Devon County Council Bus Cutbacks
Devon County Council have looked at their supported bus network to try and come up with some substantial savings. Over a series of posts we look at some of the individual routes which will be affected, focusing on those which come into the greater Plymothian Transit area.To help meet the £50 million budget reduction required by Government spending cuts next year, we now face making savings of £1.7m from our annual public transport budget. It will be the first time that we have proposed making service reductions for four years. Most bus services in Devon are run commercially by bus companies at no cost to the Council. However, we spend £5.376m a year to support nearly 200 public bus services, carrying around 4.5m passengers every year. These services would not run without this support. We also manage the National Bus Pass Scheme for 175,000 pass holders in Devon. This costs us more than £9m every year. Efficiencies have already been achieved across the wider Transport Coordination Service to meet previous savings.
We need your help
We would like to find out what you think about our proposals to reduce services. Please let us know what their impact might be on you. The proposals would start to come into effect during the second half of 2015.This consultation closes on Monday 20 April 2015. We want to hear what you think about our proposals. To give us your comments use the online feedback form below. Important: Before completing the questions read the proposal/s for the public transport service/s relevant to you. If you begin to complete the questions and leave the page before submitting your feedback, your answers will not be saved.
DEVON COUNTY COUNCIL FEEDBACK FORM
Service 55/56 (Target travel)
Tavistock - Yelverton - Crapstone - Buckland Monachorum - Milton Combe / Meavy - Dousland - WalkhamptonProposal
Service 55 is reduced from 7 journeys to 5. Service 56 continues to have 5 journeys. There will no longer be journeys for Buckland Monachorum School. The new service will operate to and from Tavistock, so all the villages will have a through service.Estimated no.of passengers journeys per year (ie one way trips) no longer catered for on this or alternative services: 10,000
Annual Saving: £45,240, including savings from service 98
Current Map
Links
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bet target travel well gutted had there funding cut big time
ReplyDeleteAnyone know if it's true the buses they did up for the Dartmoor pony, are to big for the routes?
ReplyDeleteAnon 30 January 2015 @ 10:11...
ReplyDeleteYou really don't have a clue how bus companies work do you? Some of us happen to have, from what they term 'experience' gained over years of working. We can't 'retrain' cos we don't know what else to do for work, so we stick with running buses.
These Devon County Council cutbacks will mean loss of work for small operators and for big operators too.
That means people will lose their jobs, and perhaps their businesses stopping trading because the 'solid income' from the council is no longer there, to pay the bills, as they might have borrowed money for the expensive modern buses councils require for their 3/5 year contracts that now they want to walk away from. I can tell you the council isn't paying for these increased costs.
If people lose their jobs because the council removes services, then they will become 'dole scroungers'..... or if they're really unlucky homeless because they can't pay the rent. Or because they borrowed money against their home to buy nice buses for the council's contracts.
And when these businesses go, you will be left with Plymouth Citybus (Go Ahead), First and Stagecoach charging whatever they like to the council, who in turn will have less services to subsidise, meaning you'll walk or you don't have a bus at all. That might excite you, I am sure. And then they will increase the bus fares because no one else will run the buses.
I'm sure we will then see you moaning about that and spouting your stupid ill informed nonsense here.
Aren't bus enthusiasts supposed to 'enthuse' and be excited?
So instead of posting your twaddle here, why not go get excited and harrass your local MP who wants your vote in May.
Ask them what their party wants to do about buses if they are elected to Government?
Are they going to support the industry or are they going to continue to completely balls it up with more cutbacks and forcing the costs of operating buses higher and higher whilst lecturing us on cutting our fares.
Take a long, hard look at what this Government is doing to the bus industry, it is on it's knees. Many smaller independent operators are either going bust, or shutting down, auctioning off their fleets and getting out the business whilst they still can.
Give it another 10 years and there won't be any small firms left.
I'd be worried if I was Target Travel. Worried that the vehicles I had were about to be without work. Drivers with nothing to do now because I made commitments on the strength of the council's money that they promised.
Take enough work away from a business, and it will shut down. Robert Risk is in his mid 60s, the time in life when most retire.
Think about that. You might just miss Target Travel when it goes, as will all the other small operations.
The cuts will be bad news with every company likely to suffer,however some of the passenger journeys are being subsidised by huge amounts .The 55 service above is only calculated at £4.52 but other services featured are at over 15 pounds per passenger trip which is hard to justify.With Devon CC needing to save mega millions they really are in a difficult position of where to find that money.
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