Buses

25 Minutes by Car, or 1 hour & 36 Mins using Buses...

...then a 24-Mins Wait before Your Work Shift starts?

Bus in a snowstorm in Stockton-on-Tees, Teesside, UK, at 11:46 GMT, Thursday, 30 November, 2017
Source: me (Gary Hayward)

Buses, eh? Who cares about them? Well,let's see now... only the millions of people who rely on them to travel into town to meet friends; attend an appointment, maybe to see a film at a local theatre or their family or hospital doctor; to get to and from work; and a million other reasons.

But whatever the reason, inconvenient and unreliable bus services have a big, negative impact on people's lives, their well-being, and the economy, Bosses typically expect employees to be at their workstations on time and in a calm and collected mood, ready to be maximally and efficiently productive. Unproductivity negatively impacts the bottom line, ultimately resulting in sackings or redundancies or even closure of the business. Late-arriving patients at a GP surgery or hospital in-patient facility won't get their full allocated time with the healthcare professional, leading to rushed, thus possibly inaccurate, explanations and diagnoses of signs and symptoms, or an additional or replacement appointment having to be made, costing the healthcare provider, very likely the NHS, money as well as delaying other patients' access to services.

Yet buses hardly get a look-in when it comes to public discussion, media and political attention. Millions of people don't rely on buses, having access to private transport. Given the relatively high costs of owning and running a private car, it's the wealthier members of society who enjoy that privilege. It's also that many of the better off commute by train, and there's a certain pandering to that demographic by national politicians, politicians spending so much time living and working in city centres, largely well-served by bus transport, therefore something taken for granted. All of this reflected in the paucity of media coverage of the issue.

Years ago, as an unemployed job-seeker, I participated in a Government-mandated scheme to help the jobless into, or back into, paid employment. It was called Community Work Placements (CWP). Each participant would spend five full days per week for twelve months gaining work experience from whichever participating company or otherwise organisation they were allocated to. At the time, another scheme, called Mandatory Work Placements (MWP), was causing major controversy on the basis that it was 'slave labour'; the major argument against it being that anyone working in a role for which there would normally be an expectation of being paid at the going rate should be paid that going rate rather than the person's meagre unemployment benefit. There was also the fear that employers might reduce the hours of their paid staff, or even lay off members of staff, in preference for the unemployed scheme participants, to whom they would pay nothing at all, bar a small travel and, perhaps, lunch allowance, even if they wanted to. As a result of the controversy, many organisations declined to participate in providing work placements, leaving the contracted-out operators of the scheme frantically searching for the very few willing ones and allocating jobless participants to them within a Government-mandated cut-off for doing so of twenty-one days. Only days before the deadline for allocating me a placement arrived, the only organisation that I could be signed up for was a charity shop in Hartlepool, 11.4 miles north-north-east by road of my outer-suburban home, in Stockton-on-Tees. Not a great distance per se; however...

by car, the journey would take just twenty-five minutes (about twenty-one in light traffic conditions). But that wasn't an option for me; I had to take the bus.

There was only one bus operator running buses, a singular service, between Stockton and Hartlepool. The nearest of its stops to me was in Stockton High Street. The nearest of its stops to the charity shop was just a two-minute walk away. I picked from the timetable the bus run that would see me arrive the nearest in time to, but in advance of, the start time of my work shift, which was nine o'clock, twenty-six minutes early of which I would be alighting from the vehicle. But the bus journey took fifty-four minutes, trundling around, as it did, housing estates and neigbouring settlements, picking up passengers at many of the forty-eight intermediate stops. Adding to the stress is fact that the bus would be crowded at rush-hours, standing room only.

Of course, I first had to get to Stockton High Street from my home. Despite there being bus stops merely yards away, of the solitary bus operator serving them there were no runs early enough for me to make the connection to the Hartlepool-bound bus running from the high street. I would have to take an estimated thirteen-minute/actual fifteen minute walk, 0.6 miles by footway, to the nearest stop of the only other alternative service, serving a neighbouring suburb.

The itinerary was as follows:

So, had I had access to a car, I could have set off from home at, say, 08:20 and arrived at the charity shop at 08:45, just twenty-five minutes later, with just fifteen minutes until the start of my shift. Whereas, using the buses, I had to set off from home at 07:00, to arrive at the charity shop at 08:36, one hour and thirty-six minutes later, with twenty-four minutes until the start of my shift. Then there's the journey home, at the end of the afternoon, although that took a little less time as the bus service between Stockton High Street and my home, a ten-minute journey, 2.1 miles away by road, was well up and running by then.

There was a local train service to Hartlepool but that wasn't any better; if it had been, I would have chosen it (in fact, if I remember correctly, it would have been worse). And getting taxis would have been financially impossible for me (the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) are not given to funding job-seekers' taxi fares, don't ya know!)

Remember, this was to work a full-time, five-day-per-week, twelve-month work placement—not a paid job—at a charity shop.

Luckily, under official DWP scheme-provider rules, which stated that job-seekers' total travel time to or from their work placement must not exceed ninety minutes (1 hour & 30 mins), I was able to leave the charity shop without penalty. I was further fortunate in my scheme provider then being able to get me a work placement in my own town (which, training with and working for Citizens Advice as a generalist advice worker, and clerk, happened to be more relevant to my administrative work experience and job goal and was located right on my town's High Street).

You might well think, "Well, you've got to do whatever it takes to get a job, or increase your chances of getting one, such as by engaging in voluntary work." However, that's missing my point...

...which is that one shouldn't need to spend an hour and thirty-six minutes getting to a location by bus or other public transport, especially one's (fancied) place of work, when one could get there in just twenty-five minutes by car.

Have things improved at all? Well, early-morning bus service from outside my home to my town's high street has since come about, so that gets rid of the fifteen-minute walk I had to take to the next-nearest service. This means that I could now board the 07:28 bus and arrive at the charity shop at 08:42, that still-solitary service from Stockton High Street to Hartlepool taking forty-nine minutes (forty-nine stops), down from fifty-four, a saving of five minutes. So, a total travelling time of seventy-four minutes (1 hour & 14 mins), down from that ninety-six minutes (1 hour & 36 mins), a saving of twenty-two minutes. Travelling by train, I could leave my home at 07:13 to arrive at the charity shop at 08:32, the itinerary consisting of four walks, lasting twenty-one minutes in total, two bus services, and one train service. Not very convenient. Total journey time: seventy-nine minutes (1 hour & 19 mins), despite the train journey taking just eighteen minutes (three stops).

It really doesn't have to be this way. Darlington, a town to the west of Stockton and of similar size, is a few miles more distant by road to Stockton than Hartlepool. Yet Darlington has for years now had an express bus service meaning it takes just thirty-five minutes to get from its town centre to Stockton's, although the buses are often very late, sometimes not turning up at all, standing passengers packed shoulder-against-shoulder filling the entire gangway, sometimes dangerously right up to the windscreen. But there's never been an express bus service between Stockton and Hartlepool in my living memory.

But these things can be done.

This new, Labour Government is supposedly going to sort this all out. Unfortunately, Stockton West, consisting of roughly half the town's residents, has a Conservative MP, and the Tees Valley region's mayor is also a Conservative and has ruled out a bus franchising model for the region, claiming its complexity thus cost would be prohibitive. But, then again, he's a Conservative, and right-wingers tend not to be sympathetic to the needs of the struggling members of society, including the fundamentally less able.

Is anyone listening?