The parish council recently received concerns via email and verbally regarding the bus services in Tilsworth. Please see the response from CBC below.
Bus services F77 and F70 are operated by Arriva commercially, therefore we have no say in where and how it operates.
This issue has been raised on several occasions and when we have discussed it with Arriva, they had made it clear that operating through Tilsworth at peak times is just not commercially viable.
The fact they serve the journeys they do, via Tilsworth and Stanbridge, is through us liaising with them to provide the existing journeys, they would have bypassed both villages, to make the service quicker for the majority of passengers that want to travel to Luton, Dunstable, Leighton Buzzard and Milton Keynes.
The Public Transport department has a set budget to support bus services, and this has remained the same for over 5 years, so our ability to support additional service requests is impossible.
For us to be able to pay for more journeys via Tilsworth, would cost in excess of £100k p/a, and unfortunately that is just not a cost-effective use of our budget, we are supporting areas that would have no services at all if we didn’t.
The F70 and F77 services are Busway services, so they will not stop directly outside the Hospital, there is a stop on the Busway called Stanton Rd and this a 6-7 minute walk to the Hospital. If people want to alight directly outside the Hospital, they can transfer from the F70/F77 at Church St and board the Arriva 31 service, changing buses isn’t a massive inconvenience if you want to get to where you are going, buses can’t go to all destinations people want.
Hospital journeys make up less than 6% of all bus journeys, so they’re not priority journeys when a service is operated commercially, everything has to be geared to where do the majority of people want to travel to.
South Beds Dial a Ride operate the 47 and 74 through Tilsworth, both services have been designed for other locations, they travel through Tilsworth as they are on the way to the destinations the services operate too.
The 74 service provides journeys to Dunstable from Hockliffe and the 47 serves Leighton Buzzard from Ridgmont and Woburn 4 days a week and serves Dunstable on a Thursday.
Employees at the care home can catch the F77 that serves Stanbridge, the bus serves the stops at Kings Rd which is only a 5 minute walk to the care home.
I will arrange for the timetables in Tilsworth to be update.
We will hopefully be receiving some financial support from the Dft under the Bus Service Improvement Plan, this includes money to help improve certain core services and the F70-F77 falls into this category, it will be down to the operator and the working group to decide where this is best utilised, so we’ll have to see what comes out of those discussions over the next 12 months.
It would help us greatly to have some focus from parishes to lobby the newly appointed Councillors after the elections, to recognise public transport budgets need to be reviewed, to be able help support the services needed by residents, they set the budget for us to use.