Cllr Rich Pitts Record of events

Last night at Marlborough Climate Pledge Green Drinks (11th October 2011)

We got an interesting insight to the issues people face with living in small villages without cars or choosing to live without using cars. (Although in practice this is almost impossible)...

Go and check out Louisa blog of the meeting here http://betterbedwynbuses.wordpress.com/

What was very interesting to hear was the extraordinary lenghts one of the bus operators Bodmans Coaches goes to to look after its customers... An example, the bus broken down, waiting in Grafton for that bus the passenger phoned the company to find out what was happening. Bodman's engineer was sent to take that passenger to Marlborough BEFORE fixing the bus. Now, that is outragous customer service!!!

There are many many issues to pick out of the discussion last night and other members of the transition town Marlborough were present at the Bedwyn Train Passengers group meeting last night...

There has been this amazing comment that Wiltshire uses amazingly high car parking charges to subsidize the buses. From the conversation last night there seems to be a real disconnect regarding what the people in the villages centred on Marlborough as their "big town", need from the buses and what they actually get!!! As I said at our MP Claire Perry's meeting on localism this year, let the Marlborough Town council take control of the parking we are better placed to work with our community to organize Marlborough centric services such as the buses so things that come to mind instantly;

• Making sure Villagers can get to and FROM Marlborough
• Communters use buses that REALLY work with the trains in Bedwyn, Hungerford and Pewsey.  (The X5 service does do quite well to Swindon and Pewsey. But this could be More joined up...

More to come on this !!! Well done Louisa for getting this moving... Thank you to Judy Hindley and Green Drinks for hosting last night...

Yours

Rich