Thanks for the Heads Up TFL... (From News Shopper)

Thanks for the Heads Up TFL...

10:57pm Wednesday 1st February 2012 in Opinion & Blogs

Bus links are a major reliance among communities particularly for younger members travelling to and from school; especially now as insurance and petrol prices are increasing. So, when a key bus route changes its times or becomes unreliable this can have a major effect on the public depending on it. This is a problem the passengers of the R8 bus route have been facing for several years and the difficulties have been becoming progressively worse.

The R8 travels from Orpington bus station to Biggin Hill Post Office and is a key route for getting many Charles Darwin pupils to and from School. Although it appears that it has never been a completely reliable; the small bus has been carrying more and more pupils from the Orpington area as the year’s progress and the school moves up the league tables but the bus size has not increased. So, the consequence of this is that often a section of pupils will not be permitted to travel as the bus has reached its passenger limit. This would be all well and fine if they simply had to wait 10 minutes to catch the next bus but unfortunately the R8 runs on an hourly schedule. This has been the cause several pupils arriving late to school; to the extremes that one pupil was late for her GCSE exam.

Even if students do manage to travel on the R8 it is not always been the safest journey, as so many passengers are packed onto such a small bus and because the nature of the route consists of travelling down the small lanes around Down with many sharp bends, smaller passengers have the risk of being crushed or falling over. Another risk is the buses reliability to be unreliable; basically meaning it has been previously been known to break down quite often on these small, unpaved lanes. Forcing pupils to either walk to school from this point or walk home often in the dark, in mid-winter, which is highly dangerous.

So, unsurprisingly there have been an excessive number of complaints from parents written to TFL and Rob Jones, Assistant Head at Charles Darwin School, who is responsible for community and transport issues, along with James Cleverly Bromley’s MLA as well as with many others have been campaign to TFL on the schools behalf for changes to the R8. And it is due to their hard work that finally TFL has decided to add an additional school day only journey on R8 route which will commence on Monday 20 February 2012 and will run between Farnborough Hill and Charles Darwin School Grounds.

When interviewed Rob Jones was asked, why has for such a long time has TFL refused to replace the current R8 bus with a bigger bus or run an extra route, how long he had been campaigning for changes to the R8 bus route and what was the final shove to produce a school bus? ‘Well although it was never made obvious why TFL did not want make changes it was assumed that it was mostly to do with funding that as like everything at the moment TFL was receiving cuts. I spent over a year campaigning as it is a such a slow process when tackling companies like TFL but I would consider that it was most likely the huge amount of pressure that it received from the school, MP, James, the councillors and obviously parents that really made TFL reconsider our complaints and act upon them.

But unfortunately the troubles do not end there for the passengers of the R8. Although they have finally produced another bus to solve overcrowding they did not inform anyone that they were also going to cut the last two buses which therefore changes all the times on the timetable. Meaning although the school bus comes at the traditional time in the morning, for pupils catching the school bus back they will now be waiting till 3:20pm, 20 minutes later than the original time of 3:00pm which was set up with the end of the school day. This becomes a problem chiefly, for younger students as Charles Darwin is lacking library so there isn’t a place where a large group of students can wait and this is particularly a health and safety problem for some of our pupils with disabilities. Anecdotally one pupil who previously travelled on the R8 had a synchronised journey catching the 402 to arrive home in 10 minutes from Green St Green that journey has now become a 1hour 30 minute walk in the dark or an hour’s wait for the next 402 as there are no other buses going towards their area.

So the real question is did TFL consider the affects these changes would have on passengers, especially pupils and did they inform anyone they were going to make them and why. Well certainly not to Charles Darwin School according to Rob Jones ‘We were never informed that such changes would be made and this looks like another case to campaign for against TFL, but we assume the time was changed because the last two bus routes were cut to fund for the new school bus but they never hinted to us that this would be a consequence.’ And talking to other students it came across that there were never any publications informing them of changes to the time table.

So it seems that although the additional school bus was a great victory on the schools and parents account, now another problem has arisen with the time table as an effect of the school bus. It is clear that there is a real lack of information and consideration towards passengers and the only fair consequence seems to be to hold TFL fully accountable for their actions and hope they can explain them in their entirety.