[An open letter to Cornwall Transport concerning the atrocious bus service in general, and the T1 and T2, which runs from Penzance to Truro (T1) and St Ives to Truro (T2), in particular]

Me: This bus is late again
Driver: So?
Me: So you should do something about it!
Driver: And you should try walking next time!
(Recent conversation with T1/T2 bus driver)

‘This year it all fell apart’
(A reference to the bus slogan ‘This year it’s all coming together’)

‘Believe in bus? I’d sooner believe in the pixies’
(A reference to the ‘Believe in bus’ slogan. Overheard phone conversation of an irate man waiting at a bus stop, obviously new to Cornish buses, calling the bus company enquiring if a bus was ever going to turn up)

‘Bus is best? As long as you don’t need to get to work on time, don’t have an appointment to keep, aren’t going out on a weekend, or trying to get home any evening’
(A reference to the ‘Bus is best’ slogan)

‘I ride the buses so you don’t have to’
(St. Barnabaus motto)

Hello!

In recent months the T1 and T2 bus services have become unbearable, with constant late buses, a reduced service, numerous cancellations and the occasional breakdowns causing me to wait many mornings and evenings for half an hour or more to catch the bus to or from work.

During school holidays it’s not so bad (despite the service never, ever actually being on time), with no students and little traffic on the roads. My bus journey used to take 45 minutes (my app still says it does); during term time, if I leave during the school run it can now take an hour and a half (for a 14-mile journey which takes a car 15 minutes). That’s not counting waiting for the bus; that can obviously add another hour or so per day.

The traffic has become horrendous, the worst I have ever seen on these roads. I never actually understand why there is such little traffic in the holidays (when there’s lots of tourists) then once term starts there’s at least four times as much. But the children are mostly catching the bus, and surely the adults don’t all get six weeks holiday then all start back to work on the same day as the students?

I’m sure students used to get their own bus. As it is, combined with the reduced service, the amount of students have increased on the T1/T2. They are often sitting on the stairs of the bus (presumably a health and safety breach) and I’d estimate that 60% of all conversation on the bus (and at the bus stops) are about how bad / overcrowded / late the services are (one girl complains three buses in a row didn’t show up; a woman complains how she’s had to wait an hour at Chacewater for a bus; at least once a day I overheard a student say “Can’t wait to learn to drive”… and so the car madness continues with the bus still not a reliable alternative, at least not in Cornwall).

For several years now I have caught the T1 or T2 every day from Pool to Truro, where I work. The service has mostly been okay, until around the time of the fare reductions. Since then the timetable seems to have been drastically reduced; where I used to turn up at a bus stop any time and have to wait only five or ten minutes for a bus, I now turn up at the bus stop and pray.

The cutting of services for the T1 and T2 (I don’t know about other bus services, presumably so too) seems an illogical thing to do when you’ve recently cut the prices, as you want to encourage more people on buses, not give them an awful service where they have to wait half an hour for a bus. And to then sit in a horribly overcrowded one.

With the triple whammy of the recent bus price reductions, the cost of petrol rising and climate change, I finally convinced my partner to start using the bus (she’s owned a car since her twenties). To start with she was enthusiastic, then the reality set in: the T1s and T2s were so late or just not turning up – vanishing into the Cornish mist – that she was late for work several times. Now she’s gone back to using her car.

That’s what you call a fail. A person I had actually weaned off her car (it had only taken four years), she was actually initially excited about using the bus (we’d had fun hopping on and off all day at the weekend for a fiver – using seven buses to get to Porthleven and back on a Saturday; most of the buses depressingly completely empty, as we passed tiny villages picking up no one, every house with at least two cars to them) but couldn’t rely on the service for actually getting somewhere on time. Like work. Or an appointment.

Imagine if you offered a fare refund scheme for late or cancelled buses, like trains do. You would be bankrupt in a week. Talking of trains, at least they announce when they are late (they literally announce it over the tannoy minute by minute) or cancelled, the bus displays give us absolutely nothing.

