A Bristol MP has described a decision to cancel 1,450 buses a week as ‘the apparent collapse of Bristol’s public transport system’, and says she will ‘demand answers’ from the city’s biggest bus company.
Thangam Debbonaire, the MP for Bristol West, said she would be ‘urgently contacting’ First Bus to find out ‘how they will continue to adequately serve Bristolians’ who depend on buses, following First’s announcement that they don’t have enough bus drivers to maintain their own timetable.
Bristol Live revealed today that First is ‘temporarily cancelling’ hundreds of bus journeys on more than a dozen different routes that, spread over a seven-day week, amounted to a total of 1,450 individual bus journeys. The cancellations were effectively a case of First West of England trimming its own timetable to match the number of drivers it has, rather than promise a timetable it then could not meet because of its ongoing recruitment crisis.
Read more: First Bus cancels 1,450 Bristol bus services a week until April
The worst hit areas of the city were South Bristol, where almost all the routes were affected and areas like Hartcliffe were losing 100 buses a week, and north east Bristol, where the linked trio of bus routes - the 48, 48a and the 49 - would see more than 150 buses cut a week. Ms Debbonaire said she was ‘very troubled’ by the cuts.
“Thousands of Bristolians depend on buses to get around the city,” she said. “So I was very troubled to hear that many bus services are being cancelled. The apparent collapse in Bristol's public transport system is also evident from messages I am receiving from people across my constituency, describing important journeys that have been completely disrupted in recent days.
"This chaos will only make life harder for people already struggling to pay the bills this winter. I will be contacting bus operator First Bus to demand answers,” she added.
Announcing the cuts, a spokesperson for First West of England said the cancellations would at least hopefully end the phenomenon of ‘ghost buses’ which appear on the bus stop digital display boards and First’s app, but then don’t appear in real life - because the digital information is based on the timetable and not on the reality of whether the bus has a driver and is running or not.
Ms Debbonaire is a Labour MP in a city with four Labour MPs, a Labour Mayor and, as of May 2021, a Labour Metro Mayor for the West of England Combined Authority, Dan Norris, who has ultimate control over public transport in the city region.
A spokesperson for First Bus said: “Due to ongoing driver shortages, which are making it difficult to operate all journeys in our current timetables, we have removed some journeys across several services. The cancelled journeys, which are listed below, will show as cancelled on the First Bus app, and on the real time information screens at bus stops.
“We are doing our utmost to address the driver shortage but doing so will inevitably take some time. As a result, we expect these cancellations to remain in place until at least the next major change to timetables on Sunday 2nd April, which is a date agreed between all operators and the West of England Combined Authority.
“We regret having to do this as we appreciate it will cause some disruption, but by giving customers advance notice of cancellations rather than having to learn of them on the day, we want to make it easier for travel plans to be adjusted. Cancelling these journeys in advance also enables our operations teams to focus on delivering a more reliable service for our customers, rather than dealing with cancelling journeys on the day.
“We would like to thank customers for their patience and understanding as we manage this difficult situation,” they added. “Please continue to check the First Bus app for up-to-date service information.”
Read next:
- WECA accused of wasting £8m on new Bristol HQ after Yate "snub"
- Major First Bus changes in Bristol begin today - full list of services affected
- First confirm 178 bus service will be scrapped
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