Today I attended the Transport Decisions Committee at the County Council to argue the case for ensuring local bus services in the Wantage, Grove and Faringdon area are continued.
Much of my casework is involved with dealing with residents' concerns about the local buses, and it is always a passion of mine to try to improve public transport. In an ideal world, people would choose to leave their cars at home because the experience of public transport is so much better than sitting in traffic jams.
Details of the individual services and any changes to those currently running will be available shortly, but I just wanted to make people aware that there are some improvements on the way. One of the possible new services will be a through service at peak times from Wantage, Grove & Hanney to Didcot and Milton Park. This is something I have been pushing for over a number of years ever since a young man came to my surgery who had lost his job at Milton Park through lack of a regular, reliable bus service to get him to work on time.
Today it was also agreed to continue to award grants towards the very successful Wantage/Grove Community Car Scheme run by the Independent Advice Centre in Wantage, the Grove 'Shopperbus' Service and Stanford in the Vale's minibus. All very valuable services run locally by volunteers and which contribute greatly to improving the lives of elderly and frail people within our community.
I had spent a long time preparing my report for submission to this committee and was very pleased that my comments were listened to and was particularly grateful for the hard work which has gone into these individual contracts by our Public Transport Team at the County. Watch this space for further details.
Great work.
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