The displays are so frustrating, where buses which say five minutes away or DUE often just don’t turn up all, seemingly vanishing into the ether (seriously, what does happen to them?). The countdown is an almighty tease. Even the minutes on the displays operate in another dimension – one minute on the display seems to be equal to ten minutes in real time. Despite the displays at the bus stops, my bus app and the printed timetable, it seems completely pot luck when a T1 or T2 will actually arrive.

Still, at least DUE gives us hope. As long as there’s a DUE, the bus could exist. It could be just around the corner. But the DUE vanishes, there’s no bus, and another 25 minutes to wait. No one knows what happens to the DUE buses gone AWOL.

(On the bus strike day last year I had to walk from Heartlands to Redruth to catch a train. As the display board merely said ‘refer to timetable’, along the way I told at least one person per bus stop that there was a strike on. They seemed surprised. Me? I didn’t notice less buses than usual.)

Never have I heard an apology from a bus driver for the lateness of a bus (at best they are oblivious, at worst indifferent), presumably assuming no one is in any rush, let alone trying to get to a job on time or have an appointment to keep. The buses are always filthy, with cans and plastic drink bottles rattling around the floor.

Unable to say the obligatory ‘thank you’ to the driver after alighting from the bus (unless it’s on time, so once a month, tops), I manage to utter the word ‘painful’ instead; I’m guessing it sounds like ‘thank you’ as there’s no response from the driver.

Even when the bus should be on time – the driver’s there, the bus is there, something goes wrong. This happened the other Saturday. The driver needed a drink, and a pee, then almost made it out of Camborne bus station – forgot his lunch. We were 15 minutes late before even leaving the bus station.

A while ago, in the space of a week, on one day my bus broke down around Chacewater (I heard three had broke down on the same day), on another day three buses in a row didn’t turn up (I waited over an hour for one to turn up) and, finally, a single decker turned up instead of a double decker, causing the bus to be hugely over-crowded.

When three buses all said 23 minutes on the display recently, I walked home (from Barncoose Terrace, after alighting from the U2 from Falmouth), informing the hordes of people at every bus stop “You’re quicker walking”. Most replied with “I know!” Needless to say I reached home before any bus overtook me, which is usually the case if I walk back to Pool from Redruth train station.

I have a shocking confession to make: I am 51 and I have never owned a car. I have used bus services in Peru, Indonesia, Egypt, Malta, Australia, London and Devon, to name just a handful of places. Most recently I have used buses to travel around the rural, mountain areas of southern Ireland. Everywhere in the world the buses run like clockwork. I can honestly say the Cornish bus service is the worst I have encountered in the entire world.

(Before the fare reductions the Cornish buses must surely have been some of the most expensive in the world – in Luxembourg buses are free; Germany have announced the €49 nationwide monthly ticket for all public transport. Cornish bus drivers actually used to apologise to me for charging so much for a bus fare. If you stopped building/widening roads you could use that money to make the entire bus service free for at least a year, and have more buses; in many rural areas there’s only two a day, making the car unfortunately essential.)

Other buses in the county seem to function okay; indeed, if the mornings at the bus stop outside the Innovation Centre in Pool involves me standing there like a moron as hundreds of cars zoom past me (giving me a nice dose of carbon monoxide, hydrocarbon, nitrogen oxide and particulate matter – none of which affects the selfish driver, presumably nicely cocooned in their metal death traps), the evenings, from the Victoria Square bus stop, Truro, involves me standing there as at least half a dozen other buses turn up (usually the Park and Rides every five minutes), but no T1 or T2 in sight (then, finally, three at once, just like the buses).

Waiting for the bus is one thing but even when on the bus – a minor daily miracle – I feel my life slowly passing me by. There can be traffic queues leaving Truro, then queues in Chacewater, Scorrier, Redruth. These are tiny country towns, how have you let them get so over-crowded with cars? With more tourists coming, more houses being built, your short-term greed will have long-term implications regarding the lack of infrastructure.

