Thursday, 23 August 2012
Poor bus service between St Ives and Huntingdon
This week's Hunts Post (22 August, page 6) carries a letter from a St Ives resident who was trying to catch the bus to Huntingdon en route for the Olympics. She noticed six buses going towards Cambridge while she waited for 40 minutes for a bus heading towards Huntingdon. Unfortunately she was waiting in Ramsey Road, and as readers of this blog will know, the Huntingdon-bound buses no longer travel the top end of Ramsey Road. The writer mentions difficulties getting information about the bus services, and also unhelpful or non-existent responses from Philip Norwell of Stagecoach in response to questions about the timetable.
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I'm a rather disgruntled St Ives resident who travels from Ramsey Road to Huntingdon regularly. I've done the Stagecoach option once - travel down to Seven Wives, cross the road and get a B bus. This is rather ridiculous. I still end up with an almightly tour of the Oxmoor, and can be spending the best part of an hour to get to Huntingdon. Whippet have had virtually all my bus fare money ever since. It just isn't worth the faff. If I'm coming back in the evening, later B buses still do the old route, thank goodness - and a single whippet ticket in to Huntingdon and a single stagecoach ticket back to Ramsey Road is still cheaper that the Stagecoach option anyway. Sadly, Whippet buses continue to be pretty bad at running to time as they are so vulnerable to the slightest A14 delays, and very optimistically scheduled on the timetable. I'd love to see Whippet C extended to Huntingdon (even if 1A is then reduced to hourly to compensate). I don't really understand the commercial sense of what Stagecoach have done in St Ives. Service A should copy service C and every A bus do the Hill Rise/Ramsey Road loop in one direction, dropping off from Cambridge and picking up to Cambridge at the same time. Every A bus I've noticed on Hill Rise or Marley Road seems pretty empty - and it's a lot of driver time used up in these long winded routes to RAF Wyton and the Marley Road roundabout.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment. Stagecoach's new route pattern doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. Your observation about the low use of the A buses makes me wonder how soon it will be before they change the timetable yet again.
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