US Bus to Supporter Bus

Although this may seem entirely unrelated to the Memorial Stadium, the "US Bus" service that ran between St Werburghs and St Pauls with Easton has now been closed.

This service came into existence after protests from local people about the barrier to movement from traffic and street crime in the area around the M32. The service was paid for in part by funds set aside to help develop transport services in urban areas, but it was not a free service and tickets had to be purchased in advance from various outlets.

The service ran from 8AM to 8PM each day but was often completely empty. Part of the problem was that you had to be a "member" to buy tickets and even though there were around 1000 members, obviously the hassle factor meant that people did not bother.

The failure of this service shows that despite being something that was desirable, much rests on the implementation of the plan. One of the big problems for the US Bus was that timetables and route/stops information was only available to members (a bizarre statue attached to the funding).

The connection to the Memorial Stadium of course is the idea of supporter buses as the solution to the congestion problems in Horfield on match days. If all eleven supporter buses were to be implemented they would be expected to deliver 1000 spectators to a match. However because "trigger" attendance levels for the introduction of the buses is based on average attendances, it is unlikely that there will ever be more than five or six supporter buses running.

The question is whether the information about when and where these buses travel from will be sufficiently publicised for the services to actually be used. Or will we see the supporter buses withdrawn after several years of underuse with the excuse "there is no point in running empty buses which are only contributing to the pollution and congestion."

History and photograph from http://www.stwerburghs.org, the St Werburghs community web site.