The T1/T2 route feels interminable (other services seem far faster and efficient). What I usually tell people is: the car is always faster than the bus; the bike is always faster than the bus (whilst on the T1 I’ve watched a young boy cycling on the pavement go faster than the bus along the entire length of Trevenson Road), and walking is sometimes faster than the bus (though I forgive the bus a lot; after all, UK motorists spend four days a year looking for parking spaces – but I spend that a month waiting for buses). Other times, Cornish buses are just like, well, the buses – none for an hour, then three at once (apparently it’s mathematical, not just bad planning).

The worship of the car and the road, including widening them and destroying the countryside, is severely misplaced. The council is turning Cornwall into one big concrete monstrosity, full of roads and car parks. This may seem like progress to you and completely normal but to me it’s absolutely insane. You should be cutting car use, not promoting it. New roads only get filled with cars (and dead wildlife), unfortunately. Did you know one bus full of people equals one kilometre of cars on the road?

With new roads and the widening of existing roads being built, as well as countless new housing estates being created (with, let’s say, each house having 1-2 cars), with any concept of infrastructure presumably being abandoned at the expense of profit, it seems hard to believe Cornwall Council wants to reduce traffic at all.

Roads in Cornwall are becoming more dangerous (I’ve stopped cycling on them, only on the mining trails), drivers more aggressive. I hear drivers shouting and cursing on a weekly basis at other drivers. My partner drives at the legal speed limit and gets shouted, sworn and gesticulated at. For following the speed limit! Car drivers change behind the wheel. Cars are collective insanity. More people die in car accidents than wars. The recent death of a 12-year-old boy on Agar Road, not to mention recent almost daily deaths on the A30 suggest the traffic situation isn’t ideal. (Whatever did happen to that Vision for Pool? Fallen by the roadside?)

It’s great you’re advertising the new, reduced fares but you’re advertising them in the wrong places – car drivers won’t notice the new prices on buses or bus shelters; they’re oblivious, robots. You must remember car drivers are moronic and it needs to be in their face, and somewhere it affects them directly: advertise in/near car parks, petrol stations, car showrooms, traffic jams.

I have often been stuck at Camborne bus station on a Sunday evening, 6:30pm and not a single bus is running. That’s bad enough but the bus station itself looks like it hasn’t been updated since the 1970s. There’s not a single bench to sit on. There’s not a cafe (I’ve often quipped – the bus station needs a hotel, I’ve spent so long waiting there). I’m sure the £23.7million funding the area has received could stretch to a bench – possibly more useful than a Crafts Hub (though that’s another email to another department – why, historically, most funding to deprived areas is completely wasted: going to so-called advisors who have no interest or history with the area, or to businesses already well-established. My idea? Just divide up the £23.7 million and give it to the residents. You know, the people who it’s actually meant for, the ones living in poverty.)

The amount of times I have missed connections to other buses or trains (missing an area meeting once when three buses in a row no showed, by which time I’d missed two trains from Redruth), appointments, and been late for work (luckily I have fairly flexible working hours otherwise I would have been fired years ago), is astonishing. Most days I arrive at work in the morning in a foul mood; most evenings I arrive home in a foul mood.

It would be rude of me to say Cornwall is a decade behind London, and though I despise most habits the county has imported from the big smoke (ludicrous house prices, poncy restaurants, hipster cafes, allowing Londoners to buy second homes, clogging up country lanes with their SUVs), Cornwall could probably learn a thing or two from their public transport system: going cashless (it currently takes five minutes to get a handful of people on a bus), buses running every ten minutes, a sense of urgency to actually get to the destination on time and night buses (seriously, how does anyone go out in the evening in Cornwall, have a few drinks, and then get home, without driving?) are just a few of the obvious concepts.

The biggest misconception about buses in the countryside, and Cornwall in particular, is that it’s only for students, pensioners and tourists but not commuters. This is the mindset you need to change, and fare reductions and new branding won’t change that, as I’m sure your figures reveal.

