Better Buses bill: cause for optimism for Hastings?

The Better Buses Bill introduced to Parliament last week should be good news for Hastings which really needs better buses. Stagecoach’s service  is getting progressively worse, in spite of good will from drivers and managers, writes Anna Sabin, who also took the photos except where noted.

Stagecoach runs Hastings buses for profit which comes from fares and East Sussex-provided subsidies for socially necessary services to schools and hospitals etc. Not that many hospital workers or visitors, teachers or students are using the buses as much as they might. The timetable is often wrong for them – not early or late enough.

And, even if the published timetable looks promising, the reliability isn’t there. Buses are often delayed in traffic or lack a driver, pretend to be coming on information boards and then vanish from the board at the moment of expected arrival.

Over the years the timetables have been shrinking, which better reflects real capacity  The route that used to be covered by number 20, for instance, has gone down from four buses an hour in 2019 to two, and is now divided into two separate services. This means the old end-to-end route, Ore to Mayfield Farm, stops and starts again at Hastings Station and now costs double, two capped £2 fares instead of one.

This is no way to tackle climate change or effect the policy aim of ‘transport mode switch’ away from cars.

Reliability down

Helena Dollimore, our MP, doesn’t like the direction of travel either. ‘Buses are so important for my constituents,’ she told HOT. ‘In recent years the buses have become harder to rely on for getting around, with routes slashed and timetables hollowed out. This month we saw yet more damaging cuts to routes, and people being charged more for the same journey by Stagecoach.

‘I’ve been raising these concerns with Stagecoach and East Sussex County Council, but we also need to see bigger systemic change so that we can deliver better buses. The current system isn’t working, as we are stuck in a cycle of unreliable buses that people use less and less.’

So, when transport secretary, Louise Haigh, said, ‘Our Better Buses Bill will remove barriers and empower local leaders to replicate London’s world class bus network across the country, giving passengers a transport system they can truly rely on,’ Hastings residents had cause to rejoice. But also to ask – who are our local leaders?

Louise Haigh is right when she says, ‘Together, Labour Mayors are offering a simple, transformative and popular message–better, cleaner, cheaper transport run in the public interest.’ But it will be interesting to see how it will be made to work for the third of the population of England who, like us, live under a local government system with two tiers. Hastings Borough Council is in charge of the bins and planning (housing) while East Sussex County Council is in charge of everything else including roads, pavements and transport.

If HBC wanted to put a bin hub, a tree, a bike storage hangar, a bus lane, a cycle lane or a bus stop in road space currently used for on-street parking, it would have to seek the higher tier’s co-operation which, at the moment, isn’t there. To date, collective, mostly rural, East Sussex votes, sensitivities and interests have not been aligned with those of urban Hastings.

Opposing interests

Our County Council has for years been majority Conservative – though now reduced to being just the largest party, one seat below a majority. HBC has been Labour for years, though now it is a mix of Conservative, Independents, Labour and, currently leading, Greens. So we’re still living in a system of opposing interests.

It would, for instance, be a lot of work for the County’s Local Transport Authority to find alternative parking for car owners who currently narrow Hastings main roads with their parked cars – and they’re not minded to do it. Why would they?

If the Better Buses Bill is to give local leaders more powers ‘to provide services that deliver better for local residents’, these powers will have to be well thought through, as will the probably necessary subsidies to get the services established. It’s all yet to be decided.

On this subject The Guardian quoted the Shadow Transport Secretary, Helen Whatley: ‘They (the Labour Government) need to explain whether local authorities will raise council tax or make cuts to vital services like social care to fund this.’ That’s an unnecessarily zero sum game she is predicting. Success in raising passenger numbers, where we see it in the UK already, has not relied exclusively on money subsidy.

Regional and Combined Authorities – London, Greater Manchester and eight others – have one set of elected representatives and officers co-ordinating decisions on how public money is spent, but they also decide what sort of vehicles use what proportion of their roads and what balance of transport infrastructure their shared space consists of. It is their choice how much space and investment should be devoted to public realm, place-making, space-saving public transport and health-giving active transport.

