant by April 2025.

Fare offers

Lower fares will include, from the end of October, a new £5 East Sussex single operator day ticket, family and group travel tickets (including accompanied under 19s travelling for free) and an off-peak unaccompanied young person £1 flat single fare ticket.

To cover the time between now and arrival of the £41bn, East Sussex Transport Authority published a ‘Bus Service Changes for October 2022’ which showed some service shrinkage to temporarily save Stagecoach money. Passenger numbers are still only 80% of pre-Covid levels and Stagecoach no doubt want to maintain their profit.

However, since then the County Council has rethought the cuts and said they ‘will subsidise seven services operating across Eastbourne, Hastings, parts of Rother and Wealden and into Kent, which otherwise would have [been] removed. The funding will initially be in place until March 2023’.

The very welcome frequency up-grade for Hastings’ bus number 28 from every 70 minutes to every 60 looks like it will stick, which is a small improvement to life on West Hill.

Joel Mitchell, Stagecoach South East managing director, contributed to the most recent ESCC bus statement with: ‘We will be working together with local government to attract more people out of their cars and onto more sustainable public transport. The more people who switch to bus, the stronger our networks will be. It can generate vital investment for newer buses, help keep fares low and ultimately help expand the bus network to meet new demand.’ Hmmm – how long will that take Joel?

Car-centric

Hastings remains a very car-centric town with appalling provision for walking and cycling and only traffic-congested roads for the buses.

The lovely sounding Garden Town Hastings project will be very welcome but is confined to a very small part of the town centre with, as yet, no design to connect it, in a green way, to the rest of the Borough. People living in the north of Hastings will continue to have no pleasing safe routes to walk or cycle into town and buses will continue to travel slowly on the car-congested roads, stumping their frequency and affordability.

Acutely aware of all this is Paul Barnett, leader of Hastings Borough Council. He has said he’d like radical, 21st century changes to be designed for the town with Low Traffic Neighbourhoods and School Streets which together could enable children to walk and cycle to school safely. Buses could then use routes exclusive to them through the Low Traffic Neighbourhoods and thereby provide a very much faster service.

But the Borough is not its own transport authority. East Sussex County Council run the town’s roads as they see fit, which is with most of the road space going to the car. There is very little indication that their rural, county-wide outlook is green enough, urban enough or imaginative enough to make any meaningful difference to the status quo or that they listen to the town’s petitions for improvements.

To change this Paul Barnett says he’s going to request that county council officers, possibly those who are working on the Garden Town project now, stay with Hastings to extend the garden town concept to the whole town. The collaborative design would be specific to Hastings and involve detailed consultation with Hastings residents but would follow principles applicable to any town in the county – it is being applied now to Barcelona, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Birmingham and many other progressive towns and cities around the world.

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