This has got to be a joke – the council increase the student rider by 100% then say they are keen to encourage more students to use the service. Come on! Ed
Isle of Wight Council and Southern Vectis are joining forces in a bid to make bus travel more attractive to school students. Both organisations are keen to encourage more young people to travel by public transport, and to make the experience good enough to keep young people using buses after they leave education. Building on the hugely popular ‘Student Rider’ scheme, the focus has now turned to delivering increased quality of services.
The next stage of the partnership involves looking at the efficient use of vehicles across the school run, with Southern Vectis offering up its scheduling expertise to re-plan the whole Council school lift ahead of the new academic year in September.
Southern Vectis currently have twenty eight state of the art double deckers on order to replace the oldest vehicles in the green bus fleet, which will dramatically improve the level of vehicle quality. All are easy access buses and feature full digital CCTV and clean emissions.
The company has also committed to not running any open top vehicles on school routes, and both organisations are partners in the Travel Safe plan which encourages responsible and safe travel on all forms of public transport. This has the full support of the Island’s main travel organisations and the police. Southern Vectis also provides free bus travel to teaching staff who wish to accompany children and young people on their way to and from school.
The aim is to ensure the Council gains maximum value from its school transport contract with Southern Vectis, and to ensure that the carbon footprint of the bus lift is minimised. This exercise will begin after school places have been confirmed by the end of April.
Isle of Wight Council Director of Children’s Services Steve Beynon said “Making sure children and young people feel safe when using school buses is a top priority for the council and Southern Vectis. We are aware that some parents are unhappy with the use of open top buses for school runs and these concerns have been addressed by our and Southern Vectis’ commitment that the vehicles will no longer be used. We will continue to work closely with Southern Vectis to improve bus services for students”
Marc Morgan-Huws from Southern Vectis said “The Eco-Island vision challenges us all to look at the issue of transport seriously, both in terms of providing good quality accessible buses, encouraging children to use and indeed keep on using buses later in life, and to make sure that we are efficient in the use of buses and fuel.
We are very committed both to encouraging young people to see buses as good alternatives to the car, but also to running our buses in an environmentally supportive manner.”
