Melksham Area - buses, trains, cycles, and roads. Meeting, 17.1.2012
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2012-01-15 14:48:36 - Graham Ellis
This TUESDAY evening ... are YOU available?
Melksham Town Hall on Tuesday January 17th at 6.30pm, with refreshments from 6pm. The meeting is free and informal, and open to anyone who would like to contribute or simply listen. If you need a lift home after the meeting, let me know - I'm aware that the last buses / connections to Broughton Gifford, Bulkington, Great Hinton, Keevil, Seend, and Steeple Ashton will be long since gone.
There are a number of travel and transport issues that effect the Melksham Community Area such as:
* Train Services (or lack thereof) at Melksham Station
* Buses running 2-per-hour - 2 minutes apart, then a 58 minute gap
* Cycle routes that have "no cycling" sections (in town, and on the canal from Melksham to Chippenham)
* Public footpaths which are impassible / impossible to find, such as Blueberry Road (Melksham) to Redstocks
* Provision of rubbish bins along footpaths
* Missing links in the road network such as Portal Road to the Westinghouse Road / Lancaster Way roundabout
* Public Transport services for villages such as Poulshot
* Information on public transport, public transport fares, and current operational information
* Asda Bus, Town Bus, Free Bus ...
* Interchangeability of tickets buses / trains
* Car parking for employees of town centre businesses
* Demand responsive Transport
- This is NOT a complete list ...
Following the identification of transport priorities, the Melksham Community Area Partnership will be holding its first Transport meeting of the year to discuss the issues in depth, and Eddy Watts and myself have been invited to act attend / help out in the discussion with some of our respective backgrounds and help the MCAP (who's function is to report back to the area board, acting as their eyes and ears in the community) put some meet on the bones, identify which topics are within their remit - and hopefully move some of them forward. There are one or two which may have really cheap solutions!
Travel and Transport issues are uniquely cross-area, and we'll need to work with neighboring community areas on some issues. Transport into Devizes from Poulshot effects Devizes, the Melksham to Chippenham cycleway problem comes under Corsham, and bus and train links effect numerous areas - going right outside Wiltshire when we look at travel from the Melksham area to Bath, Swindon and beyond.
Section of road needed to link A350 to Bowerhill
Section of road needed to link North Melksham to Railway Station
Section of cycleway needed to provide link across Melksham House land 
Issues which run into neighboring Community Areas