D Jones & Son Bus Company to cease trading.
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The Council with no bus companies will have to pay less in subsidies.
More people will use their cars to town.
Council put up parking costs.
Council win both ways.
This is a smart Council.
Looking after our needs.I am pretty confident that there will be some kind of Welsh grant money available to help set-up & run new public authority owned transport if they become available again.
To fail to have a decent public transport infrastructure would be stupid. Not everyone drives to work, not every family can afford 2 cars or indeed any. People also need to be able to get into school and college. Elderly people don’t all have relatives available to drive them to the shops and they can’t be expected to rely on expensive taxis. It’s already too busy on the roads anywhere during rush hours and then everywhere would get gridlocked if there were just a few incidents at pinchpoints around the town – e.g. Gresford or B&Q roundabout type crashes. We’ve also got no ringroad, just the single side of town serving A483.
Wrexham needs more public transport investment not less. Even if setting up a local authority ran service is not the best option, the council needs to try harder to come up with a workable commercial solution (with or without subsidies) to serve everywhere in the county. The fact that the council is making cuts and apparently can’t afford anything right now is simply not an excuse. If the council said they were going to close some schools because they couldn’t afford to run them (*coughs* superschools) and then there were not enough places in the schools for everyone child in the county, would that be acceptable? Imagine the embarassment of having to beg Flintshire and Cheshire to extend their catchment areas to allow in Wrexham kids into already crammed schools across the border.
Point is critical services need public money spent on them. People are willing to pay money to use busses so are not a 100% cash sink. Plus people are able to travel and get jobs that they would otherwise not be able to reach if they had no other means to get there, so that adds to the local economy. The number of times you hear of these bus failings preventing people from being able to get to work in Wrexham Industrial Estate is shocking – our thriving economic powerhouse, one of the largest in Europe and the council aren’t bothered if workers can’t reach there.
You think back in the day there were several more local train stations until Beeching came and closed them. Also Wrexham historically having a tram. Now people are not even bothered if there are no busses to otherwise cut off villages within the county and other large estates.
Ultimately even Car Loving America still has tonnes of busses and if you go across Europe where they still take public transport seriously they’d find it beyond belief the apathy and inaction from the council and the Welsh Government and the attitude towards the general public of allowing low cost public transport to be taken away.
It’s an absolute public right, even though I mostly use a car now, I don’t turn up my nose at people who rely on it, as I had to for most of my young working adult life as I couldn’t afford a car.
If you are going to allow them to take away busses, then you may as well let them take away the libraries, build houses on playing fields, privatise all care homes. Just not have any public services, make Wrexham a privatised commuter town that’s only suitable for affluent drivers and then you’ll get large swathes of council estates and villages where people are cut off with no facilities. It’ll be a 2-speed town, which is utterly shameful and not the town I was proud to be born and raised in.
Transport Secretary Chris Grayling has given a peek into the future of buses here…
TLDR? There won’t be any, start using taxis.
Wrexham Council already has a Transport Grant from Welsh Government to subsidise certain routes after 6.00pm and on a Sunday.
The grant funding has also been used for electronic bus signage — that does not work and also car park signage – oh yes this does not work either.
The question to be asked us how are the Council using their transport grants and is it effective as it could be?[quote quote=142134]Wrexham Council already has a Transport Grant from Welsh Government to subsidise certain routes after 6.00pm and on a Sunday.
The grant funding has also been used for electronic bus signage — that does not work and also car park signage – oh yes this does not work either.
The question to be asked us how are the Council using their transport grants and is it effective as it could be?[/quote]I hope you are not suggesting our council don’t know what they are doing with their money.
Good day to one and all, regards Joness buses we are living in Holt carless and now busless. There are many pensioners in Holt who depend on the bus service for–shopping–attending hospital and doctors aapointments or for social activities. Does, or has anyone any idea of what is to happen to the bus service from Wrexham to Chester and back which takes in many villages on route. This service is vital to many retired older folk who will now have no means of travel//contact or shopping facilities.
[quote quote=142147]Stagecoach are operating the C56 at the moment[/quote]
Interesting how Stagecoach snapped up the one potentially profitable Route – Wrexham to Chester via the back more affluent villages.
Private firms clearly have no interest in taking on the village routes, which is why there is a need for public sector intervention.
Nen, I read over that Guardian article and I think Grayling is on another planet – the fact is taxi-style fares are between £5-£12 on average in a local area per single trip vs £2 – £4 when on a bus (with savings for return and weekly/monthly tickets) so there is no way that the average person would find this affordable and therefore in areas of lower demand like rural areas they wouldn’t serve the areas due to not being profitable – you also wouldn’t get services running at off-peak times – until late in the evening or on Sundays. It would be right up the Tories street as Uber-style drivers are non-unionised, unlike transport workers – with those in the Transport for London (TFL) having the most leverage and causing the most difficulties.
I just cannot get my head round why the Tories are telling us we basically can’t have anything in future paid or not paid for – access to a local doctor, access to a post office, access to an A&E, access to basic public transport, access to full 3-year degrees. No other majorly developed countries are having these problems as bad as we are. There’s too much focus on trying to turn the UK into a low-tax haven to allow large multinationals to return huge profits to their international shareholders, as well as allowing people who earn hundreds of thousands or millions to pay as little tax as possible. The reason is because the one thing that causes Tory voters to not vote Tory (and ebbs away at their solid 40% polling baseline) is if they threaten to raise taxes in any way, shape or form. The Dementia Tax threat near enough torpedoed their huge lead going into the General Election earlier this year and possibly cost them seats. So they are basically crippled in the respect that if they try and raise taxes (even a little bit) to generate revenues so we can run public services in this country to the greater benefit of all the country, then they lose voters. So all they can do is cut services and privatise continuously on tighter budgets until something eventually breaks, at which point the whole country gets angry and Labour gets in anyway. Conversely there are those of us who will never vote Tories for the precise reason that all that ever happens under their watch is constant cuts and bad news.
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