blog: Catch the Bus Month - Enhancing Bus Travel with CPCA
Friday 27th September 2024
Having spent much time in recent years developing Cambridge & Peterborough Combined Authority’s Bus Franchising Assessment, it has been great to see Mayor Nik Johnson’s commitment to enhancing bus travel. Following the decision to increase the Mayoral Precept this year to provide funds specifically for improving bus services, I assisted in the development of proposals for new or enhanced services. September has seen these starting to come on-stream, so I was keen to have a ride on one such service as part of ITP’s Catch the Bus Month Challenge.
Rather than use the train from Peterborough to Huntingdon, I opted to use the 904 bus service – a partnership operation where Dews Coaches run the service on behalf of Stagecoach. In early September, the service benefitted from Precept funding to increase the frequency from 90 minutes to a more attractive hourly service for most of the day. With a journey time of 70 minutes, it’s not really an attractive end-to-end proposition – but the train serves that market well. However, the service provides useful links for the intermediate villages and expanding Alconbury Weald development. Early indications are that the service is doing well – certainly my journey saw a healthy number of passengers throughout, including a young person using the Mayor’s Tiger Pass (allowing travel at £1 for under 25s). And another bus spotted in the other direction had an equally good passenger load.
High quality bus networks need strong advocates and funding. Mayor Nik Johnson is putting this into practice. Indeed, at an event about Creating Connected Communities in Huntingdon that I attended later the same day as my bus ride, I was struck by the Mayor’s keynote speech where he highlighted the importance of bus. He felt that there was a need to refocus the way we travel – rather than sorting out our own individual travel requirements, there was a need to look at what communities could do collectively. His view is that compassion and care leads to cooperation, which in turn brings about change. He suggested that “society needs to work together, and people should be willing to change their behaviour for wider societal benefit.” I guess the implication is that if people choose to use the bus instead of the car, it will help to maintain bus services for the wider community.
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