LAST week's Hampshire Chronicle covers two stories that affect bus services in our city - firstly the all-important future of the bus station and secondly the experimental pedestrian crossing on Romsey Road by Clifton Terrace. I am a bus industry professional with experience dating back to the 1970s and have also made a careful study of local bus operations in our congested city covering the hundred years or so since 1920, and I'd like to comment on both issues. 

The idea of locating a bus station close to the trains at the railway station is superficially attractive but makes no sense in a city where the centre lies to the east of where most of the population lives. Thus, people coming from Worthy Road, Andover Road, Stockbridge Road and Romsey Road naturally come past the station, but they need their services to run on down into the city centre. We certainly ought to have excellent bus-to-train connections (and I cannot see from the recent station consultation how this might be achieved), but certainly not a bus terminus at the railway station, which lies at the extreme west of the central area and on rising ground.

I am very relieved to read that Councillor Martin Tod understands that, though I am not so sure that I agree with him that Winchester needs no central bus terminus. He comments, correctly, that Brighton bus services run very successfully without a central bus station, but he forgets that Winchester does not have Brighton's extensive bus priority schemes and Brighton does not have an equivalent of Winchester's Central Car Park.

I mention that just as we are running into the pre-Christmas rush when cars are already blocking city streets queueing for the car parks - with a catastrophic effect on bus reliability, including the city's own Park & Ride service. It is therefore important that some sort of terminus in the bottom part of the town needs to be found, to replace what we currently have in the bus station, so that buses can stand long enough to provide some necessary resilience and reliability in operation.

Meanwhile, I disagree wholeheartedly with your reader Carol Orchard about the effect, and the effectiveness, of the new pedestrian traffic lights on Romsey Road. These were introduced to allow people to cross the main road from Clifton Terrace, which used to be a nightmare.

I drive buses regularly up and down Romsey Road at all times of the day and I have been very pleasantly surprised by the very lack of congestion caused by these lights - and whereas previously pedestrians had to take their life in their hands to cross the road, with a complicated junction and fast traffic unwilling to give way, now they can cross the road in relative safety, with no more than a momentary pause to traffic. So that's a win in my book and I hope that the experimental arrangement (which could do with a little tidying up) becomes permanent.

The price of all this, of course, is much longer queues at the Stockbridge Road arm of the City Road lights - and that does lead to lengthy delays for buses heading into town at busy times and also creates problems when queuing traffic stacks up under the railway arch and beyond. This certainly needs attention, but I hope that the experimental lights at Clifton Terrace in due course become permanent.

James Freeman,
Highcroft Road,
Winchester 

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