YOUR headline 'Bus service saved – but use it or lose it" has a sad irony for myself and others who were regular passengers on Bevan's Lydney Link Service covering Alvington and Woolaston.
In order to provide a council subsidised service between Lydney and Chepstow (replacing the discontinued Stagecoach 73 service between these two points), Bevan's have apparently been told by Gloucestershire County Council to reschedule their link services, which means myself and others who live on the housing estates in Alvington and Woolaston (where the bulk of the population live in these villages) have had the service dropped from four runs per day to none. Admittedly Bevan's are offering a once-a-week Wednesday morning service from Lydney to Woolaston Common and back, but that does not help me or other passengers who used the former link service for getting to work, shopping, appointments at doctors and dentists etc.
It may seem reasonable to a bureaucrat sitting behind a desk in Gloucester scanning a handful of survey sheets that passengers including the terminally ill, sick, the partially sighted, the old, the widowed and young mums with babies in pushchairs who live in social housing 'off the beaten track' are able to walk down to the main road to catch the new service bus, but when on the return journey one has to walk quite a distance from the bus-stop, crossing over a dual-carriageway, burdened with shopping, in all winds and weathers, it is no joke. Woolaston houses are further off the A48 than the Alvington housing estate, which itself has a slight incline up to it from the main road.
Most, if not all, of the passengers who used the Lydney Link Service live on the housing estates in Alvington and Woolaston, not on the main road. The drivers know them all by name. There is still a link service covering Tutnalls and Primrose Hill in Lydney, but not to the hospital or the housing estates on villages south of Lydney. Why the discrimination?
I cannot understand why we can't have a couple of services a day (perhaps as an extension to the new Lydney-Chepstow route), even if Gloucestershire County Council can't provide the finance for the full four runs a day as before.
I respectfully request a written explanation in this newspaper from Shire Hall as to why the service to Alvington and Woolaston has been cut so savagely. – Christine Thomas, Garlands Road, Alvington.