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Is Melksham public transport actually used?

Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2010-03-05 09:38:35 - Graham Ellis

'''There never seems to be anybody waiting at the bus stop behind my house when I look out there - so I ask "why have it ... why run the buses that call there?" ''' - comment made to me by a local councilor, who's not a user of local or regional public transport

Here are two similar views of a public transport scene.



Now .. when I travel by bus or train, I'm used to seeing crowds around and thinking that's the norm, but is it? Well - no, it isn't. Take the bus stop in question, where there's a 58 minute gap between the two services every hour. Let's say that people may start to arrive 10 minutes before their bus is due - which is a reasonable (or perhaps even generous allowance) and continue to arrive on a normal distribution curve that tails off until their bus is due.

• Even assuming that the buses picks up so many people that at least someone arrives close to the start of the 10 minutes, our councilor (who's viewing of the stop, unlike the passengers', isn't synchronized with bus times) will only see people waiting one time in five.

• And if the buses pick up - say - 6 people between them and they travel in groups (families), chances are that the first arrival will only be four or five minutes before the first one is due - so the stop only has someone waiting one time in ten that our asynchronous councilor takes a peek.

Let's say that we were to scrap the bus timetable completely, and have the same number of buses run throughout the day, but have them turn up at random times. We would then find that there was almost always someone waiting at the bus stop, wasting their time waiting ... and (perversely) our councilor would be more than happy to speak up for the bus stop and the bus route as it looks so very well used - "there's almost always someone waiting for it".



Illustrations - to people who don't use the local train service, the station may usually look very quiet - because they don't happen to be there during periods of activity such as you see in the second picture. We often do ourselves a dis-service when campaigning for a better service by waiting until there's no-one around to take uncluttered pictures!