By Bill Heaney
There used to be a bus every ten minutes at the terminus in Brucehill serving Alexandria Cross, Silverton, Bellsmyre, Barloan, you name it, but everything has changed.
I am fed up hearing that I have to waken up to the fact that this is 2023, now 2024, and that I have to bite the bullet and accept that fact.
But I wonder if the young people of today are proud of the fact that we (they) have allowed our public services, including transport, to go to the dogs.
A taxi from one of the supermarkets to the schemes now cost £7 there and back.
Clippies used to keep the few pounds they made from those passengers who told them to keep the ticket to subsidise their wages when they handed over their cash and the bus companies were skint.
Nowadays, bus companies, which went private, are highly profitable and hold government at national and local level to ransom by threatening to withdraw services if they fail to provide over-generous subsidies. That happened with Glasgow’s late night services just recently.
We used to ask for “threepence for the bus fare” but now the money bags on the buses don’t rattle with pennies but rustle with pound notes.
Much as they tried last year to claw back the cost of free travel for local school pupils, our Labour council thankfully failed since it would have led to children having to walk to school through one of the coldest and wettest winter for years.
The bus owners are millionaires these days and their managers are almost as well paid as footballers or council officials.
One of the routes for pupils to walk along would have been along the A82 from Milton to Bellsmyre to Our Lady and St Patrick’s in Bellsmyre Avenue and Dumbarton Academy in Silverton.
The council had to capitulate in the end after their atrociously put together plans sank at public meetings where councillors were notable by their absence to speak up on behalf of the electorate. One such meetings was in OLSP, where the official contributions to the debate were a disgrace.
Now, a few months later, the Scottish Liberal Democrats have revealed that more than 300,000 young people are still missing out on bus passes despite the Scottish Government introducing free bus travel for under 22s almost two years ago and spending at least £1 million on marketing to promote the scheme.
Parliamentary questions submitted by the party show that 701,696 young people had taken up the pass by the end of October. This is 306,501 fewer than the total number of eligible young people.
The Young Person’s Free Bus Travel scheme opened for applications from 10 January 2022 and by the end of the year, the Scottish Government had already spent £1,137,131 marketing the scheme.
Transport spokesperson Jill Reilly, above, said: “Despite the government spending more than £1 million to drive uptake of free bus passes, almost two years since the scheme was introduced and more than a third of young people have been unable to take advantage.
“This is another striking example of the Scottish Government’s interest in fanfare rather than delivery. It extended bus passes with one hand, while with the other it took away support from bus operators already struggling with driver shortages and surging costs.
“On top of this, the administrative hurdles involved in signing up for this scheme are needlessly convoluted. Throwing money at PR won’t work if the SNP can’t get the foundations right.
“Getting people onto buses is a good way to reduce pollution from private cars and enable them to see more of our country.
“Scottish Liberal Democrats would put communities in charge of when and where buses go by adopting the Transport for London model. We would also expand the under-22 free travel scheme to include ferries, making the scheme fair for young people in the islands who depend on these services every day.
“All of this would meaningfully empower communities with better infrastructure and ensure that services are both frequent and reliable.”
The council education officials and councillors who were preparing to withdraw these passes in Dumbarton should now give consideration to getting off the local government gravy train at the next stop.