Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Health and safety gone mad - a village mourns the loss of its bus stop

You may remember that I was keen to get a bus stop for my village, and the process of obtaining one was duly kicked off, with a request to the County Council. A potential site was found, and I was really quite optimistic, especially when our site was judged to meet the criteria. However, we now have bad news to report.

Apparently, the policy of Suffolk County Council is that you have to have a bus stop on each side of the road. The bus stop has to be placed next to a raised curb to allow easy entrance to the bus for those with disabilities. Therefore, we need a site on the other side of the road that passes through the village, so we're forced back to the drawing board.

There is an irony here, in that, with the exception of our one regular bus service each week, the bus that serves Creeting St Peter is the community bus, which has a rear entrance designed for wheelchair users. Therefore, for them to board the bus at a new, accessible bus stop, the bus would need to reverse at right angles to the traffic. That isn't going to be good, is it?

Time to revisit this project, I think...

1 comment:

Amanda Taylor said...

We've just been consulted about a bus stop by Cambs County Council, who point out that when you have bus stops each side of the road cars get squashed in the middle because they are taking up too much space!

Obviously things are different further south :-)