You wait ages for a £6k b they put it on a street with no buses
BLUNDERING officials spent £6,000 of taxpayers’ money on a new bus stop – for a road without a bus route.
Residents were baffled when the shelter popped up in place of an old bus stop pole weeks after the twice daily service was axed in March.
Now a notice on the shelter, opened this month, reads: ‘Please note this bus stop is no longer in use.’
Council officials said they were unaware the route through Tickhill Road in Rotherham had been scrapped by operator First Bus.
Former councillor Carol Stringer said: ‘I’ve been campaigning for the council to put a 20mph sign up on a nearby road used by lots of schoolchildren. They refuse to put that up but then go and spend £6,000 on a useless bus shelter – it’s unbelievable.’
Donna Marie Hallam, 40, said: ‘I couldn’t believe it. I just thought “what a complete waste of money”. There are so many important things to spend money on but they go and blow thousands on this.’
Pat Woodhouse, 67, added: ‘What a waste of money – with the new timetable it’s pointless.’
A Rotherham resident uncovered the full cost of the mistake using the Freedom of Information Act. The shelter and seats cost £4,482 while installation was a further £1,452 – making a total of £5,934.
Locals now hope the shelter will be moved to a rather more useful location – ideally one still served by a bus route. A spokesman for the South Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive (SYPTE), which ordered the new bus shelter, said it had formed part of an agreement with a property developer, adding: ‘We are reviewing our installation processes to prevent this from hapawarded
pening again.’ The axed route is one of more than 3,000 closed in nearly a decade – with Britain’s bus network at its smallest size for around 28 years. The sharp decline has been compared to the Beeching railway cuts in the 1960s.