New Cheshire East bus review

[knutstransport]

RE: New Cheshire East bus review
Based on a Knutsford Town Council survey this is how much demand there is for different services from Knutsford:

Town Centre 66%
Macclesfield 52%
Altrincham 50%*
Wilmslow 50%
Knutsford (outside Town Centre) 41%
Northwich 34%*
Airport 27%
Warrington 24%
Holmes Chapel 4%
Other 16%

* Some of this demand is down to Northern not providing a good rail service between Northwich and Altrincham via Knutsford e.g. RMT strikes affecting Saturday services for so long and frequent cancellations due to staff shortages.

Some of the complaints include:
- Re-routing the 88 via Longridge means there's no services to/from the bus stop outside the medical centre on Mobberley Road.
- Infrequent Macclesfield services makes getting to and from hospital appointments difficult.
- 88 bus services no longer offering good connections to London bound trains at Wilmslow.
- An Over ward resident complained about buses being packed at times making it difficult for her to travel on the bus with her weekly shopping.

And there were lots of comments about lower frequency meant they used the bus less - in one case someone said they now have to make journeys by taxi instead of bus and only make around 1/4 of the journeys they made before the cutbacks due to the taxi costing more.

There was actually some praise for the 89 timetable, in that people liked the fact it is more consistent than the old 289 timetable - although perhaps not as much now D&G moved the first Knutsford-Northwich journey to be off-pattern!

The town council consider the reinstatement of a town circular service to be a necessity.

What is clear is there isn't justification for running a hourly frequency to Wilmslow and a 2 hourly frequency to Macclesfield and that Cheshire East were perhaps right to dismiss the idea of a subsided Holmes Chapel-Knutsford bus. However, if there were hourly Knutsford-Macclesfield buses and they provided good connections with trains to/from Crewe at Chelford, perhaps people wouldn't bemoan the lack of a Holmes Chapel bus so much.

The proportion of people saying they were very satisfied with the bus service was a whole 0%, with less than 10% saying satisfied.