Cuts for buses to Southmead, Parkway, UWE

First Bus has announced cuts to bus services from our villages to Parkway Station, the University of the West of England Frenchay Campus and Southmead Hospital, starting 4th September.

You can see the full details of the changes on the South Glos Council website here - you need to look at the sections about services 81, 82 and 16 in particular.

The section of the 81 service between Yate and Parkway will be withdrawn, meaning that people living in Yate, Coalpit Heath and Frampton Cotterell will only have service 82 to get to Parkway, giving them a less frequent service. Those living in the villages between Wotton under Edge and Chipping Sodbury will no longer have any direct link to Southmead Hospital and Parkway Station.

In addition almost all the direct buses from Yate, Coalpit Heath and Frampton Cotterell to the University of the West of England will be cut, leaving just one "school time" direct service per day in each direction, and that will only run on school days. Otherwise passengers will have to change buses.

Things will be even worse for people who live in the villages in between Chipping Sodbury and Wotton-under-Edge. They will have to change buses in Yate as well, taking longer and pushing up travel costs. People in our area fought long and hard to get decent buses to Southmead when Frenchay Hospital closed, and now many of these services are being taken away.

These cuts will:

• deter people from using public transport, making parking and congestion at Southmead and Parkway worse
• waste time for people whose trains do not coincide with the bus schedule
• restrict employment opportunities
• deter students from going to their local university
• make life more difficult for the many people who are not students or staff who use UWE's Frenchay bus station as an interchange

Please sign our petition against these cuts.