Local transport authorities are grappling with the cost implications of improving public transport access to increasingly-dispersed employment areas.
The Greater Nottingham, Oxfordshire, and Merseyside authorities – all highlighted by the Department for Transport as having good accessibility plans – have highlighted the difficulties of improving access without additional funds and rising contract costs. Oxfordshire will review all its subsidised bus contracts over the next five years to identify whether changes would allow the unemployed – 6% of people in some wards – to better access jobs.
But its local transport plan 2 states that due to the dispersed nature of employment sites – 9,000 jobs have been created on the city’s outskirts in the last 10-year census period – it may prove ‘difficult to introduce efficient services’.
~Steve Howell~ head of transport at Oxfordshire, said: ‘We may need to cut services elsewhere.’
Funding could possibly be obtained from employers – as with a new hospital, where enhanced services and bus-only access gates were secured – but discussions were ‘often slow’.
~Chris Carter~ of ~Nottingham City Council~ agreed there was ‘an issue of affordability’, in terms of connecting scattered industrial estates into the bus network. The city has, however, secured revenue funding from two hospitals to make an existing half-hourly service along the ring road run every 10 minutes. It will meet the cost of the new vehicles.
On Merseyside, the 200,000 unemployed have difficulty in reaching employment sites in Cheshire. Merseytravel is set to review its tendered bus network with a view to setting minimum accessibility standards for jobs. But its £20M annual budget is ‘under increasing pressure’ while a new bus route to jobs in Cheshire could cost £100,000 a year.