“Every person that gets on the bus has their own story,” says Douglas Fraser, parking his shiny 16-seater on the brae behind Glenfarg village hall.
“Young people can get to their football and rugby clubs in Kinross and visit friends. Older people with mobility problems get a blether on the bus when they don’t have other opportunities to meet. And families who were going to have to leave the village can stay now because we’ve got better links.”
This community bus service in rural Perthshire has transformed village life since it began in January with the modest ambition of a weekly round trip for people to have a coffee.
As Fraser, treasurer of Glenfarg Community Transport Group, explains, demand suddenly escalated when the local bus company retired and took with it the lifeline 55 route that links the village to the nearby town of Kinross.
Since April, the Glenfarg-Kinross community service has run 11 times a day – three times as many trips as previously – having just introduced a 7.10am commuter service, which connects to the bus to Edinburgh at Kinross park and ride.
Demand has more than doubled, with the fleet of four buses, two bought with grant funding and two more on loan, carrying more than 300 passengers a week, and driven by three salaried drivers and a team of 15 volunteers.
“We’ve never looked back,” says Fraser. “People in the village were feeling a bit down in dumps: the church is moving, the village shop having a difficult time, and like a lot of rural villages we are losing our facilities one by one. But now morale has gone up considerably.”
The service also does a school run taking pupils from outlying areas to the village primary school, and offers an on-demand service for group outings. Unlike a commercial service with a dictated route, the service can cater for those who struggle to stand at a bus stop, picking up less mobile passengers from their front doors.
“It’s wonderful for the village!” exclaims Jeanette, who is preparing for her Friday morning yoga class at the village hall with her friends Liz and Vivien. Liz attests the bus has “taken me places I’d not been able to go”. The women, all retired, have visited Pittenweem arts festival, the V&A museum in Dundee, the Calendar Girls musical in St Andrews. “I’m forever hearing something I’ve missed,” laughs Vivien.
There are about 20 community bus schemes in Scotland, and an estimated 220 across the UK, according to David Kelly, the Scotland director for the Community Transport Association.
“These are usually in areas already underserved by transport links, for example a community picking up the pieces when a vital route is lost, like in Glenfarg, or expanding the network to suit local needs, for example the South Lanarkshire town of Strathaven setting up an express service into Glasgow city centre to reduce car use.”
While most local authorities are supportive of the concept of community buses – and Fraser commends the “tremendous” support his group has received from Perth and Kinross council – Kelly underlines that more investment is needed, not only in the initial outlay for a vehicle but to keep services running, especially when they need to pay for professional drivers. There’s currently no national source of funding for setup costs of a service like this.
“This is really important when commercial providers are cutting services,” adds Kelly, noting that in Wales, operators have warned passengers that up to a quarter of bus services could be cut after the Welsh government ended pandemic-era emergency funding.
Cuts are not only happening to rural services either. There was an outcry in July when a private company threatened to scrap Glasgow’s only night bus service – a compromise involving another bus company has since been reached.
Ellie Harrison, of the public transport campaign Get Glasgow Moving, said that while community initiatives can be vital, they relied on committed locals accessing sparse funding when a more integrated approach was desperately needed.
“It’s a tiny sticking plaster over the crisis in Scotland’s bus services. Four years on from the Transport Act 2019, the Scottish government are yet to enact vital ‘franchising’ powers, which would give regional transport partnerships the power to re-regulate regional bus networks, so they can be planned and coordinated to serve local communities’ needs, and cut and cap fares. This process must be accelerated and the Scottish government must provide funding and support to use these powers like Greater Manchester is doing currently.”
The challenge for the Glenfarg Transport Group now is to keep the service sustainable, explains Fraser. The fare money alone is not enough on its own: “We’re a charity so charge to cover costs, not to make a profit”, and it’s volunteer run, relying on the energy and time of a handful of dedicated individuals.
Meanwhile, other villages are asking the group how to start their own local service: “It resonates with so many people in Scotland, rural villages feeling isolated and that’s what we’re trying to resolve here.”
