The Cotswolds should have a public transport system that the wealthy want to use, not one that the poor have to use, council chiefs have said.
Cotswold District Council leaders spoke out about improvements to buses and railway services which are needed in the area while discussing their plans for sustainable transport.
Council leader Joe Harris (LD, St Michael’s) said it was a scandal that a town such as Cirencester does not have a railway station.
He also said the last few decades have been quite depressing for public transport.
“Yes, more people own a car and everybody likes having their own car. I love my car, I’m always using it. I have to, even on journeys I could probably do by foot,” he said.
“Make no doubt about it. The Conservative Government has decimated public transport over the last ten, 15 years as a result of cuts to public authorities.
“We really need to see a plan to support public transport. You only have to look at the success of the Robin in the north of the Cotswolds that the county council are trialling.
“That’s a really innovative way of trying to get around. We should be seeing more things like that. It’s a scandal in a town like Cirencester that we don’t have a railway station.
“It’s just bizarre. It’s the case that we’ve gone backwards in the last 100 years.”
Councillors discussed plans for making public transport more environmentally friendly at Cotswold District Council’s cabinet meeting on March 13.
They have set out plans for transport decarbonisation to meet their target of net zero carbon emissions by 2025.
Climate change and forward planning cabinet member Rachel Coxcoon (LD, Moreton East) explained why the district council is developing a sustainable transport strategy when transport is mainly a responsibility of the highways authority.
“We’ve done really well as a nation in getting our primary energy use down. Most pitiful of all is that transport emissions nationally have only dropped by five per cent in 30 years,” she said.
“We have an enormous distance to travel on transport. Our towns and our villages are jam packed with cars.
“That has major effects on our quality of life generally but is also a big contributor to the carbon emissions and is therefore contributing to climate change.”
Cllr Coxcoon said the council should really be supporting public transport. She said: “We have gotten ourselves in a position as a country where we seem to believe that public transport should pay for itself.
“Actually, I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding there about the wider benefits that comes to society of public transport. We should have as our mantra that what we would like to see locally is a public transport system that the wealthy want to use, not that the poor have to use.”
Late last year, Gloucestershire County Council launched a bespoke minibus service operating in selected areas of the Forest of Dean and the Cotswolds.
The trial service, called the Robin, is being led by the county council with £1.352 million funding supplied by the Department of Transport.
It has been praised by district councillors, and Shire Hall’s transport cabinet member Philip Robinson (C, Mitcheldean) said it is doing a brilliant job of serving residents and getting them to vital appointments, into the community and connecting them with town centres.
“Long term we need to be thinking differently about how we provide rural public transport and I’m very hopeful this trial can prove on demand transport as a viable model to be rolled out further,” he said at the time.
