Bus passengers were told to be prepared for more bus cancellations and price increases during winter as the City Council works with bus operators to solve the problems facing bus travel.
Ava Doyle, a busy student, relies on the bus services to travel across the city for her education and has noticed the recent bus cancellations, “It’s pretty annoying when you wake up really early to get to your lectures on time, then you get to the bus stop and see the next 5 busses have been cancelled. I hope they fix the problem soon because it’s getting ridiculous.”
First Bus and Northern regional directors discussed plans to overcome the harsh winter to come in Leeds City Council’s Infrastructure Scrutiny board.
Alex Hornby, CEO of Transdev, warned meeting members over the likelihood of difficulties during the winter months, stating, “It’s going to be more difficult to obviously manage punctuality when you’ve got a driver shortage.”
He followed this up by stating, “It’s across the whole sector. It’s not focussed on one company, or even on transport, it’s all around us.”
However, the board’s industry representatives appeared calm while discussing possible strategies to increase the number of available bus drivers.
“We’ve just introduced quite a significant pay settlement to our driving staff here in Leeds, we’ve obviously got recruitment incentives and we have actually had to take some pretty difficult decisions to try to recover the network,” Paul Matthews confidently stated to City Council members and industry colleagues.
As well as regional solutions to the current bus transport problems, members of the scrutiny board also discussed the governments new bus service improvement plan, or BSIP. The BSIP aims to help regional authorities to develop action plans in order to boost bus services and encourage bus travel, while identifying the funding needed to provide these upgraded services.
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