All Change, Please


On Monday July 21, Stagecoach in South Wales are fully implementing the timetable changes which I told you about in The Last Bus to Everywhere. Having said that, some of them seem to have taken place already. I was in Caerphilly last week, and the buses to and from Bargoed are now operated by a company called Harris Coaches.

I still don't know what's happening to the buses between Pontypridd and Bridgend, or Pontypridd and Blackwood, or the other services I listed after the Stagecoach announcement. I daresay I'll find out next time I plan a day out, only to find that my ticket isn't valid for some (or all) of the journey.

[As I was finishing this entry, my informant from Caerphilly CBC very kindly filled in some gaps. New Adventure Travel are taking on the 244, although on a slightly different route. He also told me that tickets from different operators would be interavailable. It's nice to have some good news to pass on for a change.]

I'll take most of these changes into account when I continue my exploration of the various routes serving our major population centres. For now, I just want to highlight some of the revisions in the Aberdare area, which I've already covered in The Last Bus In The Cynon Valley (Part 1). It's not a pretty picture.

From Monday, the 60 and 60A buses from Aberdare will no longer run through to Cardiff. Instead, they will all terminate at Pontypridd. Passengers will have to transfer to the fast X4/T4 or the slow 132 service in order to complete their journeys. These run close to capacity for much of the day. The alternative is to walk through town and catch a train – adding to the cost and the inconvenience. Pontypridd is a prime example of Differentiated Public Transport.

Meanwhile, the biggest change in the Aberdare area, and the one which will further isolate some of the more remote communities, affects the routes beyond Hirwaun. As I've already discussed, hitherto there have been half-hourly services from Aberdare to Glynneath, Penderyn and Merthyr Tydfil throughout the daytime, Monday to Saturday.

Here's where the cuts will really be felt. From Monday, the services to Glynneath and Penderyn will be cut to one per hour in each direction. The last direct bus on route 7 to Penderyn will leave Aberdare at 1730, and on route 8 to Rhigos will leave at 1830. After this time, the slack will be taken up (after a fashion) by the 6A, which serves both communities on a strange meandering route. (I've examined the 6A in detail in The Last Bus in the Cynon Valley (Part 1).)

Penderyn's loss is Merthyr Tydfil's gain – on paper, anyway. The service frequency will be increased to three buses an hour. That's in addition to the two an hour via Llwydcoed. It sounds fantastic, doesn't it? Five buses an hour between Aberdare and Merthyr Tydfil is almost up to London standards. However, it will make no real difference to people who are travelling to and from work. The buses still start running at the same times in the morning. The last one back to Aberdare has been shoved back by a whole twenty minutes – to 1845! (Yes, that's quarter to seven in old money.)

Bear in mind that it's currently possible to catch a bus from Merthyr Tydfil to Brynmawr at ten to midnight. Can anyone explain why a Stagecoach bus going east leaves over five hours later than a bus going west from the same point? We can't even attribute this disparity to differences in local authority subsidies. Merthyr and Brynmawr are in different areas, as are Merthyr and Aberdare. It's a mystery.

At the same time as these cuts are being implemented, the Welsh Government have been debating spending billions of pounds on a new relief motorway near Newport and/or the South-East Wales Metro scheme (Henry, 2014.) In my opinion, the latest shake-up in Valleys public transport reinforces my argument that any Metro scheme needs to start in the Heads of the Valleys (or possibly the central valleys) and then mesh into the Cardiff infrastructure later on in the project schedule.

For now, it means that people living in remote communities with a paucity of amenities will be even more cut off from the economic and social centres of this deprived area of Wales. It's a retrograde step, and it will take a considerable amount of political willpower to reverse it, never mind improve on the previous situation.


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