We’re always happy to receive letters from our readers to share with you all. This comes from someone who prefers to go under the name, Bus User. Ed
Dear Ventnor Blog,
I am writing to you about Public transport.
I do not have a car and rely on the buses on the Island. Whenever I think about buses I always think of the “bus service” and I want to discuss what is meant by service.
To my mind service is the provision of is a clean, comfortable, reliable and punctual bus, to serve the interests of the Citizens of our Island to get us to where we wish or need to go. It must serve a wide range of Citizens and a wide range of needs that the Citizens will want from the bus service.
My partner and I are pensioners so do not need to get a bus to work but would need the bus to get to early hospital appointments but it has suddenly become not commercially viable to provide a bus service for such important things.
For the Citizens going to work then the bus service must be above all things reliable.
There are other bus users such as Mothers that require a space for the buggy and the shopping; the Mother will not enjoy long waits at the bus stop for a bus that has been cut out because it has become not viable economically.
Young Citizens should not have to rely on parents to act as a taxi service shuttling them around to get them to school, social events in the evening and at weekends. An inexpensive and reliable bus service is necessary to give them some independence.
Here on the Island we have holidaymakers such as my partner and I were before we came to live in Ryde, a good bus service is essential not just to get them to the places of interest but also to try and build a sustainable society where one does not need the car to be mobile.
Each section has a special need and it should not be difficult to satisfy each need easily but we are denied the bus service we need because the system decrees that the service from the buses must be measured in the amount of profit that a privateer can screw out of the travelling public.
This year alone the Go Ahead Group (The monopoly group that owns the Southern Vectis) extracted the grand total of £63 million from our bus services and despite being a difficult year they tell us the dividend was maintained and Keith Ludeman the boss man managed to increase his entitlement from
£965,000 to £1,363,000. Just as a point of interest the directors get an emolument and compensation? I presume that the compensation is for having to use our buses on the rare occasion that they have to for publicity purposes.
I was invited to a meeting in April 2007 organised by the council and held at the Isle of Wight College, the meeting was titled How to gain a model shift in transport. The Council spokesperson explained that it meant how to get Citizens out of their cars, 80 Citizens attended and 75 of the worthy Citizens came in their cars! One Lady walked to the meeting and one lady came on a small motor bike. 3 of us Citizens came by bus to a meeting about getting us out of their cars? The most questionable thing to me was the fact that Marc Morgan Hughes who sat at the same table as myself told me that he came by car because the bus did not go where he lived? A bus service managed by a manager that does not use the buses?
Why is our bus service not run by the municipality so that the electorate can decide what we want from our bus service? Why are we constantly fobbed of with excuses that it is not commercially viable to provide the Citizens with the bus service we need and most importantly a bus service that we need if we are to go forward in building a sustainable society. There is a radical group that try to tell us moderate Citizens that only privateers can run anything and it is time the moderate Citizens that only want the Earth stood up to the extremist, radicalised supporters of private capital and demanded that diligence and frugality become watchwords for our services, not indifference and extravagance.
During the years 2005 to 2008 the Go Ahead Group spent the obscene amount of £203 million on the pointless exercise of buying back their own shares, when Carolyn Sephton, the company secretary was asked why they did this she did not try to explain just said that it was not illegal. Perhaps it is not illegal but it is certainly immoral. During this orgy of extravagance the shares were around £24 and now they stand at about £10. Why did they not reduce fares all round and get more Citizens on to our buses? A truly win win exercise.
Signed, Bus User
Image: rbrwr under CC BY-SA 2.0
