Robert Hampton

Another visitor! Stay a while… stay forever!

21st October 2013

Bus Pain

A great piece on the great SevenStreets blog, about Liverpool mayor Joe Anderson’s boneheaded decision to scrap bus lanes:

Liverpool is making it just that little bit more difficult for us to use public transport – at a time when study after study shows bus lanes to be a catalyst for urban regeneration, we’re shoving things into reverse…

Read the whole thing, which makes the case for buses (and public transport in general) very well.

My own observations: some of the bus lanes seemed a bit illogical and poorly signed (the one along Lime Street between the Adelphi Hotel and the station always seemed to catch drivers out), but most of them did seem to work to help buses beat congestion. Getting rid of all of them en masse, without any proper study or consultation, is madness. It’s quiet this week due to it being half term, but I dread to think what will happen next week.

I’m more thankful than ever that I live near a Merseyrail station.

Tags: , ,

3 Responses
  1. Comment by peezedtee
    30th October 2013 at 8:46 am

    Buses in Liverpool always seem to have been a mess, with or without bus lanes. Last time the boyf and I were there, about a year ago, we were on our way from London to the Isle of Man and found it completely impossible to work out how to get from Lime Street to the Pier Head. Are the taxi drivers bribing the city to make the buses as useless as possible? Meanwhile the new mayor is plainly a nincompoop – not a very good advert for directly elected mayors.

  2. Comment by Robert Hampton
    30th October 2013 at 8:59 pm

    There is a bus, the CityLink (the route changed recently; it would probably have been the C3 when you visited last year).

    But yes, I’m not impressed by Joe Anderson. He seems to spend a lot of time baiting Eric Pickles on Twitter and not much else.

  3. Pingback by 2013 was a big year for… « Robert Hampton
    5th January 2014 at 11:46 pm

    […] Anderson, made some big decisions: putting the Mathew Street Festival out of its misery (yay!) and axing all the city’s lanes […]