If ESCC were to ‘replicate London’s world class bus network’ it would have to do as London and Greater Manchester and franchise the bus service. It could not afford to start a company of its own from scratch. Reading has retained its own bus company, as have only 10 municipalities in the UK. It works very well but it’s had it for a hundred years – for towns to do the same from scratch now would be crazily expensive.

No profits in Hastings

But franchised or not, a bus service in hilly Hastings, with its narrow roads filled with cars, cannot be run profitably by anyone. The only profitable line is the 99, which sticks to the flat along the destination-rich A259 from Hastings to Eastbourne. Instead, Stagecoach keep thinking of wheezes to keep their takings up and costs down – old buses, cancelled buses, ghost buses and, the latest ruse – bus routes snipped in half @ £2 a half.

That’s why most Hastings bus users are people who have no other means of getting about or have a free bus pass. And it’s why there’s an unacceptably large section of the population which doesn’t get about at all.

Mark Etherington, HBC portfolio holder for Active Travel says, ‘Hastings is one of the worst areas in the country for transport-related social exclusion, and cuts to existing bus timetables – often without discussion – are troubling. Meanwhile, unconstrained car use in our town creates hazards on our roads (and pavements), congestion, pollution and noise.  We need sensible alternatives – and ESCC should be a primary partner in that endeavour.’

Best practice

Borough Councillor for Silverhill, Billie Barnes, has roads in her ward, lined with parked cars, where residents dread a fatal accident from speeding. She would like to see change. ‘We need a more imaginative way to deal with transport and the use of our roads,’ she says.

‘We should take best practice from other boroughs. Lancashire County Council has made a start by simply providing big yellow ‘Slow Down, Save Lives’ banners and bin stickers for any resident or school community wanting to challenge driving habits on their road. We could begin by doing that here.’

Civilising driving will help but we will need more. For instance, the recently postponed Levelling Up-funded Hastings Town Centre Public Realm project illustrates well how nationally ‘improving bus services’ will require investment in expertise and powers at the right, very local, level of government to succeed.

In 2022 a visionary Local Transport Authority might have seen the £10.8m allocated for Hastings public realm improvement as a perfect sweetener to help the local public cope with changes to car access to the centre of town where most of the shops are. The public could have gained a very-good-for-business bus and access-only Queens Road; the whole Albert Memorial area for rain gardens, walkers and cyclists; a high-spend, high-employment shopping environment between the station and the sea; and the approach roads reserved for buses and end-of-evening taxis only.

Inspiration lacking

Such congestion-free routes would have made buses faster, more popular and so more profitable. The model could have been rolled out throughout the Borough. Unfortunately, our County transport officers, together with their equally uninspired Stagecoach bro’s, decided to stick with what they have – car traffic and street parking as usual and a frustratingly unpopular bus service.

Anyone who lives in Hastings knows how unwalkable many of its pavements are, how strikingly car-jammed and unsignposted the town appears when you step out of any of the four train stations, how hard and dangerous it is to cross roads on foot and what an unfair divide there is between the mobility opportunities of people with keys to a car and those without.

Better buses and trains could go a very long way towards changing all that and making us more equitably mobile. Children could be independent, healthy and connected again. We could all be healthier and happier. We want to reach net zero. Mass transport with walking and cycling, better but fewer through-roads for cars, plus maybe more shared co-wheels cars, will be necessary to get there. The Better Buses Bill might, at last, bring 21st century transport expertise, love and vision to our unique town.

‘Today’ said our MP on the day of the Bill’s introduction, ‘the Better Buses Bill is introduced to Parliament by the new Labour Government. After decades of failed deregulation, this will give local leaders more powers to provide services that deliver better for local residents.’

Let’s hope these powers get us to a point where rich and poor hop on and off buses, where for most people at most stages of life there’s not much sense owning a car, you might as well hire one when you need one, and children can walk to school once again, unaccompanied and safe.

 

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