MEETING WITH DAN NORRIS, METRO MAYOR
Last Wednesday we finally managed to get the Metro Mayor, Dan Norris, to Brislington East to pay us a visit and sit down to have a serious talk about public transport. We met Dan at St Anne’s House so that he could also see the great work going on there. As he looked out across St Anne’s, Dan’s first comment was “wow, you really do have a lot of trees here!” Our discussions focussed particularly on the lack of decent bus services in the area. We went over the St Anne’s station bid and explained that, whilst the recent report to government identified a real need for transport improvements in the area, it suggests that a costly railway station may not be the answer. The final decision for this rests with government, but if we are not to get our station, then we really need a step-change in bus services and also improved walking and cycling provision.
Dan also said that he is looking to makereal impact in a particular area with the money he has obtained from government, rather than spreading it thinly across the whole city – so we ended our conversation with a big pitch to suggest that he use Brislington as a pilot area to show what can really be done with some money and some innovative thinking. He was very open to this idea, which was very pleasing. We will have to wait and see if we can secure this “pilot”, but we will continue to push for the improvements that we need for Brislington East and we thank Dan for giving us almost an hour of his time. He has agreed to come back to Brislington to host a ‘meet the residents’ session in the near future, which we will try to organise as soon as possible.
WECA EXTRA-ORDINARY MEETING The following day I attended an extraordinary meeting of the WECA committee to discuss the fate of subsidised bus services in Bristol Dan spoke about how funding of regular bus and the rest of the WECA region. The services on non-profit-making routes is a tendering process for these services has very expensive way to crack this particular revealed a 43% increase in cost, due to both nut, and talked about alternative ideas such driver shortages and rising fuel costs. The as ‘on demand’ buses, which would act a bit money must now either be found from somelike Ubers in the local area, picking up people where or subsidised services in the region and delivering them onto the major arteries will be lost. You can read my full statement I like the A4 where fast and frequent services made to the committee on my page here can be delivered profitably. 30
