Hour-long wait for buses as new term changes hit hard

Bath students have endured days of bus chaos as First Bus struggles to meet demand. Hundreds of school pupils and university students were late for class this week when buses either failed to turn up or were too full to pick up more passengers. Despite First Bus promising to address the problems with its U1 and U2 services after the fisrt day of chaos on Monday, students reported long queues on Tuesday for the buses that serve the University of Bath. Twerton mum Sarah Moore, who had to drive three children to Bath Studio School on Monday after they could not catch the U2 bus, said the same thing happened again on Tuesday. “There are still children standing in Twerton waiting to get to school,” she told our website Bath Live shortly before 9am on Tuesday. “There’s only three buses on instead of six,” she said. “The last two buses drove past because they were already full.” Discussing the problem on Facebook, resident Sean Moore said he saw “40 plus children” waiting at a bus stop on Mount Road at 8am and children still waiting at 9.10pm. “There should have been six buses but only three were put on this has caused stress and chaos not only for children trying to get to school but for students trying to get to lectures.” Kate Russell blamed the problem on the number of students rather than the number of buses. “Uni buses everywhere in Whiteway, Twerton, Southdown, traffic horrendous and our poor kids can’t get to school,” she wrote on Facebook. “Every bus stop I passed this morning had 10+ uni students queuing,” she said. “I’ve never seen Bath like it before.” Many pupils in the south west of Bath rely on the U2 bus to get to Ralph Allen School and Bath Studio School after four school bus services were withdrawn. But it appears that demand for the both the U2 and the U1 took First Bus by surprise. Students were late for lectures due to full or late buses and reported similar problems on the second day too. The bus operator had apologised for the “inconvenience” on Monday, and promised there would be “additional capacity” on Tuesday. On Monday, students shared videos of the queues on social media and reported being late for lectures after waiting for up to an hour or more for a bus with space. Donny Wong, who said he waited “the best part of an hour” for a U1 bus, called the service “appalling”. Mr Wong posted the video on a Facebook page set up by the University of Bath Student Union to collect feedback for First Bus. In a tweet on behalf of the student union, Alisha Lobo shared a video of a long queue of students waiting for the U1 on Corn Street behind Bath College. Ms Lobo called for students to email their feedback to Bath-uni. feedback@firstgroup.com