Co-ordination vital
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A FULLY commercial bus network for the Romsey area in Hampshire would cater for only 36 per cent of existing passengers and would wipe out all evening and Sunday services.
"There would be social hardship on a large scale" said speakers David Beaman of National Bus and Doug Jones of Hampshire county council, who presented a report on the area's bus services to the Planning and Transport Research and computational company's conference in Brighton last week. The Hants & Dorset network at present gets 77 per cent of its costs from fares, most of the shortfall being made up by £130,000 from the county's revenue support allocation. To do without this eight services in the area would have to be cut to two, covering only 28 per cent of the current network mileage.
The area study looked at the possible use of "unconventional" transport resources to plug the gaps. This included ambulances, fire services personnel carriers, private hire cars and minibuses, works transport and community buses and other voluntary organisation transport.
In general, problems of vehicle and driver availability prevented the regular use of these resource.
However, Beaman and Jones said there was some scope for meeting part of the unserved demand by co-ordinating this pool and the task was already beinb tackled by a county voluntary transport broker.