Call to ban city open-top tourist buses

A BATH man says open-top tourist buses that travel around the city centre are causing misery to residents.

George Feiger, 72, has lived on Brock Street for five years and was involved with the previous campaign to ban coaches from the Circus. That movement reached its goal in 2019, after a 20-year campaign and protests in the streets.

By that time, residents on the Royal Crescent had also succeeded in banishing the coaches from their doorsteps.

Now, as a board member of Circus Area Residents Association (CARA), Mr Feiger has launched a new petition to stop open-top tour buses coming through the city centre.

He said: “The bus is simply too big for the Georgian streets of Bath. It’s enormous and they cause massive congestion.

“Their route runs through a variety of streets which are quite narrow with cars parked at the side and as soon as the bus comes down the street you cannot have traffic going the other way. Cars have to back up and wait for it to pass, creating more congestion simply because they are so big.”

He went on to say that when most coaches were banned from the Circus, it made things “a lot better” for residents by improving the traffic flow.

He added: “Now, the Clean Air Zone is trying to keep out commercial vehicles below Euro 6 standard, and it’s hitting people like plumbers the hardest when it should be tackling these buses.

“They have a sticker on the side of them saying, ‘I’m Euro 6, I’m a clean bus’, but they are not clean buses – only cleaner than Euro 5.”

Mr Feiger said that, in the short term, he would like the vehicles to take another route via wider roads outside the city centre, and allow people to walk in to see the landmarks.

City Sightseeing, the company that runs the red hop-on, hop-off bus in Bath, rejected Mr Feiger’s comments.

A spokesman said: “Tourists’ contribution to the local economy is colossal of course and tour buses allow visitors to move around the city very efficiently, and with the hop-on, hop-off facility, it is used as the main tourist transport during their stay.

“The tourist industry is the main economy in the city, employing hundreds of individuals and creating wealth locally. It is recognised that tour buses provide a highly efficient method of linking tourist locations while providing unrivalled views of the city.”

He said that the Traffic Regulation Condition (TRC) covering tour buses defines how long waiting may occur at every stop in the city. He added: “Currently the group of which we are a member is working with manufacturers to develop an electric tour bus which will benefit Bath in due course.”