CASE STUDY
I feel my village is marooned. It would be brilliant if routes were protected
WITH an already limited bus service, people in the North Lanarkshire village of Banton are worried about becoming cut off altogether.
Having seen bus routes to Glasgow and Stirling axed in recent years, local grandmother Margaret Chalmers said there was a real fear its routes to Kilsyth and Falkirk would be next for the chop.
For Margaret, the plans to now put the bus industry back in public hands – and protect vital but unprofitable services – is most welcome.
She said: “It would be brilliant if it changed and routes like the ones in Banton were protected. It makes a lot of sense – buses are too important a public service to be left to the free market.
“There’s no point in the Government giving you a free bus pass as a reward for working for years if there are no buses where you live – it’s discrimination.
“The bus service is a lifeline for me and for lots of other people in the village. I don’t know what I’d do without it.”
The 69-year-old doesn’t have a car so she regularly uses the bus to get to doctors’ appointments, visit her family and do her shopping. Having lived in Banton for the last 27 years with her husband Ben, she has seen the service deteriorate to what she now describes as her “marooned” home village, which has a population of about 400.
That’s despite the fact the busy A803 is less than a mile from the Chalmers’ home and the M80 motorway is only around two miles away.
The A803 has a regular profit-making bus service running up and down it – but it’s not profitable for operator McColls Coaches to extend its Glasgow to Kilsyth service to Banton.
And the M80 sees hundreds of commuter buses travel up and down it every day – but again, there’s no profit for the operators in coming to Banton.
Under the new plans, routes such as Margaret’s will be bundled up with profitable routes such as the ones which run along her nearby main roads and operators made to run the loss-making one as a condition of running buses on the profitable one.