1 Bedford Area Bus Users’ Society. BABUS Newsletter No 1. March 2006 The first Annual General Meeting of BABUS will be held on Saturday 20th May 2006, starting at 10.00, at the Bunyan Meeting House in Mill Street, Bedford. Mr James Freeman, the Managing Director of Stagecoach East, has kindly agreed to speak at the meeting on “A Vision for Stagecoach in Bedfordshire”. We hope that all members who can, will come along so that we can meet each other and welcome our speaker. Refreshments will be available. Open letter, with two themes, to members from the vice-chairman of BABUS. Why am I with BABUS? I have for many years been interested in public transport. Like many of us, I see that the private motorcar has, in many places, dominated the travel to the extent of virtually wiping out public transport, particularly in rural communities. I have lived in a number of large cities in this country that have fairly comprehensive public transport services, yet use of the motorcar has led to traffic congestion and gridlock. I now live in a rural area where public transport is fairly primitive, and many of the communities around me have little or no public transport. What little public transport exists is totally uncoordinated. If you have no access to private transport it’s like having no legs. The main bus route through my village starts at a town with a railway station, passes through three other towns with railway stations, and finishes in another town with a railway station. Yet for some crazy reason at no point on its journey does it provide any kind of interchange with the railway system. In order to earn a living, by working in a town, I have found it necessary to use a private car as the only practical way to get around. Having been an enthusiastic cyclist in my youth, I found latterly that my work location was generally too far away to be within easy reach. In any case, as a cyclist these days you are very vulnerable on roads where some motorists seem to barely know what a bicycle looks like. This was starkly brought home to me a few years ago when a car driver, who did not even stop, knocked a friend of mine off his bicycle locally. The victim, having lost a leg, is now in a wheelchair. This is why, as a parish councilor, I also campaign for improving safety of cyclists. I have travelled around different parts of the world, and through Eastern Europe and South America in particular. There I saw it was possible not only for public transport to exist, but actually prosper as a method of travel. Being an enforced car owner and a fugitive from pedal cycling, I thought there must be a better way of organising transport in this country. This is why I joined BABUS. My only regret was, and still is, that BABUS restricts itself to transport by bus. In truth I am not particular interested in traveling only by bus: to me, bus is just one mode of public transport. There are others like rail, trolleybus, tram and so on, even canal. Depending on my journey I will happily use whatever mode of transport is appropriate. I suspect many of the public feel the same way: I imagine they just want to travel from A to B and, like me, will use whatever mode of transport is appropriate and available. With this in mind I have looked to join forces with other organisations locally that are also engaged in public transport. There are a number of such organisations, eg BRTA. I wonder if we each individually have sufficient membership for us to be campaigning independently? It might cause confusion in the minds of the public that there are several monkeys trying to unzip the same banana. Is that piece of paper really necessary? When I joined BABUS, as secretary in the first instance, I said I would be happy to serve subject to one proviso; that I would like to use electronic communication as the primary method of exchanging written information. There were a number of reasons for this and I would like to share them with you. 1. We now have some 80% or so of homes locally with a connection to Internet (figure provided by Mid Beds District Council). For those people not yet so connected there are numerous places, such as the library, which provide access. Many offer training too, often for little or no cost to the user. Contrary to popular belief, it is not even essential to own a computer to use the Internet. 2. I serve on a number of different committees, and in other organisations. If they all send me paper I simply do not have the resources, or the storage, to manage the resulting mountain of paper that would clog up my home. 3. One of the reasons I believe we should promote public transport for travel is the environmental one. I share the concerns of many people about the medium to long-term effects on our planet caused by over-use of resources. Whenever I receive an e-mail from Beds County Council, there is a message at the end proclaiming: “Save energy, money and the environment - is it necessary to print this message?” I support this notion and invite BABUS members to think about it. The paper tsunami obliged me to relinquish the post of BABUS secretary. I am now focusing on deputising for the chairman as appropriate, maintaining the website and bulletin board and managing development projects. I have spent a significant amount of time setting up our website and its associated bulletin board. I hope that those of you who have used these resources will agree with me that they provide a worthwhile way to communicate. I will be the first to admit that neither are they perfect nor do they totally replace every other form of communication. However, I hope that those of you who have not used them will take the time to find out about them, and maybe dip your toe in the water. The Newsletter is sent out only a few times a year: the website can be updated daily if necessary. I would especially like 2 feedback and items for the “News” section. The BABUS website at babus.org.uk is the window through which the rest of the world views us. I welcome all members to this, the first edition of our newsletter. If you are reading it electronically then I especially thank you. I invite members to join me and limit the number of trees being cut down, as part of our mutual interest in preserving the environment for future generations. If you need help on reducing the amount of paper in your communication, feel free to contact me to explore other options. If together we succeed, one of my reasons for joining BABUS will have been met. Obligatory Disclaimer by BABUS. The articles by named persons in this newsletter are the views of those individuals, and do not necessarily coincide with the views of BABUS as a corporate entity. From the Editor. Hello everyone, my name’s Peter Hirst; I’ve been ‘volunteered’ into putting the BABUS newsletter together, and since I wrote that, the committee has kept on looking at me, with the result that yours truly now finds himself scribbling notes at its meetings, writing the minutes or notes afterwards whilst climbing a steep learning slope on the use of tables in ‘Word’, maintaining the membership listfor use in e-mail distribution of all the documents The two main people on the BABUS team are Colin Franklin, chairman and very keen on bus operations, and Frank Hendrix, vice-chairman and website wizard for our website at babus.org.uk (no w’s with that one!). He gets us all to think in terms of electronic data transmission, a very worthwhile practice. We are encouraged and helped in our efforts by the people at Stagecoach, and by Stephen Sleight of the Beds Rural Communities Charity. One of the projects that the Rural Communities Charity runs is the Rural Transport Partnership, who got BABUS founded. BABUS, in turn, is associated with Bus Users UK, who publish their own very good quarterly magazine. They can be contacted at www.bususers.org.uk. Hyperlinks exist between all three websites, Stagecoach, Bus Users and BABUS. I’ve always been keen on transport, first coming across Biggleswade as a handy stop on the Yorkshire Services route up the A1, long before the M1 was built. It’s been my home on and off since 1961, at which time it was still on the coach routes to the West Riding and even Scotland. Since then it has lost many of its routes; most recently the daily ones to Milton Keynes, Stevenage and Cambridge. These routes were taken off quite soon after the opening of Biggleswade’s bus station. Timetables. The Stagecoach timetables are always well displayed at this station but other timetables, for Herberts Travel, J & D Travel, Ivel Sprinter and Tesco’s are not. Some are available from the library, whose policy is to rely on the blue timetable booklets, supplemented as necessary by leaflets for newer services. However, surely they should also be displayed at least at the most important bus stops. After all, the Ivel Sprinter timetable is displayed at Cambridge’s Drummer Street bus station. The Tesco bus services to Baldock were included in Hertfordshire’s Region 5 booklet and they’re still on www.intalink.org.uk (though its page is dated in year 2000).