Mousehole

 It’s early April and the sun is shining over Mousehole, Cornwall, as an older couple trudge up the hill to their nearest bus stop before sinking into two of the plastic chairs that have been lined up on the side of the road. Until recently, buses would come right to the centre of the fishing village, the couple are soon explaining to a pair of Australian tourists also waiting for the bus. But when the bus route was taken over by the Go-Ahead transport group in February, the small, ice-cream-van-like buses that had been used by the previous bus company, First Bus, were swapped for full-size buses – some of them double deckers – that wouldn’t be safe to drive through Mousehole’s narrow streets. So the route, which has been taking passengers down to the harbour since the 1920s, was cut short, and now ends at the edge of the village.

This is the start of an interesting article in The Guardian today

Richard Stevens was interviewed for the article

The decision to change the Mousehole route, which also stops at the fishing port Newlyn, “was not done through ignorance”, says Stevens. He’s a former bus driver himself and the Mousehole route was one of the first he ever drove. But though he cares about keeping Cornwall accessible, the previous provider, First Bus, “landed themselves in a loss-making situation”, he says. Cornwall council subsidises approximately half of the bus services in the county, but the Mousehole route falls into the other half – the more well-used half that, pre-Covid at least, was deemed profitable enough to be run as a commercial service. “No bus company’s getting rich these days with current funding models, so while I am a stable company, I couldn’t afford to take on the kind of losses that they were incurring,” Stevens says.

Overall, I think the Guardian did a good job presenting a balanced view in its article about how challenging it is to sort things out without extra funding. Maybe Richard can find some buses that are small enough yet still carry enough passengers to make it viable, or perhaps someone on the council will have to bite the bullet and provide the necessary funding.