Environment Audit CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by Miss Lynn Curnow

Background

I am a female, of age group 45–55. I live in Porthleven, Cornwall. I don’t drive, never have, therefore have mostly relied on public transport for getting to and from other areas. The service provider in this wide area is First Devon & Cornwall. (“First” by name, but, sadly, not by nature, in my opinion!)

I am unemployed and use the service for both shopping and appointments in the nearby town.

I use the bus, on average, at least once a week, and have done so from two rural areas and one town that I have lived in during my adult years. Mostly, though not always, I use it to get to the nearest town, which is Helston.

Helston town is approximately two and a quarter miles from the bus stop I use in Porthleven.

Unfortunately my findings on the service are all somewhat negative.

Reliability

The service mostly runs hourly; 2 hourly on Sundays.

I find the service to be unreliable a lot of the time. Often running late, not only in the summer when the tight time schedule they run is nigh on impossible with all the extra summer tourist traffic on the roads, but also during winter months.

Sometimes buses don’t turn up at all.

Late buses cause a lot of problems to people who have an appointment in town. I have in the past had to cancel a dental appointment because of my bus not turning up within 35 minutes of its due time, and had to plead with the dental practice not to charge me the cancellation fee.

Many times, because the buses are often running late, they get to Helston too late for passengers to connect to a connecting bus to take them on to their further destination, (to the train station for instance), meaning a wait of anything up to an hour—an hour and a half, for another bus to that destination.

Example

An example of this happened recently and was the last time I used the bus:

My bus was approximately 20 minutes late arriving at Porthleven, nothing new there.

When talking to a person who had boarded the bus at Penzance Station, (First’s base station and where the bus had started from), she told me the reason it was late was due to a problem on the roads that was not of the driver or provider’s fault.

However she also told me that she was one of many passengers who had been at Penzance Station waiting for a bus that was due to leave there an hour earlier than the current one we were on. (Most of those passengers were still on the bus when I got on).

The lady added that the earlier bus they had all been waiting for at Penzance Station had been cancelled. I asked her if the office there at Penzance had, at the time, announced the cancellation at the station and given an explanation. She replied that no, they hadn’t, so several people had asked the driver of the bus we were on, and he had told them the previous bus had been cancelled. Until that point no one knew why their bus hadn’t picked them up. No explanation was offered.

I have to say I found that shocking and quite disgraceful that a base station did not have the courtesy or respect for the passengers awaiting a bus to inform them their bus wouldn’t be running, let alone offer them an explanation. Disgusting.

Quality

The buses we have down here are, to a very large extent, old ones, some very old indeed.

Very slow and rattly and, more often than not, are filthy, inside and out!

You are lucky if you can actually see very clearly through the windows, they are that dirty.

To rest your elbow on the inside narrow ledge running along the windows is a no-no unless you don’t mind a filthy elbow as the ledges, floors, etc are covered in dust and general dirt.

Often there is quite a bit of litter on the floors also.

Yet the further you go “up the line” throughout the country where First buses are the service providers, the newer the buses are and they are kept clean and tidy.

The drivers generally have, or show, no customer service skills whatsoever. Even when you smile at them and greet them, or when you disembark and thank them, they just ignore you and remain looking miserable. Not many at all respond in kind. Very rare indeed.

Bus Timetable

The bus timetable was released in April. It had a few mistakes in it on times and days running. I queried these with the company who were unaware of the mistakes.

On 23 May a new timetable was introduced. A lot of bus times had been changed as were some routes, and some buses were taken out/no longer running.

This information was only put up at some bus stops, not released in printed form for passengers to be able to use.

So, within little over a month, there were quite a few changes to the timetable released in April.

The company’s response to this is that people need to check online when they are planning a journey. Fine for someone with a computer and internet access, but a lot of people don’t have that.

Funding/Fare Payers

My last observation, point of view is the funding of the buses.

I consider this: The company is part funded by the Council, but who actually pays for the service/pays the fares to offset the rest of the funding needed?:

Students get free travel.

OAPs use their fare exemption card.

This card is only permitted to be used for single journeys, NOT return journeys, hence making more money from the funding of them for the company as two separate fares are cheaper than a return fare.

Workers don’t use the buses due to their unreliability and time it takes to get to their required destination due to the buses not being direct. (Buses made me late three times in the first two weeks of my employment some time ago, resulting in me receiving a verbal warning about my lateness!)

Therefore the main (or only) fare payers are the unemployed, having to use the service to go into town to the job centre, or go shopping, etc.

Very unfair, and making it even more difficult for those already struggling financially.

This makes the fares very expensive. A return fare to Helston from Porthleven is a minimum of £3.85. That is travelling for 4 and a half miles. A single fare is only about 50p cheaper.

If you wish to travel on to the supermarket, another minute’s ride on the bus, that cost me an extra 50 pence, and that was many months ago now.

I am owed 5 pence on my last journey by the company and was given an “i.o.u” ticket, a credit voucher, by the driver of the last bus I used, because he was apparently short of change. That bus had left the base station only about 45 minutes before!

I was incredulous and did think to myself “I’m sure they wouldn’t allow me to owe them 5 pence on a journey if I was short of that!”

All in all, to summarise, I find the service awful, unreliable, dirty, overly expensive and a fairly miserable experience having to use it.

3 September 2012