Bus chief says parking rises not enough (From Bucks Free Press)

Bus chief says parking rises not enough

10:16am Friday 30th November 2007 in

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Steve Burns, director of Carousel buses, believes more needs to be done to help public transport beat the traffic before people will consider using it.

He said: "The problem is there are no bus priority measures, the buses sit in the same traffic as cars. If people are sitting in their cars for an hour to get to work and a bus does it in 15 minutes then we would have an excellent public transport system in Wycombe."

When Eden opens developer Multiplex and the district council hope to attract shoppers from Marlow, Amersham, Chesham and further afield into High Wycombe.

The 675,000 square foot shopping centre will push the town into the top 50 shopping destinations in the UK and attract an extra 200,000 people to the town a week.

In a bid to accommodate all the extra traffic, an extra 1,600 parking spaces are being built.

But Wycombe District Council has decided to push up parking rates in Princes Risborough, Bourne End, Marlow and High Wycombe to try and encourage more people onto buses and other forms of public transport.

While some car parking prices will be shooting up by nearly 100 per cent, in other areas the increase will be much smaller such as 20 pence an hour.

Mr Burns, who has run Carousel in the town for seven years, said: "Twenty pence isn't going to make anybody get out of the car and onto the bus."

He added putting the parking prices up was like trying to "force" people on to buses and it would not work. "We would rather our passengers travel with us because they chose to because they felt it was a better means of transport," he said.

Brian Drury, commercial director for Arriva, said, "We made a number of service changes in September which looked towards the opening of Eden and we are talking to Buckinghamshire County Council and the shopping centre to discuss what further service enhancements may be introduced in partnership with them."