I am actually now going to move, or get another job, or both, so unbearable has the experience become. It has made me depressed and frequently angry and frustrated.

Anyway, I hope you don’t think this is one big rant, all moaning and no solutions (and, believe me, there are blissful moments on the bus – usually on empty roads on sunny days in spring, sitting at the front on top deck, somewhere between Scorrier and Chacewater, with the bus gliding through the treetops and engine houses). Well, here are some fixes to the dire situation:

• Go on, go back to the previous, extortionate fares; I would rather pay full fare for a full service.

• To encourage more people to commute to work, introduce an express service at commuter times which just stops at a few places, say Camborne – Pool – Redruth – Truro.

• Introduce a service where single person car drivers (a ton of metal pumping out poisonous gases to carry one person, destroying communities and wildlife? How was it ever legal? How was it ever popular?) pick up people at bus stops. (I am signed up with Liftshare but so far no one on the site appears to drive from Pool to Truro.) Like a form of hitchhiking.

• A more dynamic bus service, serving out of the way places, and late night weekends. It’s taken me a combination of train, bus and taxi (!) to get back from Falmouth to Pool on a Friday night. Likewise, I’ve been stuck at Camborne at 6.30pm (!) on a Sunday evening, with no more services. In short, a shocking and ludicrous Sunday and evening service.

• Park and ride should be part of the bus network – for starters it’s far more frequent than regular buses, and would be quite handy for people wanting a quick ride to Truro train station, for example. However, I’ve been refused entry on the Park and Ride several times – I’ve met my partner in Truro; she’d come by car and parked at Langarth Park, I’d gone by normal bus earlier but because I didn’t have a ticket I wasn’t allowed to board (despite having a bus pass). There’s actually a lovely route through quiet country lanes to get to Langarth Park, so we’ve often walked it. (For the record, Park and Ride is still a massive fail, as it does involve cars and car parks so it’s not a proper solution.)

• You know what? I’m no nationalist by any means (I’m not Cornish for a start), but don’t widen roads to encourage tourists, close the Tamar bridge! Ban cars! Let the tourists leave their SUVs on the other side, increase the bus fleet by ten-fold, have bus and trains running every ten minutes, introduce trams between nearby towns (e.g. Camborne-Pool-Redruth), have proper bike routes between towns (it finally dawned on me why I see most cyclists at 7am on weekend mornings; it’s before the moron car drivers are out and about).

• To protect nature, at least ban the use of cars at night. The night is for the animals, they should be allowed to roam free and not be squashed by cars.

• Seeing as many bus services that cover the villages are virtually empty most of the time, introduce more of the city-type smaller buses to cover all of Cornwall (such as the 42, which I took the other day to Falmouth, which was great but late; there was a 36 double decker in front of me at one point; on Saturday afternoon, completely empty. Sigh).

• I applaud the S2 bus which travels around a few beaches. It looks like it runs four times a day. Yeah, this one needs to run four times an hour. In fact, during summer (which in Cornwall seemingly now runs from spring to autumn), the roads around beaches such as Gwithian look like the M25 during rush hour, and with cars parked all along the roads around the area, a shuttle bus service (in those nifty Mercedes-Benz Sprinters introduced a few years ago) to and from major towns to such beaches would not go amiss.

• Go like Costa Rica! Stop carpet-bombing Cornwall with concrete!

• Give me a year as minister of transport (or whatever the phone-it-in job is), I’ll do it for free, and transform the county. If need be, I’ll literally walk up and down the median of any main road around Truro with a sandwich board – one side saying ‘Cars are collective insanity’, the other ‘One full bus equals one kilometre of car traffic’.

Let me know your thoughts.

Kind regards

St. Barnabus, patron saint of the buses
“I take the bus so you don’t have to”

Previously on Barnflakes
Cars vs buses
Bus pass
Letters of complaint