A Stirling West councillor has met with First Bus bosses over the state of bus services as passengers continue to struggle with services across the city.
Labour councillor Jen Preston has taken over the chair role for Stirling Council’s Environment and Housing committee following the recent local authority elections - with the poor bus services currently on offer among the items high on her agenda.
The issue has been a consistent gripe for commuters and passengers aiming to get in and out of the city on a regular basis, with MSPs Evelyn Tweed and Mark Ruskell among those expressing their frustrations in recent weeks.
In a social media post on Saturday, Ms Preston urged locals affected by the poor service to get in touch and labelled the current situation as “not good enough”.
As part of efforts to resolve the problems with a reduction of services and short-notice cancellations, Ms Preston wrote to both the Traffic Commissioner and the Transport Minister and met with First Bus Scotland managing director Duncan Cameron.
Speaking to the Observer, Ms Preston said: “I’m looking to get the bus services working reliably again, and I’m really open to suggestions from any of those people about how we can make that happen.
“The biggest issue seems to be that First don’t have sufficient drivers to cover all their routes. They also need to get on top of their communications so that people know which services are having problems on any given day.
“I met with the Managing Director at First on Wednesday. He thinks that they’re making progress in recruiting more drivers and has promised to look again at how they communicate delays and cancellations so let’s see how that goes.
“In the short term, it’s just more of what’s currently happening – people who rely on the bus to get around are facing serious difficulties.
“They are late for work and medical appointments, they miss seeing family and friends, and they can’t be sure that they’ll be able to get home. This needs addressing as a priority.
“But there’s a longer term issue too – we are in a climate emergency and many of us who normally drive would like to be able to choose public transport for some journeys. But as things currently stand bus travel is often not an attractive alternative.
“When it works well it’s really good – I caught the bus to work this morning and it was on time, clean, and got me where I needed to be. It needs to be like that all of the time, though, for more people to consider the bus as an everyday alternative to taking the car.”
Responding to a question regarding “last-minute cancellations” on the X10, 38 and 52 buses from Stirling MSP Ms Tweed at Holyrood earlier this month, Transport Minister Jenny Gilruth stressed the impact of the pandemic and Brexit had caused issues with the recruitment and training of new drivers.
Ms Gilruth also confirmed she had asked Transport Scotland for an “urgent review” into why so many services were now being cancelled.
