By Redwan Eid
Residents of Cheltenham are complaining about the bus service in the town, with reports that buses mainly turn up late or they do not at all in most of the time. Arrival boards at bus stops do not display any notice about a change of scheduled trips, and the mobile app notifies people at the last minute before the bus is due.
The decline of services mainly lies in buses run by Stagecoach West- the main operator of public transport in Gloucestershire County.
We have spoken to residents at bus stops in Cheltenham, who expressed their deep frustration at the service disruption, which at times caused them to miss critical appointments.
Sue, a public sector worker, says that “You can’t rely on Stagecoach buses to turn up at all if you have an appointment”, and describes it as ‘rubbish’. She adds that the current situation has been the same since before covid. Among the important appointments Sue remembers she missed due to the bus delay or cancellation were medical ones. She reached out to Stagecoach and complained about the service, and the management’s answer was that they were short 4000 drivers across the country and were facing a huge problem in the recruiting new employees.
Harry, a university student has had negative experiences with Stagecoach buses as well. He struggled with his daily journeys to the uni last year from his student residential hall in Pittville to Park Campus, which is usually serviced by the N route, which would most of the time never turn up. That lost Harry a significant amount of time in his lectures until he managed to walk to the town centre to catch another bus to his university.
Layla, a housewife, complained that the bus she takes to work only runs until 3:30 PM, and after that, she needs to find another way back home. Lateness also affected her as others, and at times, that also lost her medical appointments.
We reached out to Stagecoach West and highlighted to them the main points passengers complained about. A spokesperson from the company gave the statement below:
“As is the case with other transport operators and many other organisations, we are seeing a continuing impact on our staffing levels in Gloucestershire as a result of COVID related staff sickness.’
“Our teams are working very hard to continue running our planned services for customers. However, due to ongoing driver sickness, we may not be able to run every service as planned and there may be some changes to services.’
“Where this is the case, we endeavour to offer customers as much notice as possible. In the vast majority of cases, we offer customers 24 hours’ notice in advance of cancelled services.”
Until Stagecoach overcome this problem, bus passengers can check the journeys timetable on the company’s twitter account.
